'f' *' '♦' J' •%. '-^ '^■^^^^ % j- »' %.^^ .^'•^-< A' .'km\ v./ /jife,\ -^^^^ ,^ *\c? ^\ '-s .**■ -^. -Kr^-o V<^- «%'^''^- V ^ .0' . 7* A ^oV" ,•' iO t .. A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE THK SPIRIT OF ROME A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY WILLIAM PASCOE AND EIGHT OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS TO DOMINIC CONTENTS CHAPTER I. All Roads lead to Rome 11. St Peter and his Basilica: Michael Angelo III. Rome Pagan: Roman Art IV. Rome underground V. Rome at Church . . • • VI. Outside Rome : The Campagna . VII. The Road to Genzano . VIII. Art and Artists . . . • IX. Three Roman Functions X. The Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore XI. Two Roman Martyrs XII. A Sorcerer and a Saint XIII. Raphael : Pinturicchio : Michael Angelo XIV. The Holy Father Index ..•••• PAGE I 12 35 68 89 122 136 156 176 192 211 228 245 265 271 vu LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR The Spirit of Rome S. Peter's . In the Forum The Colosseum at Night The Castle of S. Angelo From the Doors of S. Peter's The Pantheon San Clemente The Temple of Vesta . Tomb of C/ecilia Metella Italian Soldier . The Fruit of the Campagna Italian Peasant Woman. Piazza Barberini. Piazza di Spagna . View from the Pincian . Frontispiece FACING PAGE / 14^ 40 •/ 44/ 54 76, io8\ 114. 134/ 140V I44v/ 152/ 210 248 265 IX A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE IN MONOTONE KACING TAGE PiETA. From the marble group by Michael Angelo in San Pietro in Vaticano . . 22 ^J {Photograph by Anderson) The Prophet Jonah. From the fresco by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican . 28 / {Photograph by Anderson) Antinous. From the statue in the Vatican . . 62 {Photograph by Anderson) Marcus Aurelius. From the equestrian statue in the Capitol . . . . .66 {Photograph by Anderson) Sacred and Profane Love. From the painting by Titian in the Borghese Gallery . . .160/ {Photograph by Anderson) S. C/ECILIa. From the statue by Maderna in the Chapel of S. Caecilia . . . . .224 {Photograph by Anderson) Alexander VI. From the fresco by Pinturicchio in the Borgia Rooms, the Vatican . . . 258 {Photograph by Anderson) MosES. From the statue by Michael Angelo in San Pietro di Vincoli . . .262 {Photograph by Alinari) A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE CHAPTER I ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME THE popular proverb was always a puzzle to me as a child. I remember reading a book called " It's a long Lane that has no Turning " — and could not be per- suaded by my elders as to the real significance of the title. I looked for that lane on my country walks. I questioned more experienced travellers about it. I wondered whether it was along that uncornered lane that pursuers of rainbow gold were forced to go. I pictured it as running, like a swift and secret arrow, beside one of those interminable Rues Nationales of France ; gleaming through golden cornfields and flashing through the dark green villages of Normandy. And I could not contain my disappointment when I learnt that the proverb was intended to be, not mystical, but full of common-sense ; not redolent of positive joy, but merely the vehicle of a rather rustic optimism. Or again that companion apophthegm, " It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good," was always for me the picture of some not normal hurricane, some Euroclydon of the universe which blasted and bruised town and hamlet, city and country, cattle and men. And ** All roads lead to Rome " — I protest to this day I do not know what the proverb means. Most people, I find, particularly if they use the proverb ecclesiastically 2 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE or imperially, intend to express a conviction that Rome is the universal goal, the sublime and continuing harbour of all our shiftless endeavours and futile ambition. Rome, for them, like the Boyg in Peer Gynt, wins all through gentleness ; fights by refusing to fight, is victorious after the monstrous fashion of the East, by allowing her opponents to exhaust themselves and to fail. She is the sea to which all rivers run ; she is the great ocean of human hope, and fidelity, and folly, and ambition and zeal. Well, I will have none of that. That is not, to my mind, a true picture of the city of Caesar and Peter, of Brutus and Borgia : so calm and inhuman a mistress would never have won the allegiance of so many periods and religions and temperaments. Rome has the allure of the mountains, the charm of the hills on which she sits, and with which she is girdled : her secret is not some- thing which swallows up the adorer, it is no Nirvana of the spirit or the mind ; her secret is a jewel for which her admirers must joust, and to whom she will she gives it. " All roads lead to Rome " : yes, but you must get on to a road. And the idler, the false mystic, the Buddhist, the quiet ist adventures no high road : he lingers, in a keen selfishness, among the meadows of a false philosophy. *' All roads lead to Rome " : yes, but you must have the will to move, the passion to achieve, the desire to possess. " All roads lead to Rome " : yes, whether as Christian, or as poet, or as archaeologist, or as aesthete you may go to Rome and you will then reach the treasure of the ages of the heart, the satisfaction of many needs, the solace of sorrow and the deep security of faith. " What road shall we choose ? " That was the first question that Dominic and I asked each other. We had settled to go to Rome ; and we found we could manage a full twenty- two days there, if we broke our journey at Genoa on the way down, and possibly at Pisa and Paris on our return. Twenty-two days at Rome ! There were ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 3 once three Americans who were presented to Pio Nono. The first said he was staying six months at Rome. ** You will see something," replied his Holiness. The second had to leave after three months. ** You will see a good deal," was the papal encouragement. The third confessed that he could only spare three weeks in the Holy City. *' Ah ! " retorted Pius, " you will see everything." It is a consoling story, with a good deal of truth in it ; but Dominic thought it would be a little rash to rely upon it as an absolute guide. Dominic is always more ready than I to plan a tour ; and he always plans it well : so I acceded to his request that we should definitely, before we left England, decide what road we should take to Rome. It did not take long to decide. Great as is the interest of Rome pagan, the Rome of Caesar, and Horace, and Catullus, and Juvenal, it must yield for Christians and Catholics to the Rome of the Catacombs, to the Rome of the martyrs, the Rome of Peter and Paul, of Gregory and Francesca, to the Rome where Fra Angelico and Michael Angelo meet, the Rome which Pinturicchio and Raphael and Botticelli decorated. After all, even the great monuments of Imperial Rome achieve half their interest by virtue of their Christian associations ; the Colosseum is wonderful not because of its arrogant size and insolent swing, but because here the unnamed martyrs of the Church shed their seminal blood. The playthings of paganism are the religion of Christian Europe ; and of the religion of Im- perial Rome modern Europe has, at different times, made a toy for her courts and her theatres. So, without quite so many words perhaps, Dominic decided that our first business in Rome should be to visit shrines and churches, and to see Christian and Renascence art ; and to settle, when there, how much time we could afford to such things as the Forum and the Palatine, the Baths of Diocletian and the Museum of the Capitol and the Conservatori. Unlike most people who are methodical 4 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE and good at plan-making, Dominic does not mind departing from arrangements ; and, as it happened, we saw a good deal of Republican and Caesarean Rome, and saw it, too, in spite of some difficulties, with more considered ease than I had expected. We had chosen for the time of our pilgrimage — for it remained, I insist, more of a pilgrimage than a tour, though Dominic always complained that we ate too well and did not hear Mass often enough for real pilgrims. I pointed out to him that all mediaeval pilgrims fared as well as they could ; and that even in the year of Jubilee comfort was not thought inconsistent with piety ; but he only retorted that the feebleness of others was no excuse for our own luxury, and that he at any rate did not feel at all like a pilgrim. Well, as I was saying, we chose Christmastide and Epiphanytide for our pilgrimage (the word shall stand) ; it is, from the ecclesiastical point of view, a season at Rome even more entrancing than Easter — for nothing at Easter equals in excitement the Epiphany week at S. Andrea della Valle. It is a time when the climate should be kind ; and when Rome is not intolerably full of English and American tourists. (Why are all — or nearly all — visitors to foreign places '* tourists," except one's own immediate circle ?) So we left England on the day of S. John the Evangelist, making up our minds not to rush through but to stay a night at Genoa and arrive at Rome not too travel-weary to appreciate even a night-glimpse at her beauty. This intention, however, was frustrated by the Italian railways. Between Vada and Cecina runs a river, and over that river a bridge which the express from Genoa to Rome crosses. In the winter of our pilgrimage the bridge was broken : and all the travellers were bundled out of the train, and packed away with their luggage into bullock waggons. For a mile or so we were driven until we reached Cecina, and then we had to enter a train that had been a de luxe ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 5 somewhere about the year 1880 — the compartments were upholstered in red plush, the train was innocent of any corridor and noxious with many draughts ; smashed windows and a general fustiness of disuse completed the discomfort. I am sure no mediaeval pilgrim, with the good road under his own, or his horse's, feet suffered half our anguish in the miserable end of the journey : so, rather cold and cross and hungry, Dominic and I gazed through the steaming glass of a hotel omnibus on the dark and clattering streets of the Eternal City. Most old towns are spoiled by the extension of suburbia. It is a condition peculiar, I think, to modern civilization. People who have not the means to live in the old cities, or the initiative to live in the country — for of course to-day it requires far more originality to stay in the country than to leave it — linger on the outskirts of great towns. This is not quite fair to all suburban dwellers. Round about London, for instance, many suburbs are merely the exaggeration of old villages — and Islington, Fulham, or Chelsea enshrine — in how doleful a casket ! — memories of old-world, country hamlets. There is a real difference between the suburb which has had its centre in a village, however insignificant, and the suburb which, spreading out from the main town, has swallowed up, unrelenting and unheeding, all landmarks of ancient reality. Now Rome is free from both kinds of suburbs : freer even than Oxford, freer than any great town, and as free as the small walled cities, like Rothenburg on the Tauber. There are plenty of great villas outside Rome, plenty of convents and villages — but unless one so far miscalls the Vatican, there are no suburbs. No doubt the Campagna, with its sweep of uninhabited land, its ghosts of Etruscan cities, and its thousands of desolate tombs, helped very largely in keeping Rome free from suburbs ; certainly the result is that Rome, viewed from quite close, has an aspect that cannot be equalled by any other city. 6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Almost at the beginning of our stay Dominic and I were taken by a friend up to the garden of the Doria Pamphili Palace. There, without straining the eyes, you can see the whole stretch of the Queen of the Seven Hills — see easily right over Trastevere, with its homely quarters and popular churches, across to the Aventine with its memories of the Apostles, to the Celian where S. Stephen guards the tragedy of the saints in his round church, and the Sisters of the Maternal Heart of Mary care for the sick among their flowers and trees ; or away in the north-east where the line of the Road of September leaves the Quirinal on its way to the Porta Pia ; or right over the heart of Rome, where the Capitol is crowned by Ara Coeli, to the fine Gate of the People at the end of the Via Babuino. So seen, Rome gives a sense of completeness, of unity that no other great city has ever inspired in me. Dominic, faith- ful to the Isis, put in a plea for Oxford : and certainly Oxford in the " Fifties " must have given somewhat of the same impression. Although even then without her walls, Magdalen College and Folly Bridge and the sweep of S. Giles guarded and ringed her : but in Oxford to-day you pass too easily into that new creation that has linked Summertown with Hinksey, joined the Dew-Drop and the Mitre, and confounds in one town S. Edward's College and the choir-schools of Wolsey's and Wykeham's founda- tions. In Rome you have plenty that is new ; but none of it — not even the regal memorial that swaggers and browbeats the old streets — can remain unabsorbed. The secret of Rome is that — everything, however distinctive, however definite, that comes to Rome is certain to take on as well that indefinable something which we call " Roman" ; a quality that you may worship or condemn, but which cannot be ignored. " Do in Rome as Rome does " is not a bit of advice ; it is a warning, nay, almost a prophecy. The lovers of the Eternal City know her strength : she does not crush or distort originality — did not Michael ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 7 Angelo do his greatest for her ? — but all must be done in her service. She is as intolerant as Christianity itself ; if you join her at all you must be hers heart and soul, body and mind : but then, as in Christianity, you will find that never before have your powers been so much and so truly your own. While we were in Rome Dominic and I exchanged impressions both of details and of the whole, at least every day ; and towards the end we agreed that the four epithets that described her best were : compact, coherent, continuous and converted. The compactness is, of course, due to the lack of suburbs; and it is, I suppose, one of the reasons that make all of us feel we can understand Rome very easily. People talk lightly about the clarity of the Latin genius ; they com- pare the mysterious and obscure solemnity of the Holy Sacrifice as offered in S. Athanasius of the Greeks with the simple and straightforward Mass of San Pietro in Vaticano or Santa Maria sopra Minerva ; they contrast the dim wonder of Gothic and Byzantine, with the public flaunting openness of the Roman basilica. There is truth in this. But not so easily does a great city, a great people, or a great religion yield its secrets. There is a subtlety that disregards disguise ; a mystery so sure of itself that it disdains wrappings, a privacy so awful that it cares not how public is its expression. I yield to none in my love for the Greek and the Eastern, or for the Gothic ; but I am not sure that there is not more of the spirit of Chris- tianity in this naked grandeur of the Latins, this nervous, proud insistence on the bare elements of religions, the essential heart of truth. And it is significant, is it not, that all the greatest mystics have been Latins by religion ? In the East the true mystic, the man who has passed through the obscure Night to the Great Vision, is rare, although no doubt the ordinary worshipper has a higher sense of the mystery of his religion than has the servant of 8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the Catholic Church in the West. Anyway, beware of thinking you can swiftly pluck the heart out of Rome. The two things for which she stands — the law of Caesar and the law of Christ — are easily obeyed : but compre- hended ? Rome, too, is coherent. You might easily put within four walls a collection of houses and churches that might be compact enough, and yet produce no result save a sentiment of muddle and compression. Rome avoids that — avoids it, if you will, by a miracle, but still avoids it. I know I run counter to all sentiment in this matter. Every new change, since the days of the first Prisoner of the Vatican, has been hailed by such lovers of Rome as Mr Augustus Hare as little short of blasphemy and little better than destruction. From the coinage to the Colosseum, from the trams to the statue of Garibaldi, from the cleaned Forum to the crowded Corso, all the changes are cursed as spoiling the city. This flood of invective shows but little faith in the Capital of the West. Rome will survive the vulgarities — for there are some vulgarities — of the present regime, just as she survived the vulgari- ties of the seventeenth century, or the earlier, the incom- parable insolence of Nero. I protest that we, who went with no feeling of sympathy with the modem government of Signer Nathan, could find little to complain of. The monument to Vittore Emmanuele will be hideous, but the city that saw the golden image of Nero, the vacant swagger of the Colosseum, and the knobbly vitality of Bernini, need not fear one more triumph of the Philistines. After all, the Goths entered Rome a long while ago : and Rome still stands, while the Goths — who will claim the title ? The continuity of Rome is more amazing, possibly, than any of her other characteristics. How easily the Pantheon becomes a Christian church : how naturally does one pass, in that wonderful Church of San Clemente, from the first ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME 9 building with its image of Mithras to the second with its frescoes still redolent of the ninth century, and to the third, which links our own time with the glory of the Middle Ages. There is nothing that Rome has wasted, nothing that Rome has destroyed. She transforms. There is an exception to this. When we have mentioned the beautiful Church of Our Lady over Minerva, with its wonderful tomb of that quaint writer, Durandus, we have finished with the Gothic in Rome. And even there the Gothic is subdued. Any other must be sought in the Sacre Grotte, or in a few odd corners, where one may see some carved Paschal candlestick or the broken remnants of a tomb or a tabernacle or a statue. And this absence of Gothic helps the feeling of continuity. One never thinks of Rome as having had a Gothic period ; and so one glides from the Rome of Romulus to the Rome of the Gracchi, and from the Gracchi to Cataline and Caesar and Cicero, and from Caesar to Marcus Aurelius and Julian, and from Julian to Gregory, and so through Christian history until we arrive at Pio Decimo and — shall we say the Convent of San Anselmo on the Aventine ? And converted — this is the most noticeable, the most proclaimed of all Roman characteristics. It is true that modern folly- — and this we did curse — has removed the chapels from the Colosseum ; but still on the pillars of the Caesars is displayed the cross of Christ. Still where stood a temple of Mater Matuta the modern Roman may worship in honour of S. Maria Egiziaca. Still from the Capitol of ancient Rome the Bambino blesses the city at the time of the showing to the Gentiles. Here Rome has but followed the course of Christianity throughout the world. While the religion of the Gospel is the most exclusive, it is almost the most inclusive ; most intolerant to those who reject, most genial to those who obey. The wise men of Alexandria brought to the service of Christian theology Greek philosophy and Greek 10 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE mysticism ; the men of the West brought popular devotion and popular superstition to the same service. There were dangers in both processes — all movement is dangerous — no doubt a few men transferred to Mary, Stella Maris, an allegiance given ages since to a sea-born goddess, and transferred it with little thought : and no doubt some men who were slaves to the pride of intellect in Greece, were slaves also under the banner of the Cross. But the gain surely outweighs all possible evil. At the time when Peter and Paul brought the Gospel to Rome, the larger part of the Latin race definitely worshipped beings whose attributes were admittedly evil ; Latin religion was not divorced from conduct, it was wedded to evil conduct. To-day, God knows, one may find men whose lives are evil, while they still have devout professions ; but overt worship of evil is not possible to anyone who retains an iota of the Christianity of his fathers. This at least popular Catholicism, with its shrines and its saints, its crucifix and its confessors, did eminently accomplish : it pulled down everywhere the altars erected to lust, to cruelty, to pride, to vainglory, and substituted shrines to mercy, pity, peace. It put in the highest heavens the bruised image of a condemned God ; it flamed across the arch of the world the message that victory is gained only by self-sacrifice. The temple of Aphrodite with her sterile lusts, and her painted, twitching servitors, fell, and for the first time the Woman with the Child is enthroned in the heavens. A Catholic tradition is the foundation oi all modern civilization. For all modern civilization is dis- tinctive only by virtue of the place given to woman ; and the place given to woman was secured to Christian nations when they saw Mary assumed into heaven. *' Mortals, who behold a Woman Rising 'iwixt the moon and sun. Who am I the heavens assume ? An All am /, and I am one. ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME ii Multitudinous ascend I, Mighty as a battle arrayed : And I bear you whither tend I ; Ye are I : be undismayed. I, the ark that for the graven Tablets of the Law was made ; Heart of Man was one, one Heaven ; Both within my Womb were laid.'^ I have said that Rome is continuous. And of its appearance the statement is true. But she underwent a great change of heart ; she who was the Great Harlot of the Apocalypse became the Holy City, when she turned from the old gods of her people, and from the borrowed gods of Greece and the East to the figure of the Mother and the Babe. Rome is the converted city. CHAPTER II S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA ABOUT A.D. 55 Simon Peter arrived in Rome. Nine years later the Imperial authorities were seriously disturbed at the growth and secrecy of that curious sect of the Jews, who worshipped Christus, and were called Christians or Nazarenes. They were evi- dently, to a Roman mind, indeed to any reasonable man who desired to preserve authority and society, a most mischievous and decadent sect. Rome, as Juvenal thundered, was the cesspool for all the grossest Oriental superstitions. The unclean and unnatural devotions of the East, the slack immorality of a sleek religion, were sapping the old Roman ideals of order, of good govern- ment, of justice, of Res Publica — these Christians actually put in the place of a god one whose claim to deity rested on rebellion, on defiance, and on anarchism. Men who had examined this superstition asserted that the behaviour of this Christus before the judge was insolent ; that he had refused to plead, and when pressed had claimed to be Son of God. And this claim the authorities very properly met by his prompt execution. Even the Jews — except a few of his family and intimates — despised and ridiculed him ; and the horrible religion had originally only spread in such centres of vice as Corinth, or such homes of ignorance as Galatia. In Rome its adherents were slaves and freedmen, prostitutes and pandars, v/ith a small sprinkling of better-class men who, in the general break-up of national morality, were feverishly eager to try any new 12 S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 13 remedy for the world's ancient burden of weariness. In 64 the authorities decided to make a decisive move against Christianity. Nero, with that sound statesmanship that marks Imperial from Republican Rome, determined to mingle punishment with popular amusement. He gave a great entertainment in the gardens that covered the Vatican hill, the Campi Vaticani, where Cincinnatus had held a farm, and where Apollo had his temple. Under the auspices of the calm, sane, beautiful Sun-God, Nero prepared to stamp out Christianity. Rome had recently suffered from a severe conflagration, and there was little doubt in the minds of the police that the fire had originated with the Christians, probably in a bold attempt to destroy the city and, during the destruction, to effect some kind of revolution. This was fortunately prevented, through some miscarriage of their plans, and while enough Christians remained for a suitable execution there was no fear of their overcoming the law-abiding citizens. Nero himself gave some thought to the nature of the punish- ments, which are recorded in detail by Tacitus, and he succeeded in achieving a grim suitability to the crime of which the Christians were guilty. Many of these vaga- bonds were smeared with pitch and set light to ; so that their burning bodies glowed across the evening sky, as on the slopes of the gardens the people of Rome enjoyed their Emperor's munificence and admired his justice. Two years later, by the execution of the leaders of the sect in Rome, Petrus and Paulus, the Imperial policy was brought to a successful conclusion. Peter, I think, can never have been very happy at Rome. He had not Paul's interest in Greek thought and Roman civilization. The Galilean Fisherman, strong of character, obstinate, resourceful, was bewildered by the clamour of the city he calls Babylon. In that first letter of his, written from who knows what little room in the Jews' quarters in Trastevere, he insists on the " electness," 14 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the peculiarity of his faith, and his flock. " Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people ; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light " — that was the belief which kept Peter during the Neronian persecution, that the vision which turned his feet back, when he had fled along the Appian Way, that the resource against which all the devices of all the Caesars were powerless to succeed. And because of Peter's faith, because of the strength and abidingness of the Rock, Dominic and I went, on our first morning in Rome, straight to the Basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, over the ground where, centuries ago, our fellow-Christians had flared their faith in the gardens of the Beast of the Apocalypse, up to the great Confessio where the ninety- three lamps guide our footsteps ad limina Apostolorum. This is the real end of the Imperial policy — of Nero, of Aurelius, of Julian : the Basilica, built on the ruins of the old church, magnified by the genius of Buonarroti, is nothing more and nothing less than a gigantic tomb for the body of the Hebrew Fisherman, whom his Lord called the Rock. Not only is Peter's character the foundation of the Christian Church, but Peter's relics are the foundation of the cathedral of Christendom. Though S. John may command more love, and S. Paul a greater admiration, the whole plebs of the Christian world finds its true expression at the Confessio of S. Peter : for S. Peter represents more essentially than any other of the Apostles the one thing needful for the Christian disciple — the conversion of character. Without that, the love of a S. John, the intellect of a S. Paul, the tact of S. Barnabas would be useless : and character was Peter's only gift, as it must still be the only gift of countless millions of Christians ; as it was indeed the only gift of the innumerable army who were slain, and burnt, and tortured and defiled on the ST. PETER'S S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 15 ground which is now embraced by the sweep of the great colonnade. Thoughts such as these sprang into my mind as I knelt, with other pilgrims, and gazed down into the Confessio, or looked up where Christ's promise is blazoned round the dome. '* Tu es Petrus et super banc Petram aedi- ficabo Ecclesiam meam." Peter is the typical Christian, the auto-Christian ; and the Church that forsakes Peter can never be sure of Christ ; no amount of learning, no amount of zeal, neither high ambition, nor supreme humility, neither culture nor simplicity will avail without that changed character, that turned temperament that is the keystone of the Christian life. And the long army of saints who crossed the sea and wandered over weary leagues of land to come to the Con- fessio bear witness to this. To kneel where had knelt Athanasius and Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome, Dominic and Francis, Bridget and Wilfrid, Boniface and Anselm, Ignatius and Philip Neri — that surely is an ambition that ought to inspire every Christian : to-day it is easy to get to Rome, and it seems as though the privilege were rather disesteemed. Yet from England, Scotland and Ireland there lacks not a great procession of pilgrims from the time of Ninian and of Patrick, who received his mission from Pope Celestine, and of Caed walla, that King of Wessex who, after Wilfrid had turned him to the Cross of Christ, would not be baptised save at Peter's feet. And in 689, just after his baptism, he died and was buried in the loggia of old S. Peter's. This human custom, this inti- mate habit of bringing one's ambition, or one's hopes, or one's penitence to the great saint, secured for primitive and mediaeval Christianity a note of the family which has been rather lost since, in Catholic Christendom, save amid the Latin nations. Of course the spirit is still found in northern, and even in non-Catholic countries, but it burns with difficulty, and its possession is not regarded i6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE as a sign of the normal Christian Hfe. Rehgion to-day is too sohtary an affair. That terrible motto of Protestant individualism, " Nothing shall come between my God and my soul," is the denial of the Petrine spirit of primitive Christianity. Everything must come between a man's God and his soul : the cry of a child in the street, the demand of a beggar for his cloak, the sneer or the blow of an enemy, the love of a friend or a spouse — all these come between God and the soul : and it is the object of Christi- anity to turn these obstructions into aids, to realize that what comes between things joins them, and that God is found not in loneliness or in self-dependence, but in the least of these His little ones, in the cup of water, in the Broken Bread and the Poured-out Wine. The Saints and the Sacraments are the safeguards of Catholicism. And it is in this insistence on the human side, the popular aspect of religion, that Catholicism shows itself the true descendant of primitive Christianity. The instinct which brought the inhabitants of Jerusalem into the streets, with their sick, that the shadow of Peter might overshadow some of them, still lives in the driving motive which hales the peoples of the world to the Tomb of the Apostles. In the shadow of Peter men still seek health. Not that Peter can be found only at San Pietro in Vaticano. Origen long ago saw that every Christian might be Peter, the Rock, in the sense of the title bestowed by Christ : and Peter may be found everywhere. Still a natural affection will take Christians to the great shrine which the ages have raised to the Primate of the Western Church. There is a spirit, I thought, as I gazed up the long nave towards Bernini's baldachino, which grudges this gorgeous and magnificent memorial to the fisherman ; a spirit which complains, as a modern dilettante has done, that the Cathedral of S. Peter lies as heavily on the body of the saint as do the innumerable chapels which disfigure and S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 17 distract the memory of Wesley. It is a superficial criticism. Your Peter, your man of simplicity, of strong character and no great intellectual gifts, likes things to be magnificent : it is not the peasant nor the fisherman who is distracted by pomp, or would banish magnificence from the worship of God. That is a disease which super- vened on the rationalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries : a disease that attacks not simple natures; but people who have no capacity for the gorgeous, who are fastidiously inimical to all that the natural man admires, who through a perversity of their temperament affect a simplicity that is far from their heart. S. Peter, in his life, would have loved S. Peter's just as he loved the Temple at Jerusalem ; it is — this enormous church — an expensive way of saying ** Thank you " to Almighty God ; but the plea of David is the plea of the plain man : " Neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing." It has become usual to say that San Pietro in Vaticano; enormous though it is, is so well proportioned that the visitor, on entering, does not realize the huge size of the building. I can never imagine the temperament of the person who first made this discovery. How did he forget so completely his own size and that of his fellow-creatures ? Directly Dominic and I got in, we were lost. One stands in a perfectly clear space — apparently no one else is near; and far, far off, where the twinkling of the lamps round the Confessio can be seen, are small, dwarfed figures that are other men. No place, to be frank, has ever so impressed me by its immensity as this cathedral. Whether one is looking up, or across, or at the great dome, or even simply standing beside a tomb or chapel, or walking past the image of S, Peter, everything around gives one a startling and certain sense of smallness. The church is so big that one hardly thinks of it as a building ; it is a city — a i8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE city of fair colonnades and wonderful arches, a city peopled with how large and how illustrious a company. Every chapel is a separate house enshrining the memory not only of its name-saints, but of others who have been buried near the saints of their choice. When I was told by a friend to whom figures are not quite meaningless that Cologne Cathedral was less than half the size of S. Peter's, I was not surprised : and I am sure S. Peter's gives the impression of being very much longer than S. Paul's in London, although the actual difference is onlj' a matter of thirty odd yards. There are other cathedrals which impress me more by sheer beauty, or by wonderful proportion ; but there is no building in the world which so gives me the impression of being not only meant for, but adequate for, all nations ; no building that represents so fully the catholic aspect of the Church ; and that is an aspect which in Rome frequently gets lost. It is amazing to an Englishman to find how much the Italian standpoint is emphasized in Rome ; how Pius X. is really far more Bishop of Rome and head of the College of Cardinals than Patriarch of the West and head of the Catholic Church ; how the attention of Romans is given up to paltry local quarrels, and ridiculous details of etiquette, while the officials regard the real life of the Church, outside Italy, as something incidental to the prosperity of the Roman See. It is time that Catholics who are not Latins should begin to insist that the Vatican officials must realize that the Pope was made for Christendom, not Christendom for the Pope : and his Holiness himself should not so encourage the idea that he is Italian first and Catholic afterwards. The present College of Cardinals represents scarcely anyone save themselves, and a few prejudices forgotten everywhere except in Rome, and, possibly, among the more ultramontane sections of society in different countries. I remember discussing this aspect of Catholicism with S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 19 a priest — a Roman by birth, who had never been farther from the Eternal City than Assisi — who had much to do, in his official capacity, with receptions at the Vatican. We were talking about Modernism : he was a little shocked at the word, but did not mind discussing persons, and we went on to the case of Dom Romolo Murri and George Tyrrell. The first he knew well, and loved greatly, and indicated that the whole affair was a bad blunder ; that Murri had been unjustly treated — but ? And a shrug finished his protest. And Tyrrell ? '* Ah ! well, Tyrrell was a theologian. They do not like theologians here. I have read some of his books ; they are beautiful. But now — well he is neither Catholic nor Protestant." I tried to persuade him that Tyrrell's rather petulant, though singularly provoked, letters on the Encyclical in The Times were no sort of evidence against his Catholi- cism : that many saints had said far severer things against individual Popes. But the Italian point of view was too strong. The person of the Pope is in real danger of becom- ing a dogma of the Church in Italy. As another priest, an Anglo-Roman, once said to me, " Unless you have a devotion to the Holy Father, similar in kind to that which one has to Our Lady, you are regarded with suspicion at Rome." Well, as I could not get my Roman friend to budge on the Tyrrell question — simply, I am sure, because Tyrrell was English, and unknown to him — I attacked him about America. I mentioned curious instances of friendli- ness between Roman and other Catholics, and asked how the Propaganda dealt with them. " Ah ! " he said, "America! — America is a very long way off." That is a very fatal attitude, to my mind, for any official of the Catholic Church to adopt. America should be as near as Assisi, and Florida as familiar as Florence. The truth is that the theory of centralization, so intensified during the centuries since the Reformation, is being abandoned. 20 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE unconsciously perhaps, but still surely, if slowly. And the reason, too, is not far to seek. Any centralization in the Church should be a centralization of affection, of devotion, not of government : in past ages men sought Rome not because Rome ruled the world, but because in Rome they found the common aspirations, the mean of Christian truth, the average of Catholic dogma preserved and expressed. To-day there is a danger — not entirely through Rome's fault — that Rome will represent not the mean but the extremes ; that she will be in the future not the soothing, composing, averaging power of Christi- anity but the exciting, provocative, disturbing element. This is a danger which all friends of the Church have seen coming since the time of Pius IV. ; and in the pontificate of Pius IX. it was first transformed from a danger into a principle. There is an old prophecy that no Pope should reach, still less exceed, the length of the first pontificate ; but Pius IX. outran Peter, and it is not good for the Church when its head goes beyond that which was accomplished by the Prince of the Apostles, when he abandons that business of guiding that was given him by Christ, and seeks to soar hke John, to teach like Paul, or to divert from its natural object the devotion that the Christian world gives to the Mother of God. When we had got over the sense of vastness inspired by the whole of the Basilica, and endeavoured to pay some attention to details, the feeling of being lost even increased. One could spend a time of pilgrimage without leaving San Pietro in Vaticano ; and I envied at times that Anchoress who, in the early days of Pio Nono, lived in a pillar of the vast church, and spent her life amid that inexhaustible medley of associations. Dominic and I had one or two special devotions to satisfy — there was the grave of that beautiful Gregory — him of Nazianzus — beloved of Mrs Browning and honoured by Ibsen ; the tomb of Gregory S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 21 the Great, " our father who gave us Baptism," and the monument to that gentle descendant of Charles I., Henry Cardinal Duke of York, with his father and brother. But except — and what an exception ! — for its devotional memories, the BasiHca does not contain much to arrest the attention. There is only one other name — in its world almost as significant as Peter's — which hangs over the whole building. Whether fairly or not, the grave plans of Bramante and the excesses of Bernini are forgotten, swallowed up by the gigantic fame of Michael Angelo. Is it not singular how those men of the Italian prime were never content with a specialist's reputation ? They were Jacks of all trades, and masters of all trades : above them all stand Leonardo and Michael Angelo. Leonardo da Vinci has written his name elsewhere than in Rome ; but Michael Angelo wrote his name with the Eternal City. By the walls, and in the heart of the old city, as well as here in the capital of Christendom, you cannot escape the name of Buonarroti. It is curious to think that in the period of art when what was called the Classical ideal was in possession of the critical field, men of taste could seriously discuss whether Michael Angelo or Raphael were the greater artist. Occasionally, as in the famous case of Reynolds, a great man perceived that Michael Angelo, however much he disturbed accepted canons, was at any rate incomparable, alone ; but the general tendency was to balance, with much parade of critical views and academic learning, the Stanze or even the Loggie of Raphael with the Sistine Chapel, and to speak in the same terms of admiration of works so different in conception and achievement as Raphael's " Transfigura- tion," Domenichino's ** S. Jerome," and Michael Angelo's " Last Judgment." The habit is still kept in certain modern guide-books, and yet it is difficult to believe that anyone who has any love for primitive or Renascence art, and any knowledge of modern painting, should fail to see 22 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE that a world separates the master of the Sistine roof from the decorator of the Loggie, or the Stanze. I have always loved that wonderful Raphael who rivalled Perugino in the beauty of his colouring and the grace of his expression, while he excelled him in simplicity of composition — the Raphael of the Madonna im Griinen, the Madonna Granduca, and many other panel pictures where, for once, you find genius combined with facility. But to put even this Raphael beside Michael Angelo is what no friend to the gentler painter would do. Raphael should really have been the favourite artist of that odd school of semi- serious aesthetes who prattled of " art for art's sake " in the closing decades of last century ; Raphael, with his freedom from struggle, his detachment from spiritual or intellectual interests, his supreme technique and his in- exhaustible capacity should have been their god — not Botticelli, with his wistful, troubled Mary, and his sad Aphrodite, swaying on the conscious shell ; not Crivelli with his mannered, jewelled ladies and his pensive Bambinos — but Raphael, master of line, master of colour, master of composition — but not master of our souls. That is the secret of Michael Angelo : all his work, undeliberately, unconsciously, if you like, from any of the sonnets to the troubled, yearning lines of the Rondanini group, is crammed full with the passion of the unseen. He employs no tricks, none of the easy modelling devices — and yet the eyes of his Mary and his Christ are towards the unutterable, the invisible, the eternal. We came back again and again to the Chapel of Our Lady where stands the Pieta that he finished when he was a youth of twenty-three. It is the same Mary that one can see in the statue which is in Bruges Cathedral : sorrow hangs over the Lady of Bruges, grief has enveloped the Lady of the Chapel of Sorrow. And yet, even though this her Son is dead, Mary still gazes on him with a calm assurance ; she knows that, in death, as in life, her hope and salvation PI ETA MICHAEL ANGELO Sini Pictro hi I'a/i'cauo S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 23 is in the child of her womb. In the slack lines of our Lord's ankle, in the rested, yet still weary, pose of the head there is a note of grief that hardly appears in the hooded face of Mary, or the quiet lines of sorrow at her mouth. She is young, this mother, and Condivi has told the master's reason for keeping her young. " He," writes Condivi, speaking of the figure of Our Blessed Lord, " is of so great and rare a beauty that no one beholds him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a mother ; never- theless, some there be that complain that the mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michael Angelo of this objection, he answered : ' Don't you know that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste ? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose ? And I tell you, moreover, that such freshness and flower of youth besides being maintained in her by natural causes, may possibly have been ordained by the divine power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the mother. It was not necessary in the Son ; but rather the contrary : Wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a true human body, subject to all the ills of man, excepting only sin. He did not allow the divinity in Him to hold back the humanity, but let it run its course and obey its laws, as was proved in His appointed time. Do not wonder then that I have, for all these reasons, made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. To the Son I have allotted His full age.' " A world that began to indulge in ** realistic " paintings must have found this ** saying " of Michael Angelo's a hard and difficult one ; it is far removed, this vision into eternal truth, from the vivid accuracies of Tissot or of Holman Hunt, whose hard actualism replaced the academic 24 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE accuracies of the later eighteenth- century painters. But to-day we turn back to Michael Angelo and the truth ; we are learning once more the value of vision, and the truth that a religious painter is primarily concerned with religion. In one of the most vital books on art that has been pub- lished recently we have a young Irish artist echoing the words of the Florentine master. *' In early Italian art the virginity of Our Lady is the great fact ; in late, the Motherhood. If a painter insist on the Motherhood, hi his painting, it is probable that he cares for nothing but the painting of it. Which is well, perhaps, for art, and art alone. He who would paint Virgin- Maternity must care for nothing (at the time) but the painting of Virginity. Both facts cannot be painted ; though, by the introduction into the picture of the Infant Son, the Maternity is acknowledged or suggested." ^ This is, perhaps, rather too strongly said ; but it is a truth that needs saying. I believe, however, that the only way of giving effect in art, either pictorial or plastic, to the motherhood of Mary is by the. artist striving to remember the mystery of the virginity. If he endeavours to depict that, " the rest will be added to him." There is far more of the divine mother, ay, and of the human natural woman, in the right hand of the Mary of the Piet^ than in all Raphael's motherly Madonnas. When Buonarroti decided to '* throw the Pantheon there up into the sky," he vowed he would do his work " for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter " ; and the devotion that inflamed the old man of seventy had inspired the youth of twenty-three. His art was dedicated, and so his art was true. It is this attitude towards his subject which makes us of the modern world appreciate Michael Angelo far above any of the other Itahan masters, and put him, with his unflinching desideration for truth, in the same category * *' Art and Ireland," R. Elliott, p; 262. S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 25 as Dante. In the childhood of faith we may turn to Beato Angehco, whose art we can see in strange contrast with Buonarroti's here in the Vatican ; the frescoes at Florence or of the Nicholas Chapel more truly represent the simple, dovelike aspect of Catholicism ; Botticelli and Luini, Mantegna and Pinturicchio, in their so different fashions, satisfy the decorative feeling in Christianity — illustrations their pictures might be to the rapturous words of the Canticles, or such snatches at hidden beauty as " The King's daughter is all glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold," or " Out of the ivory palaces," or '* The glory of all pleasant furniture " — Perugino, and Lippo Lippi and Raphael may conquer in things purely aesthetic; but Michael Angelo, and his great compeer, Leonardo, are the availing masters of art specifically, theologically. Christian ; they represent the spirit of man wrestling with God until the breaking of the day, and the naming of the Ineffable Name ; with them, as Our Lord said : ** the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and violent men take it by force " ; they feel, as did the Apostle, that upon them the ends of the ages are come, and they anguish to interpret heaven to earth, to reveal God to their fellows. As we were gazing at the frescoes on the Sistine roof, Dominic said to me, " Don't you think Michael Angelo is extraordinarily Roman ? I mean really Roman ; direct, trying hard, as does the Roman missal, to be simple, full of statement rather than suggestion." It is, I think, a happy criticism. In the shghtest sketch, even in the grotesque, of Leonardo you have a suggestion of the veil. In the curved smile of the Baptist, or the strong hands of the Madonna in the Diploma Gallery, is written not only mystery, but the consciousness of mystery, awe, and a certain indefinite happiness, so unearthly as to be almost sorrow. " In a glass, darkly," might be written under 26 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE all Leonardo's work ; his Mary, his children. La Gioconda herself, and the Jesus of the Cenacolo might all have been painted, not from figures, but from reflections in a mirror ; they are all gazing out at the world and human life, not as it is but as it appears in the stream of consciousness ; their eyes are troubled with the vision of existence, seen not clearly, but as it was, years ago, by Plato's prisoners of the cave. How different the people of Michael Angelo ! " Et ecce velum tempH scissum est in duas partes a summo usque deorsum. Et terra mota est, et petrae scissae sunt, et monumenta aperta sunt : et multa corpora sanctorum, qui dormierant, surrexerunt." *' The veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom " ; the three hours of darkness that followed the three hours of agony was the time in which the spirit of the painter of the Sistine Chapel wrought his works. For him there is no veil any more ; nothing between the vision of God and his genius except that inevitable darkness that covers the earth when man realizes what he has done to God. It is a shallow criticism which finds anything of the Greek in Michael Angelo : there is a great deal of the Hebrew — the " Last Judgment," in its tremendous overwhelming sense of sin and justice, is almost purely Jewish — and there is much of the stern Christianity of the early fathers : Tertullian, not Francis, would be patron of Michael Angelo. And if we are tempted to think that the religion of the Sistine Chapel is too hard for the Christianity of the Gospels, we must not forget the flabby spirit and the dissolute devotion, and the pious immorality of the age of Leo X. Where so many artists were prostituting their art and religion in the service of godless popes and pagan princes, Buonarroti fearlessly drags the Medici into the shadow of death, and puts the fear of judgment and hell into the hearts of the Roman Curia. His naked Noah and his hurrying Haman not only symbolized, like the earlier S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 27 frescoes at Pisa, Christian dogmas, but branded, as the simpler painters never tried to do, the vices and follies of his own time. Sixtus at first wished the designs on the roof to be concerned with the lives of the Twelve Apostles ; and we are told that Michael Angelo refused to be content with this subject because of its poverty. This can only have been an excuse ; for there are plenty of incidents in the Book of the Acts and in tradition which the painter could have employed in treating the Apostles. But we may believe that Michael Angelo felt it was time to give his patrons a sterner view of religion. No one can accuse the master of the Bruges Madonna, or the Holy Family in Burlington House, or of the David, of a lack of tenderness ; but surely it was pardonable that Michael Angelo should desire to provide a contrast, not merely artistic but re- ligious, with the sweet, aesthetic frescoes that Perugino and Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Botticelli had put upon the walls. None of them could aver that he had any lack of love for the Holy Family, Our Lady and the Saints ; but he thunders from the arches and ceiling of the Sistine, Are you fit to mix with Mary and her Child ? Have you reahsed what was necessary before God became man ? Here, in those hooded figures, peering into the centuries ; here, in the expectant images of the ancestors of Mary and Joseph ; here, in every incident of the Creation, in every fall and ambition of man ; here, in the folly and wisdom of the Israelites ; here, in the vision of the prophets and the vaticinations of the Sibyls ; here, in the Lifted Serpent and the agonized people ; here, in the natural strength and the natural weakness of men and women ; here, in all these, you must be ready to see the prelude, and the reason and the necessity of the Incarnation. Michael Angelo continues the Apostolic comparison between the first and second Adam, the patristic parallel of the first and second Eve ; and the Adam who draws from the Eternal's finger the breath and spirit of life is seen again in the 28 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE tremendous Judge of that terrible parable over the altar. There are critics who have called the central figure there Jupiter; have accused the fresco of being pagan rather than Christian. I admit that the artist gives only one view of the Last Judgment; and the view is, perhaps, exaggerated; but there is nothing in it of pagan. That swift, denounc- ing Christ, that saddened and stern Mary, are far removed from the gods of the Greek or Latin Pantheon. Zeus is the embodiment of calm, impersonal justice ; he is, after all, the slave of the Fate behind the gods, that iEschylean destiny which awaits Olympus and earth ; the Judge here is full of personal feeling, full of that personal anger and disgust at sin and its consequences which so marks off Judaism and Christianity from all other religions. And if the vision seems too terrible, too one- sided, one has only to go back into San Pietro and look at Our Lady of the Pieta to realise that Michael Angelo knew as well as any man that " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever be- lieveth in Him should not perish but have eternal life." It is his keen realisation of personality that always keeps Michael Angelo from being simply decorative. We may prefer the charm, the gentle perspective, the deliberately beautiful composition of the frescoes on the walls of the Sistine, if we look at them from an aesthetic standpoint ; but as images for a place of worship there is infinitely more of the religious spirit in the roof and the lunettes. The men and women start out into the life of the chapel ; you feel, as you gaze up, that every moment you become less real, and the frescoes more ; that they are instinct with a quickness and a vitality that is eternal ; that they are pictures of things not seen, and are set there for the judging, not the pleasure, of the people. " A question of modelling," the art-critic may murmur, but what con- cerns us is not the how but the why of these tremendous figures. You have got no nearer to Michael Angelo's 1 H HHHJI ■■■ 1 ^H _— _^ ^^^^^^^^^^B ^m 1 -a ita ^F^^^^^^^^^u B& . ^^^^^^^^Hf^^^^^^^^^I 1 ■ 1 l*'^ ' ''""J^K ^K. i^^^^^F —r.Tra 1 J^^^m' ^^ ■^^^^■i '-^.^ "^^H gjH s 1' J I^H H > ^^^^^^^,._ MM ^^1^ j| r if 1 ri -'^^^K v^^^^H H I 1 I ^^^BBflB^^^^^^^^^HKa ^1 Pra^BP ^1 1 1 1 P ' ft w ^r^Tliliign _ S^F '''/,^^^| 1 ?^ 1 ^£^^^^ 1 THE PROPHET JONAH ■MICHAEL AN(;F.I.() 77ie Sisdne Chaf>el. J he I'atiian S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 29 spirit when you have waded through pages about his technique, and about the hmitations of a sculptor's painting ; the lesson of the frescoes is the same, although their execution is admirable, and the treatment of the architectural features of the building superb. It is only nineteenth-century England that confounded bad art with didactic art ; until the divorce between religion and art — a divorce that is hastened after Buonarroti's death — it had not occurred to anyone that art should not be didactic ; indeed the old masters were too wise to imagine that it could be anything else, for the painter who pursues, con- sciously or not, art for art's sake is fully as didactic as the man who uses his craft to express the truth as it has been revealed to him. For many of us these pictures of the prophets are a keener, more transcendent commentary on the Messianic prophecy than anything that has been written in books : to their painter the " bodies of the saints which slept arose," and we have his eternal vision of the heralds of the dawn in Jewry and Heathendom, these rapt, ecstatic figures who, for all their Delphic enthusiasm, have, each of them, that inner certainty, that inalienable security that the know- ledge of God gives. Since the days of the Catacombs the Church has always given a great prominence to the person and prophecy of Jonah ; Jonah, who in his fate symbolized Our Lord's burial and resurrection, and in his prophecy anticipates the Christian teaching which binds in a common chain of suffering and expectation the whole of living things. Michael Angelo did not break with that tradition. As we leave the Sistine Chapel we turn back, and our gaze rests on the startling image that leaps out from over the '• Last Judgment" ; Jonah, delivered ab ore inferi : Jonah, preacher of doom, to whom was given the great lesson of salvation even for Nineveh, " that great city wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand ; and also 30 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE much cattle " ; and the burden of Nineveh is the burden of Renascence Rome. When I read what I have written about Michael Angelo and then think myself back into the Cappella di Nic- colo V. I feel somewhat of a traitor. Beato Angelico is so intimately connected with Florence that many forget that his tomb is in Rome — in the church, surely, where he would soonest have lain, even setting apart its Dominican associations, had he had his choice — S. Maria sopra Minerva ; forget that we may turn from the magnificence of Buonarroti, the romance of Pinturicchio, and the realism of Raphael to the calm mediaeval beauty of the painter of Paradise — of Paradise, or may not Fra Angelico be called more truly the painter of the Transfiguration ? One's instinctive cry, standing within the Cappella Niccolina, is ** It is good for us to be here." With Francis of Assisi, Fra Angelico did more than any other man to bring back to Christians the child Jesus, the memory of the Incarnation and the power of God's life on earth. Here, looking at his rendering of the stories of S. Stephen and S. Lawrence, we feel not, as in the Sistine, that we are carried away into the eternal order, but that heaven is embracing earth, that " mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other," that the saints have condescended, yet how graciously, to mingle with our ordinary lives. But we must remember that this chapel was painted, not by a man who was artist first, but by one who had most vividly that vocation for the religious life, for following the counsels of perfection, which in this age men find it so hard to understand. A purely aesthetic view of Buonarroti's work is futile enough ; but with Fra Angelico such a standpoint is more foolish still. He does not compel, perhaps, to thought as does Michael Angelo ; but there must be few of us, who are Christians at all, who can look S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 31 except with some feeling of shame at the unflecked purity and spiritual abandon of his work. How unclean and how disquieted, how unfit to join in this life of sunshine and happiness, of self-sacrifice, and joy, must we appear. The danger of course is, when Christian devotion is pre- sented in so attractive a light, that we may, unrepentant and unshriven, claim to take our place with the Santa Famiglia. When the great truths of the Gospel are pre- sented so beautifully, so much in the spirit of a summer holiday, bathed in the light of the Fete Dieu or Lady-Day in August ; it is only children and those old people who keep the child's spirit who ought to rush into them un- consciously, immediately, and as of right. We, who are soiled with sin, we, who are anxious with experience, we, who are heavy with care, have no business to forget until we are forgiven ; or light any candles for Mary and the Bambino until, clad in the garb of humility, we have held the tapers of penitence and fallen prostrate in heartfelt contrition. So we must go to the Cappella Sistina before the Cappella Niccolina ; pass the Prophets and the Sibyls, before we come to the gracious, beneficent lives of Stephen and Lawrence. There are critics who find a certain lack of dignity in some of these frescoes, and a lack of ethical feeling. They complain that Stephen's figure in the frescoes where he is bustled along to the stoning place has technical defects of a grave character : it may be true — but I am sure that this curious, unbending and yet unresisting Stephen, pushed along by his enemies, gives most securely that sense of absolute abandonment which the saints have felt in their martyrdoms. When the Body of Christ is spat upon and bruised and buffeted, when the body of His first witness is mangled in the presence of the Apostle of the Gentiles, to all appearance evil is entirely victorious over good ; but the slack, limp, unenergizing pose of the body is symbolic of that tremendous effort of will by which God's 32 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE servant has emptied his soul of his human desires and is dependent solely on the supreme will of his Saviour. '* The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God " — and never so much as when the fate and the lives of the righteous appear to be entirely at the mercy of Satan and his legions. It is for this reason that many of the most religious painters love to dwell on the sufferings of the martyrs ; they take a certain humorous enjoyment in showing to other Christians how the powers of evil are deceived ; and you get, certainly in Orcagna and Benozzo Gozzoli, sly touches of irony that betray the twinkle in the eye of the painter. Fra Angelico is never homely — he is too beauti- ful — but he is not without this suspicion of godly fun : his devil is the devil of the mystery-plays, but in Sunday garb, so to speak. In the story of S. Lawrence we have one of the most typical of the martyrdom tales ; and it is evident how the painter felt the contrast between the stately spiritual beauty of Lawrence's ordination and the stark and severe simplicity of his trial and death. How charming are the poor people — really poor, not merely penurious — in the fresco where S. Lawrence distributes the wealth of the Pope ; doubtless many of them came for sustenance to the friary where Beato Angelico lived. It is astonishing that any human being looking at these frescoes, or at the earthly-heavenly vision at Florence, should be able to write " the passion of existence for him was centred in the next life. His artistic method was the result of his detachment from terrestrial things." The truth is that ail Fra Angelico 's interests were on this earth ; but that he saw this earth as God's footstool, and its fields as the playing meadows of the saints, and its flowers as toys for the cherubim, and its mountains as refuges of God's seers, and its stars as jewels for the crown of Our Lady. Religion, for him, was never anything but a thing sacramental ; and to a sacramentalist every sod S. PETER AND HIS BASILICA 33 of earth is sacred, every blade of grass sings its own h3mans and every river has its own antiphon to the undying psalmody of the ocean. Fra Angelico knows nothing of a religion detached from human interests ; and he cannot see a heaven more beautiful than the garden of his own Italy. He is the child among the Italian painters, and his vision of the religion of the Incarnation supplements Michael Angelo's vision of the religion of the Atonement, just as the theology of Alexandria supplements the theology of Hippo. -^ Dominic is not here to read this — I should say that Dominic is a priest and so speaks with authority on these matters — but I can hear his objection to a good deal I have written. " Yes ; but you have said earlier that after all the Petrine character is the one thing necessary ; S. Peter, not S. Paul, is the foundation rock of the Church, and doesn't Fra Angelico represent S. Peter ? Surely 1 1 feel rather strongly that the religion of the Sistine ceiling is what is needed for many of the present-day heresies and folHes — pantheism, new theologies, Nietzscheism, and all the other revivals of discredited and dusty moral and ethical disasters. We have not quite got out of that steamy, seductive Parisian back- water into which Renan tried to divert the river of Christianity. One knows that Fra Angelico, though he might have been driven on his knees and compelled to tears, would have understood the splendid terrors of Michael Angelo's faith ; but your modern sentimental Christian, your popular preacher, who deals in what Dr Figgis has called '' religion with the claws drawn," shivers away with an unintelligent fear from the Cross and the Crucifix, from sin and the Saviour. And we must take care that he does not arrogate to himself the right to play in the meadows of Fra Angelico, in the sheepfold of the saints. " He that entereth not in by the door is a thief and a robber " : and the door is humility, and penitence, and a sense of sin, for all save those few who have kept their baptismal robe spotless ; and they are generally broken by the sins of others, and seared with the salt of alien tears. It is the modern man " who is not bothering about his sins " who must be pushed into the Cappella Sistina, and forced to see what sin has done, and what are the fruits of unrighteousness. c 34 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE there is something not quite Christian — leaving alone the horrible condition the fresco is in — about that Last Judgment ? Perhaps it is not pagan — but " " Well, I think I will leave the reader to finish the dis- cussion on the first question ; but for an answer to your suggestion about the paganism of Michael Angelo — come and see what ancient Rome was like ! " CHAPTER III ROME PAGAN I The Forum BEFORE we had been two days in Rome, Dominic and I decided that it was useless to try and ignore the Rome of the Repubhc and the Caesars. No one can reahze, mitil he is in the city, how intimately and in- dissolubly the different Romes are united, and how im- possible it is to appreciate the early Christian Rome until one has seen the memorials of Rome pagan. In many cases, of course, the glory of pagan Rome is the triumph of Catholic Rome. Where Divus Augustus built a temple in honour of his imperium, the Popes dedicated an altar in honour of Our Lady of the Martyrs ; the Forum itself is guarded by the ruins of Santa Maria Antica, and by the relics of Santa Francesca, most honoured of Roman saints ; and the memory of S. Peter and S. Paul over- whelms all other thoughts when we enter the Mamertine prison. Still there is much of ancient Rome that remains, un- absorbed, unassimilated by the Rome that has succeeded. I know this contradicts — as Dominic reminds me — what I have written before ; but Rome is a contradictory city — why did I not remember to say that earlier ? Rome's very power of assimilation is shown by her instinctive rejection of certain things ; what she leaves, stands gaunt, naked, 35 36 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE nothing but a skeleton while life is still flowing in the red veins of her narrow streets, and throbbing in the pulses of her noble gates, and beating in the heart of her churches. The Forum, we agreed, was the first thing to see of pagan Rome. Most people see it in great discomfort, with a guide. They are formed into little groups ; and each little group is reminiscent of an Oxford lecture-room and a conducted tour — it exudes culture and impatience in about equal quantities. An inordinate amount of tabloid information is thrown about, and alas ! how little is ever digested. I suppose the knowledge is predigested and is like most modern dietaries of nuts and other non-flesh substances : they run through the body without con- veying any nourishment at all. Those who indulge in them go through all the sensations of eating, none of the trouble of digestion, and get none of the advantages of vitalizing food. We saw several little crowds running round obediently, and we avoided them all. I like the modern arrangement of the Forum. I never saw the old order, when grass grew over it, and you strayed into the ruins with a happy air of accident, only prevented from success by a corner of Hare's " Walks in Rome " peeping out of your pocket. But still I aver the present mode — turning all the ruins into a paddock and making it an open- air museum — is much the better. It is silly to pretend that before the days of the wicked Italian government the Forum was vastly more picturesque, and therefore was in a better state. In the Middle Ages the place was a rubbish heap, a quarry, a market garden, a buffalo paradise. Under the nineteenth-century Popes a good deal was done ; but much the most serious work of excavation has been accom- plished since 1871, under Rosa, and Lanciani and Boni. I have never understood the spirit which carps at good work because it is carried on under unpleasant auspices ; and if a great deal of destructive work — difficult to forgive, some of it, like the pulling down of the Convent at Ara IN THE FORUM ROME PAGAN 37 Coeli — has been done for the somewhat aimless cult of Victor Emmanuel ; we must put against it the wonderful care displayed in discovering the treasures of the Forum, not least Santa Maria Antica, a building worth many Renascence palaces or convents. Nor do I understand the spirit largely indulged in by artistic writers in the seventies and eighties — which prefers its ruins to be "picturesque" — that is, decaying, tumbling, dangerous and dirty. I hate restoration as much as anyone, but why prevent pre- servation ? The men who used the Forum as a convenient place from which to " lift " marble, acted intelligibly ; but what can we say for the sentimentalists who bemoan the destruction of the Middle Ages and damn the efforts of the men who are trying to retrieve the disasters of previous epochs ? "I have no patience with these people," as Dominic said, when an English countess of our acquaint- ance spat on a two-lira piece which bore Victor Emmanuel's head and expressed a desire that it was not necessary to use " the beast's money." " Why doesn't the woman throw the coin away ? She takes good care to get her income in the coin of the country ; she ought to remain faithful to the old papal money." From which you must not gather that Dominic is a White; only, while quite inno- cent of all politics, he likes people to be thorough. But I know no place where it is so difficult to sympathize with the Holy Father, as Rome. "The Prisoner of theVatican ? " Yes ; but somehow one feels sure that the key is on the inside of the door. Is there anything more trying to the imagination than the Forum ? Perhaps those earlier pilgrims of culture, Rogers and the men of his time, could more easily evoke memories of Republican and Imperial Rome than we can ; the number of landmarks, the variety of ruins and the dreadful confusion of dates can only be overcome, I should imagine, by one who has lived in the Forum for about a year. In a couple of dozen yards one passes from the Rome of 38 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Tiberius to the Rome of Constantine, and from Constantine to Caesar. No sooner has one tried to picture the scene along the main street, with Horace sneering at some bard devoid of his own genius for commonplace and capacity for patronage — " non di, non homines, non concessere columnae " — than one is carried on to the days of Trajan, who satisfied, by the extant rostra, the growing demands for popular oratory. I beheve the right way to enjoy the Forum is to forget one's school books, forget one's Lanciani, give up trying to find the exact line of the Via Sacra, murmuring mean- while Horatian tags, and frankly appreciate the wonderful beauty of single remains — little bits of sculpture, heads, and columns and altars. It was while wandering about the Forum in this way that I realized fully the Roman's astonishing gift for portraiture. There was nothing else quite like it in the ancient world. It is true that in Egyptian art you have occasionally a most surprising verisimilitude ; but even in such a statue as that of the Letter-writer there is hardness of outline, a certain cruel conventionality that is lacking in the best Roman things. How wonderful, for instance, are the animals on those two huge blocks of marble known as the Plutei ; more wonderful, I think, are the sow, the ram and the bull than the human figures on the outer panels, for to achieve portraiture of animals without either caricaturing or humanizing them is a feat more difficult than attaining good representations of the human face and figure. It is in detail, homely, almost Dutch, in conception and design, that the Roman excelled. Even from illustrations and plans and descriptions I have never been able to admire the stupendousness of Roman architecture ; all their enormous works appear to me to have been done against the real Roman genius. The Romans were far too sensible a people, in their prime, to be affected by mere size : that is an Oriental heresy. And for this reason any one ROME PAGAN 39 of the huge, inhuman, barbaric monuments of Assyria and Egypt is far more impressive than the Colosseum or the giant ruins of the Palatine. The Egyptian was sincerely the slave of size ; perhaps the vast emptiness of the desert, perhaps the horrible clearness of their religion, inspired by the hard outlines of the African cli- mate, made them servants of a meaningless immensity, but insomuch as their servitude was sincere it transforms such monuments as the Cheops Pyramid or the Ghizeh Sphinx into a certain overwhelming verisimilitude that might deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. In the same way the enormous winged bulls of Assyria, gazing out on humanity from the abysses of some nameless, bestial hell, can still terrify and astound. The great Roman buildings have nothing of this crushing, if false, impressiveness. When I read the accounts of the Colos- seum as it was, I feel sure that it was vastly less potent to charm and amaze than now, when with its gaping brokenness it testifies to the strength of the blood of the martyrs. And that huge golden Nero which swaggered in front of the Palatine — if we could see it, should we not think it vulgar — as vainglorious art always is ? All the diseased and decaying faiths and customs of the East swept into Imperial Rome, and the stern, clean lines of the Republic were made gaudy and common with the stucco and gilding of an alien architecture. Still in quiet streets the Roman artist worked on, doing his careful, veracious yet not unimaginative pictures of people and animals. I say ** Roman " — but we are in danger of forgetting that the Roman of the Republic and of the Empire was almost as much a mongrel as the English of modern times : any race that can colonize continuously and successfully will generally be found to be of a very mixed descent. In recent times scholars are inclined to give more and more prominence to the influence of Etruria on Rome : much that has been regarded as 40 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE typically Roman — the roads and the drains — are probably Etruscan ; and the Etruscan contrived to live in the Campagna which the ancient and modern Roman alike — save for such adventurers as the monks of Tre Fontani — have allowed to be a desert for dogs and the dead. Still there is a very distinct element in Roman history, in Roman art, in Roman character which we may set down as typical of the Roman genius : only it is emphatically not the element which so many visitors to the Eternal City are apt to consider " Roman." The pomp of the city is Eastern, the grandeur of the city is Hellenistic, the im- perial position of the city is far more Christian and Papal than the product of native Rome. It is true that in Julius Caesar you have a man who embodies imperium in the best sense, just as Vespasian, in a lesser degree, does — but Caesar spent his youth in Asia and Vespasian was never a Roman. Your typical Roman was a man of intense if small ideas, a man of tenacious if narrow interests, a man of deep and national religious feeling. Cato, Cicero, Pompey,^ men who remind us rather vividly of the mid- Victorian Englishman — the English of the Manchester School, with a contempt for anything but solid worth, a dislike of anything flashy, or swagger, or foreign, are the typical Romans. Whether it is un- conscious knowledge of his own doubtful descent that makes the mongrel so arrogantly national, I don't know ; but there is the fact — that a Roman, who probably had an Etruscan ancestress and a grandmother from the provinces, prated of his ** Romanness " just as an Englishman who cannot go back three generations with- ^ How typical is that anecdote of Pompey as Bacon tells it ! -' Pompey, being commissioner for sending grain to Rome in time of dearth, when he came to the sea, found it very tempestuous and dangerous, insomuch as those about him advised him by no means to embark ; but Pompey said, ' It is of necessity that I go, not that I live.* " THE COLOSSEUM BV NIGHT ROME PAGAN 41 out finding Scotch, French and Welsh ancestors will blurt across Europe speaking nothing but English and boasting of his English blood, far more scornful of the foreigner than is some Hibernian Irishman who runs straight back to the O'Briens or the O'Donoghues. It is too often forgotten by men who are never tired of quoting the Roman empire as a model that the imperium was based on the destruction of the Roman character — that narrow, peninsular pride which saw nothing higher than the Seven Hills and nothing holier than the Shrine of the Vestals. And it is forgotten, too, that when Rome ceased to be Republican she ceased also to be strong : she was only saved by the Cross from going the way of Athens and Veil. It was by the deliberate debauching of the Roman citizen, by the policy of free food and free sports, by the practice of a slave-supported ease, that the gaudy triumphs of later Rome were achieved : every new conquest in Britain meant a fresh home ruined in the city, every inch of the map that was made red in token of the Roman power was reddened by the most vital blood of Roman citizens. An idle populace, sneering at a policy they disliked or misunderstood, supported by an army whose pretensions increased with its power, was only rescued from utter destruction by the foolishness of the Gospel. That is what comes into the mind of the lover of Rome as he stands and watches in the Forum how the Empire swallowed up the real independent Rome ; and when he sees what pathetic, what tragically futile, efforts were made by those degenerate Romans to pretend to a pro- fession of a character that was irretrievably lost. One of the most splendid records of Imperial Rome in the Forum is the Basilica Emilia, restored from the Republican building of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, by Augustus and Tiberius. It was gorgeous with Phrygian marble, and adorned with the best Greek statuary — it 42 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE was typical of the highest that the Imperial spirit could produce — just as the Colossus and the Theatre were typical of the worst. In front of this palace was a small, ancient shrine — Plautus mentions it in the Cucurlio — Cloacinae sacrum ; and Livy speaks of it as something immemorial, part of the history of the city. This temple, dedicated to Venus Cloacina — the Love that Cleanses or Our Lady of Purification — was burned down in a.d. 178, but carefully restored by the Rome that had ceased to worship there. It had stood in that spot, so Pliny says, since the war between the Roman and the Sabine, and there the two enemies had purified themselves, with branches of myrtle and prayers to Venus. The ceremony of purification had long been abandoned by the pro- fessionals of the Pretorian guard and the mercenaries of the Imperial army ; but Rome, for very shame, rebuilt the shrine to the Love that Cleanses, to Aphrodite, bride of Ares, to the friendship that follows strife. Nothing is more heartrending than this careful, antiquarian attention to forgotten and deserted gods : the altar that is too clean, too neat, is worse than the altar that is dusty. It is better to forsake and forget your religion than to turn it into " a monument of the historic past." Yet there must always have been a number of citizens who were not bribed into treachery to their old ideals. In the Flavian Dynasty the population of Rome was something under a million and a half, and the Colosseum probably held only about fifty thousand people. We may believe that in spite of the frequency of the shows there were a certain number of citizens, unaffected by Jewish or Christian ideas, who refused to be degraded for the echo of distant conquests. Yet the astonishing diffi- culty there was in stopping the spectacles is evidence of how secure a hold the worse ideals had on a large portion of the populace. The strongest and strangest difference between the ROME PAGAN 43 Roman of the Republic at its prime and the Roman of the Empire is seen by the manner in which the emperors and their sateUites lose their sense of proportion and their capacity for self-control. In spite of that genius for talking which reaches its flower in Cicero — the Cicero of the letters even more than the Cicero of the speeches — and in Pliny, the Roman always had far more croocppoarvvii than the Greeks, who valued it so highly. Pericles and Plato and Sophocles are the only prominent Athenians whom one could think of as self -con trolled. A nation too often talks a great deal of the quality which it de- siderates and does not possess; and Socrates, with his passion for destructive analysis, ^Eschylus with his superb gloom, Aristophanes with his boisterous and acid wit, Alci- biades with his wanton insolence, Euripides with his melancholy scepticism, are far removed from the ideal of temperance, of balance, of assured and certain poise. Now it is this attitude of — at times rather irritating — sanity which the Roman of the Republic displayed. It makes the difference between Plautus and Aristophanes, between Virgil and Homer ; it inspired the poetry of that most Roman poet, Lucretius, and the conduct of Cincin- natus. Caesar had it, and had it very strongly, but with Caesar the passion for experience — surely a characteristic that led him very far, though we may discredit the stories of Suetonius — and his astonishingly fertile and acquisitive genius, kept the more sober qualities largely in sub- jection. After C^sar what Roman has it ? We find a pompous parody of it in Lucan, and a sentimental parody of it in Seneca ; but never a sign of it in any Roman emperor, except, possibly, Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius. If you would know how far the sense of proportion left the men whom Rome delighted to honour, look at the relics of the Hadrianic Empire : the huge villa at Tivoli built as a kind of memorial of the Emperor's travels, the Ponte S. Angelo 44 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE and the Moles Hadriani — and as a tribute to the gods of heaven, the swinging dome of the Pantheon. The Pantheon is quite the most affecting, undoubtedly the most certain and successful, the least grandiose of all the Imperial buildings. It retains most of the simplicity of Republican Rome, while it has caught something of the spirit which animated Julius Caesar and, in a less degree, Augustus, who was responsible for its foundation. This all-holy place Hadrian restored, and gave to it its present wonderful dome, that vast expanse of celestial roof, pierced by the eternal eye, from which alone the building gets any light. This Pantheon — S. Mary of the Martyrs — is, had he known it, the worthiest claim to remembrance that Hadrian left : this comparatively small and modest building, which he restored to the honour of the gods of heaven. Then you have the Moles Hadriani — the monstrous tomb which a later age put under the guardianship of the great Archangel, the Signifer of God. This huge mass, at whose original splendour and wealth we can only guess, was, we may be sure, esteemed by Hadrian far above the Pantheon. This, and the great bridge which united it to Rome, seems more typical of the Empire than the Colosseum. And this was built to immortahze the Emperor's passion for Antinous, and to defy the death which Hadrian, unlike the Pharaohs whom he emulated, believed to end all things. More typical than the Moles, more typical than the Amphitheatrum, is the Villa. We still call it a villa. It was really an artificial continent ; a series of palaces and climates and environments ; a vast effort at recon- structing the past which held for Hadrian nothing but the weariness of things sought for and things achieved, of desires too superficially entertained and too easily satis- fied, of worlds that he could not conquer, because they were already his, of an adulation due only to God, and THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO ROME PAGAN 45 given to a man. Here, on these miles of land, the Emperor bade his architects and gardeners and designers refashion for him the places he had seen in his travels ; and they did his bidding, and still the Emperor's soul was world- weary, homeless, the victim of dryness and accidie. " Animula, vagula, blandula Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula, rigida, nudula Nee, ut soles, dabis jocos ? '- *' Soul of mine, gentle and quaking Guest of the body, and friend of it, Whither away art thou making Stiffening and naked and shaking ? Jesting ? Ah ! now is an end of it ! ' ' All that enormous expanse of garden and mansions, with the theatre, and baths, and hunting boxes, was built — simply for self. The very idea of self-sacrifice — that so potent instinct in early Rome, as the legend of Quintus Curtius and the cavern in the Forum testify — had been lost by the emperors. All the pomp and the glory and luxury subserved one purpose only — passion for self. There is something, Dominic insisted, of unselfishness in the Pantheon, with its recollection of God's mite, and in the Moles, with its tribute to passion and to death ; but if you admit that, what is there but self in the Villa, with its Greek beauty and its vast resources for pleasure ? And that is the spirit of the Empire — the spirit which the rulers had to encourage in the people so that their own absorption in it might seem normal and right. *' On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell. Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell. 46 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The Roman noble lay ; He drove abroad, in furious guise. Along the Appian way. He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers — No easier nor no quicker pass'd The impracticable hours.'' And there was lost too in Imperial Rome the sense of obedience. Before the growth of luxury, before the enormous increase in slave-labour, Roman discipline, like Roman decorum, was a quality that none could dispute. No doubt the beginning of bad was when such a man as Crassus, the richest of the triumvirate, amassed wealth by the to us familiar method of ground-rents and house-broking ; but the Imperial Forum, with its monu- ments of aggrandized families, its arches and tributes to individuals, bears melancholy witness to the excessive importance given to wealth. And when wealth can command allegiance the spirit of true obedience is broken ; every arch that meets the eye as you stand and look towards the Amphitheatrum Flavianum, from that of Septimius Severus to that of Maxentius and Constantine, is a symbol of the decadence of Rome ; the ruined palaces, the Basilica Julia, the Basilica ^Emilia, the Basilica of Constantine, the Temple to Caesar which jostled the temples of the ancient gods — each marks a step towards that inevitable decline which was finally accomplished in the rise of Christianity. It is, however, possible to exaggerate the extent of the Imperial evil : it is difficult to get any accurate notion of how many people resented the inordinate excess of the more extravagant emperors. For one thing, we hear so loudly the voice of the parasite that we cannot discern the cry of the objector ; for another, those objectors who do ROME PAGAN 47 make themselves heard are forced to shout so loudly and to pitch their complaints in so extravagant a key that we hesitate to give credence to Juvenal's frightful attack on the Roman women, or to Tacitus' savage and sweeping diatribes against Tiberius or Nero. There must have been a good few who did not consent to the swindling and suicidal practice of drugging the conscience of the city ; the best of these either embraced Christianity or, leaving Rome, tried to uphold the Roman spirit in the villages — pagans, whose primitive faith was better than the obsequi- ous Christianity that was affected by the Court after Con- st antine's conversion. It is the memory of this simpler folk, a memory nigh buried under the groaning arches of the Principes, which alone makes the Forum anything else than a museum of Grgeco-Roman architecture and sculpture. We sought their footsteps and their memories in some of the older temples, where Imperial restoration at least spared the titles and respected the ancient sites ; we could remember them as we gazed at the Pons Juturnae, that spring at which Castor and Pollux watered their horses, stiU welling up as on the day when the Great Twin Brothers announced to the city the result of the battle by Regillus ; but perhaps the memory of Republican Rome clings most round the Temple of Vesta, sacred to the old religion of fire, tended by the holy order which even the Empire hardly availed to disturb. And near the House of the Vestals are the ruins of a small shrine which, with characteristic discretion, the Senatus Popu- lusque Romanus erected "to an unknown God." Here, too, in this house, may be seen the statues of the vestales maximae ; on the pedestals we read the strange, yet familiar names, Praetextata, Numisia Maximilla, Coelia Claudiana, Flavia Publicia. And then we were arrested by the sight of a pedestal from which the name had been carefully erased. Why? Prudentius, in his hymn on S. Lawrence, gives us the answer : 48 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE " Videmus illustres domos, Sexu ex utroque nobiles, Ofiferre votis pignora Clarissimorum liber um. Vittatus olim pontifex Ascitur in signum crucis ; Aedemque, Laurenti, tuam Vestalis intrat Claudia.'' ** Noble sons of noble sires. Daughters of a noble house Bring to us their young desires, Bring to us their eager vows. See ! the Priest of Jove, who takes Up the Cross whose sign he makes ! And the Vestal Claudia sped Where St Laurence' blood was shed." So the best and purest thing in Roman religion becomes absorbed in Christianity. The cult, first encouraged and estabhshed by Numa Pompilius, revered through the Republic, respected through the Empire, finds its true home in the heart of the Catholic Church. On Holy Saturday, at the blessing of fire and water, we have the real succession of natural religion, and the song of the Vestals becomes the song of the Church. Haec sunt enim festa Paschalia, in quibus verus Agnus occiditur, cuius sanguine postes fidelium consecrantur. Haec nox est, in qua primum patres nostros filios Israel eductos de Aegypto, mare rubrum sicco vestigio transire fecisti. Haec igitur nox est, quae peccatorum tenebras, columnae illuminatione purgavit. Haec nox est, quae hodie, per universum mundum, in Christo credentes, a vitiis saeculi, et caligine peccatorum segregates, reddit gratiae, sociat sanctitati. Haec nox est, in qua destructis vinculis mortis, Christus ab inferis victor ascendit. Nihil enim nobis nasci profuit, nisi redimi profuisset. O mira circa nos tuae pietatis dignatio ! O inaestimabilis dilectio ROME PAGAN 49 caritatis : ut servum redimeres, Filium tradidisti ! O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est ! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem ! O vere beata nox, quae sola meruit scire tempus et horam, in qua Christus ab inferis resurrexit ! Haec nox est, de qua scriptum est : Et nox sicut dies illuminabitur : Et nox illuminatio mea in deliciis meis. Huius igitur sanctificatio noctis, fugat scelera, culpas lavat : et reddit innocentiam lapsis, et moestis laetitiam. Fugat odia, concordiam parat, et curvat imperia. . . . O vere beata nox quae exspoliavit Aegyptos, ditavit Hebraeos ! Nox, in qua terrenis coelestia, humanis divina junguntur. Oramus ergo te, Domine : ut Cereus iste in honorem tui nominis conse- cratus, ad noctis hujus caliginem destruendam, inde- ficiens perse veret. . . . Deus, cujus Spiritus super aquas, inter ipsa mundi primordia ferebatur: ut jam tunc virtutem sanctificationis, aquarum natura conciperet. Deus, qui nocentis mundi crimina per aquas abluens regenerationis speciem in ipsa diluvii effusione signasti ; et unius ejusdemque elementi mysterio, et finis esset vitiis, et origo virtutibus. ... Sit haec sancta, et innocens creatura, libera ab omni impugna- toris incursu, et totius nequitiae purgata discessu. Sit fons vivus, aqua regenerans, unda purificans ; ut omnes hoc lavacro salutifero diluendi, operante in eis Spiritu sancto, perfectae purgationis indulgent iam consequantur. Unde benedico te, creatura aquae, per Deum^^vivum, per Deum^-verum, per DeumHhsanctum : per Deum, qui te in principio, verbo separavit ab arida : cujus Spiritus super te ferebatur. Qui te de paradisi fonte manare fecit, et in quatuor fiuminibus tot am terram rigare praecepit. Qui te in deserto amaram, suavitate indita fecit esse potabilem, et sitienti populo de petra produxit. Benedico •i-te et per Jesum Christum Filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum : qui te in Cana Galilaeae signo admirabili, sua D 50 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE potentia convertit in vinum. Qui pedibus super te am- bulavit : et a Joanne in Jordane in te baptizatus est. Qui te una cum sanguine de latere suo produxit : et discipulis suis jussit, ut credent es baptizarentur in te, dicens : Ite, docete, omnes gentes, baptizantes eos in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti. II The Palatine and the Mamertine Prison In a city that draws so much on one's emotions as does Rome, it would have been a pity to try and summon enthusiasm over what really, at first sight, left one cold. The Palatine did not excite me. Better perhaps to say that, with two exceptions, the ruins in the Palatine seemed negligible beside the other glories of Rome. The fact that Tiberius and Caligula each built a palace there, and that Nero's golden house, stretching to the Esquiline, covered a greater space of ground than does S. Pietro in Vaticano, gave me no pleasure. I was tired of Imperial extravagance; tired of trying to realize it, and besides there is a handier way to realization in the bitter sentences of Tacitus or the violent periods of Juvenal. Nothing on the Palatine reminds you of anything but the folly and the hard vulgarity of Imperial Rome, except the Domus Liviae and what is called the Paedagogium. The house which may have been built by Tiberius' father is by far the best example we have left of the general plan of a dwelling-place in the early Empire ; and it is difficult even now not to feel a certain sensation of breaking privacy as one stares at the frescoes of lo or Galatea ; peers at the leaden water pipes, and conjectures about the Roman plumbing, or examines the manner in which the connoisseur of the period preserved his pictures from ROME PAGAN 51 damp. Here at last I got a sensation of real, ordinary life. In the remains of the other palaces I felt little but the shadow of dead ceremonial, and the thick gloom of disgraceful vice ; but here, when my thoughts were per- haps getting rather morbid, I was snatched back to the recollection that even in the Rome of the Empire, relations of the emperors were leading ordinary, domestic lives. Even the Court of Nero had its Acte ; and the Empire, gross obsession as it was, did spring from hearts that once had been human, and fostered ambitions that were, in the origin, not entirely diabolic. Acte, however, was a slave and — as an unduly neglected novel (by Hugh Westbury, I think) suggested — very likely a Christian. How many of the slaves that frequented the Paedagogium were Christians ? This building, close to the Stadium, was, as the blameless and bloodless Baedeker tells us, " a school for the Imperial slaves, who, like those of all the wealthier Romans, received a careful education." A careful education ! Wonderful Teutonic honesty ! No doubt the education was careful ; and what was it about ? It is Theodor Mommsen who suggests that American slavery is but a drop in the ocean of human cruelty beside the slavery of ancient Rome. That may be exaggerated ; but let those who want to know what kind of lives slaves led, what sort of amusements their ''' education " induced them to practise, read Martial — Martial, the careless, cynical, practical worldling who cannot quite keep the cry of the oppressed out of the frivolous flick of his obscene epigrams. I can't quote Martial — even in Latin ; but let us see how the same problem struck an educated Jew — a provincial, no doubt, *' with a thick accent and an absurd emphasis on moral conduct as opposed to moral values " — as one hears some Roman lady of the Imperial times chatter — " so unlike our own dear Seneca." Martial may have met Paul, but I don't suppose he ever heard these words : " Know ye 52 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE not that to whom ye yield yourselves slaves to obey, his slaves ye are whom ye obey : whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness ? But (praise God !) ye who were the slaves of sin, have given heartfelt obedience imto that form of teaching which was delivered you. And then, when ye were freed from sin, ye became the slaves of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men, because of the infirmity of your flesh : I beseech you, as ye once yielded your members slaves to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, so, now yield your members slaves to righteousness unto holiness. For when ye were the slaves of sin, ye were free from righteousness. And what fruit had ye then from those things whereof ye are now ashamed ? Surely the end of those things was death. But now, freed from sin, slaves of God, ye have j^our fruit unto holiness, and at the end life eternal. For the wages of sin is death ; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." No one can really appreciate the Pauline Epistles, more especially those to the Romans and the Corinthians, unless they have a picture of ancient slavery in their mind. Most of the Christian community in Rome was probably slaves : what a temptation must the Gospel of Paul, with its wonderful insistence on freedom, its almost passionate denunciation of legalism, have been. And how wonderfully did S. Paul grasp the danger, and meet it without abating a jot or a tittle of his preaching ! Of course the slaves of the wealthy Romans, with a few exceptions, were not educated ; they were no more educated than a Strassburg goose is fed. They were stuffed. They liked being stuffed. They gorged and lusted and quarrelled and killed — ^let the Jew of Tarsus speak again " fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, extor- tioners — such were some of you," he cried to the Church at Corinth — and such no doubt had been some in the Roman Church. And they did not know it till the Jew told them. ROME PAGAN 53 That is the mystery of iniquity in Greek and Roman civihzation. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which Aristotle sanctions, and Plato ignores. The slave had no soul, no rights, no duties. And not till the wind of God swept this, the Paedagogium, blasting that infernal falsehood, not till then can we say that the slaves were educated. That there were Christian slaves here we know from a hasty wall-drawing found on the wall and preserved in the Museo Kircheriano. One afternoon a group of six or seven of the boy-slaves were " ragging '' one another : and then a handsome, clever fellow, a Greek, proposed some foul way or another of passing the time. And the rest agreed — all but one. He is Alexamenos and has been a great friend of the other Greek, and in reply to entreaties and requests he con- fesses : " I am a Christian." The other has heard of the Jewish fools that worship a crucified criminal ; his sound Greek sense turns in revolt from this disgusting confession, and the next morning he scribbles on the wall a cari- cature of his companion adoring a figure on the cross. And he gives the Figure the head of an ass. " To the Greeks foolishness." What better commentary can we have on that text than this sneering, AXe^aixevoq a-e^ere TOP Oeov ? 1 1 There is another theory that makes this graffito not a ribald sketch, but a confession of faith either on the part of a Gnostic sect, who identified Christ with Seth, and Seth with Seti — an ass- headed deity of Eg5rpt ; or of some eclectic person trying to revive a cultus of Seth. I do not believe a bit in this theory. Firstly, boys who are keen on religion do not draw devotional pictures on the walls of their school buildings, particularly when the religion is of so odd a kind ; secondly, there are no other graffiti in the Paedagogium which encourage one to think it was a likely spot for inscribing reHgious pictures. Thirdly, this modern theory leaves the cross quite unexplained. And the cross, though faint, is perfectly plain and visible still. 54 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Indeed this Paedagogium is the most melancholy place in ancient Rome. Here were trained the human watches, the human jest-books, the human freaks, the human machines who were, as Democritus advised, *' the limbs of the body, used each for his own end." Ignorant men had their reading done by slaves ; wealthy fools had their walking and their greeting of friends done through slaves; the slaves made jokes for stupid masters, and invented vices for filthy ones. They had no use, no personality of their own — yet their brains supplied much of the senti- ment of Seneca, and most of the learning of Pliny. They were like the piles on which Venice stands, as necessary and as forgotten ; and when they failed, Roman civilization crashed down, as Venice will fall when her foundations give : and that spiteful scratching on the wall is the symbol of the power that shook the slavery of Rome. One morning Dominic and I had got up rather late and were not out in the streets till nearly eleven o'clock. I know nothing so fresh and so startling for Northerners as the changes of Roman weather in the early days of the New Year. In London or any English town one knows sufficiently what degree of warmth to expect directly the first breeze of morning whispers up fiom the river to the narrow and the broad streets of the city. In Rome it is quite otherwise. You leave your hotel to walk in a street that is dipped in dark, cold shadow ; you shiver slightly, and gaze up wonderingly at the strip of blue sky that stretches taut and firm above the high roofs of the houses. Then you go on until you are standing in one of the great piazzas — that of the Spaniard, or the more homely one of the Tortoise Fountain, or, best of all, in front of S. Peter's Basilica — and behold the whole world is bathed in glowing, warm sunshine. The citizens have discarded or opened their overcoats ; the jets of the fountain play with the sunlight like children with soap bubbles, and the FROM THE DOORS OB^ ST. PETERS ROME PAGAN 55 blue above you is vast, domelike, full of Italy's eternal spring. That was an experience which we had on many mornings. It was an auspicious winter, that winter of our pilgrimage. It rained, it is true, but always between sunset and sunrise ; so that in the early morning you got the most beautiful grey-blue effects against the broken pillars of Trajan's forum, or the long flight of steps that leads up to the Church of the Altar of Heaven. It was just such a morning when, as I said, we got up late. Our late rising had rather disturbed the plans for the day ; and we wandered, a little aimlessly, towards the Forum, discussing what we should do with the rest of the morning. Suddenly Dominic remembered. ** We haven't seen the Mamertine." It was true. So we turned aside and entered the prison which, more than any building in Rome, is associated with Republican and Christian memories. No one knows what the Mamertine was in origin. It may have been a well-house, or a tomb, or even an ancient temple, in which case the lower chamber might have had uses not unconnected with the mysteries and the sacrifices. Anyway it is one of the oldest things in Rome. Livy says that it was built by Ancus Martins, and calls it " Career imminens foro." It was used, in Sallust's days, as a place of execution as well as a prison. It was repaired in the principate of Tiberius, as is testified by an inscrip- tion on the facade. Perhaps it is exaggerating its political importance to compare it, as does Nichols, with the Tower of London. Jugurtha, who was starved to death in the lower cell, and Vercingetorix are the two most heroic figures of pagan history connected with the Career. For us, of course, the prison is indissolubly associated with the name and the confinement of S. Peter. It is not certain whether Peter was imprisoned in the upper or lower chamber. In his day the only entrance to the lower cell was by a hole in the floor of the upper, which itself had a similar access : 56 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE prisoners were let down by ropes, and there left to rot or starve. Tradition says that the lower cell was that occupied by S. Peter and S. Paul ; but the tradition is late, and if we suppose that he wrote an epistle while in jail it is almost certain that he occupied the upper cell. The tradition is encouraged by the spring of water which is in the lower cell and whose origin is thus given in the Breviary : " At the time that Peter and Paul were kept in prison, two of the guards, Processus and Martinianus, with forty others, stirred by the preaching and miracles of the Apostles, turned to the faith of Jesus Christ, and, when a spring suddenly burst out from the rock, were baptised." To- day both cells are easily visited by pilgrims, as a staircase has been built. After we had gazed at the scene of the Apostles' im- prisonment — for in one or other of the cells they certainly were — we went on to the quaint little Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami, above the prison. It was getting on to noon, and there were not more than half-a-dozen worshippers in the building ; we knelt down to say the Angelus, and were just going out again, when a priest entered to say Mass. We had not heard Mass that morn- ing, and so we agreed to stop. It is always interesting to hear and assist at services in a foreign country. Habits of reverence, habits of devotion, are so totally different in different places. The celebrant was served by a man who would have been declared dreadfully irreverent by any English priest. He rarely did less than three things at a time. For instance, while he was saying the Preparation with the priest he was lighting the candles, and also carr3dng vessels from one credence to another. Yet he was not inattentive. He never missed a " Cum spiritu tuo," or a " Kyrie eleison." And as the Mass proceeded, though he got, if anything, brisker and more businesslike, he was never — what shall I say ? — in that state of commonplace contentment that ROME PAGAN 57 you may see in some English churches. He was eminently alive ; he was used to the mystery at which he was assist- ing, but it had bred with him, not a sleepy acquiescence, but a kind of hurried attachment, a breathless and quick- ened affection. The famous passage in '* Loss and Gain," in which Newman defends the hurried saying of the Mass, has always seemed to be nonsense — clever and mischiev- ous nonsense ; the argument he uses (or rather that his character uses) if pressed to a conclusion would compel us to dispense with words altogether. But this server, in his appearance, in his movements, in his whole atmosphere, almost justified the words of the English cardinal. The odd thing was that the priest was the exact opposite of his server. It is often difficult to hear any of a Low Mass abroad except the Preparation, a *' Dominus vobis- cum " here and there, and '* Ite Missa est.'' But this priest spoke every word so distinctly, so slowly, that I wondered what would happen when he came to the Canon. Wliat happened was worth staying for. The whole of the Canon was said quite out loud — that is, I, who was kneeling a good three yards from the celebrant, could hear every word. It seemed extraordinarily suitable that here, over the most ancient building in Rome, over the spot where Peter had baptised his jailers, and possibly afterwards said Mass for them, a return, however unconscious, should have been made to the primitive and mediaeval custom of the Church, and that we should hear the great Canon spoken ore rotundo. Never before, and never since (though I have heard some other priests in portions of the Canon), had I heard the great roll of Roman martyrs: " Communicant es et memoriam venerantes . . . Lini, Cleti, dementis, Xysti, Comelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni, Joannis et Pauli, Cosmae et Damiani " ; then, after the action, that other bede-roll of holy names : " Cum tuis Sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus : cum Joanne^ 58 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandre, Mar- cellino, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, Caecilia, Anastasia." The names rang softly in the little church, each name carrying with it its own fragrance of suffering and self-sacrifice and love. How typical of the Roman genius is that page in the Missal ! It hedges in the supreme act of consecration, the utterance of the awful words by which the bread and wine become the Body and the Blood, hedges them in by those two little lists of names. Not presumptuously are the names of the local sufferers dragged in. No. The first list begins with the glorious name of the Mother of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ, and then, running through the Apostles, glides insensibly into that list of Bishops who ruled and saved and bled for the Church of Rome. And just as Peter is brought into the heavenly places under the cloak of Mother Mary, so those maidens who followed Christ to the Garden of the Vatican, or the games of the Amphitheatrum, ascend up the ladder of glory after the swift heels of him who outran Peter, and of him who first died for Jesus, and of the Son of Consolation, and of the man who had the tact and the righteousness to take the place of the traitor. Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, and Cecily — their broken bodies healed — unite in the sweet task of praising God with us for the Adorable Sacrament of the Altar. It is by this bold appropriation of sanctity, this childlike passion for being at home in heaven, that the Roman and Catholic Church keeps her hold on her children. No longer does she add names to the Canon of the Mass — I wish she and other churches did — but she does not forget the poor and humble any more than she did in the days of Cosmas and Damian. The two most democratic things in existence are the See of S. Peter and the Roll of the Canonized. A peasant and the son of a peasant is now in the Chair of the Fisher- man ; and all over the Catholic world altars and chapels are being built in honour of an illiterate shepherdess who ROME PAGAN 59 was condemned by the doctors and lawyers and burnt at the orders of a bishop. And it is this note of democracy, of repubhcanism, of a starthng and splendid equality before the throne of God that one aches for, after viewing the ruins of Imperial Rome. There at Mass in the little Church of the Guild of the Carpenters we worshipped Him who was known as the Carpenter's Son, and the huge, tumbled grandeur of the Palatine and the insolent self-aggrandizement of the Caesars were forgotten, forgotten while we heard the names of Lawrence and Damian, of Cecily and Agnes — the name of Caesar's slaves and victims, names repeated daily in countries where the fame of Imperial Rome is known only by that catalogue of Roman criminals. in Roman Sculpture There remained, before we could turn to Christian Rome, the great galleries of sculpture. In them, in the galleries of the Vatican, the Campidogho, the Conserva- tori, and, more than all, in the Terme, the modern pilgrim can have a pure and unalloyed pleasure, can indulge freely in sentiments of astonished admiration for the fierce competence, the unflinching literalism of the Roman spirit. I suppose no one, except a few of the French revivers of an ancient mode of art, ever believed that realism was a discovery of the nineteenth century. The naturalism — even Zola's naturalism — which was raised to a creed in that odd, distant period of which Mr George Moore is almost the only survivor, was not born in France. Even if we take naturalism in literature, Richardson and Fielding, Bunyan and Defoe wrote easily, untroubled by thoughts of a dehberate theory, and so achieving a realism 6o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE that still lives, pulsates with blood, and is quick with passion and sorrow. And before them there had been Catullus — and in sculpture, the man who wrought the ** Seated Boxer " in the Terme Museum. Modem criticism gives this work to a Greek, working in Rome ; if it be so, and not the work of some Roman of genius who had learned the Greek technique, it is a most astonishing instance of how the Roman spirit caught even the Greeks. Here is illustrated the exact opposite of the Roman poet's cry : ** Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes Intulit agresti Latio. ■' Nothing could be more removed from the Greek spirit than this vivid presentation of a momentary pose : the bruised cheeks, the battered temples, the absence of any attempt to render a type rather than portray an individual, stamps the work with the very note of Roman art. We can see the Roman patron, possibly stung by some such taunt as fell later from the Hps of Juvenal, turning with indifference from the Hellenistic statues that all his friends were buying, and demanding from his sculptor something " really Roman.'' " Why not do Dares there — ^look at him, look at that leg ; there's modelling for you ! Eh ? " And the supple Greek consented. And here we have immortally preserved the thing that Rome dehghted to honour. It is better, to my mind, than the Colosseum : it is sincerer — it has at any rate the quality of revealing personality, whereas the larger monuments of Rome seem to reveal only pride and vainglory and that vague distrust that was at the heart of the city. That distrust you may find exemplified by other statues : you find it, to my mind, most acutely in two. Praxiteles, who under the influence of Phryne did more than any other man to divert Athenian art from austerity, brought into it a lyrical cry that reaches us still through ROME PAGAN 6i the Roman copies of his most famous works. His art is the first to be troubled by a vague passion ; in him was lost that complete simplicity of statement, in him the flesh and the body cease to be ordinary natural things, and become vehicles for thought, for introspection, for delight and despair. It may be this was a judgment on him from Aphrodite. When he had completed the statue which Cos refused, and Cnidus accepted, the epigram- matist wrote : "'A K^TT^i? rdv J^vTrpiv evl K.vlS(p eLirev iSov(ra ^6u, €v, TTOv yvjuivrjv ciSe fjL€ Tlpa^iTeXf]^ ; " From that moment we may believe that the goddess of love disturbed the artist's soul ; and as an expression of that discontent he carved the "Hermaphroditus." How far the statue, now in the Terme Museum, follows the lines of Praxiteles is uncertain ; but here we have the shadowy fear of life, the occupation with an unreal beauty, the revolt against the splendour and sanity of nature revealed in its most amazing and terrible form. " Love made himself of flesh that perisheth A pleasure-house for all the loves his kin ; But on the one side sat a man like death. And on the other a woman sat Uke sin. So with veiled eyes and sobs between his breath Love turned himself and would not enter in." The "Seated Boxer" and the " Hermaphroditus ": still the trouble of Imperial Rome haunts us, and the secret of that trouble may be learnt from those two statues wrought for the delight, possibly, of the same man. It may be urged, however, that the ** Hermaphroditus " is, after all, the presentation in marble of an ancient legend; that Rome did not find, but borrowed, the legend, and so the statue must remain not quite typical of the Roman 62 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE spirit in its ambiguous weariness and distressful agony of flesh. '* World conquest and world -weariness, The beauty that strives not, but gains ; The pleasure amorous of pain's Half-poison'd blossom, the distress Of surfeited desire, the slow Perplexity of death in life, Lust, that takes cruelty to wife, And heartless longing, come and go On the curved, pouting lips that smile Not happily, not sadly, but As though indifference had shut The gates of heaven and hell, the while The poor, bewildered spirit flies From death to death, and seeks to still The broken clamour of the will Beneath the hard Egyptian skies." Come to the Vatican. Come, and pause in the galleries before the statue of Antinous. Here surely is the weari- ness, the tired desire, the aimless, fruitless lust of Imperial Rome. He stands there, the Bithynian slave in whose honour the Emperor built temples and founded a city ; he is the god of Roman Hellenism ; on his lips there is the melancholy born of frustrated hopes, born of dry and futile despair. His eyes are set looking down on the waters of the Nile where he found the rest denied him in the Emperor's palaces, a peace that he had not known in the sheltered indolence of his captivity. What was it that drove him into the cool embrace of the ancient Nile ? Did he, like Narcissus, become enamoured of his own reflection, at the broad, swelling bosom, the slim ankles, and the lean desirous limbs ? Or did he feel that this mystical Egyptian river held secrets as strange as his own, and more potent, and so, in a bewildered anger, fling him- self on that adventurous journey ? Or did he rather, on some starlit night, steal from his bed and stand gazing, ANTINOUS ROME PAGAN 63 gazing at the water scarcely stirred by the slow dip of the broad paddles ? And then, as he gazed, he remembered the years, not so long since, when he had bathed in his own Bosphorus and was clean and innocent ; and a great aching came over him, as he saw in the waters of the Nile the waters of his own river ; and deep down the memory of dead and half-forgotten companions called him, and the idle dreams of youth, and the cherished ambitions, and youth's passionate, ennobling love — and without a cry the creature of Hadrian slipped into the merciful water, the water that should slake the thirst of his shame and leceive the broken, beautiful body. Did he gain peace ? We question the statue in vain. Its eyes are heav}^ with the dreams of Egypt ; but they reveal nothing of the soul. There is nothing in the marble but a temperament and a body, strangely and terribly beautiful. It is not a Greek beauty. They are wrong who say there was anything of the Greek in Hadrian's ignoble passion for the boy that he bought : worlds lie between that Imperial insolence and the love which Plato glorified. Platonic love was of the soul, and touched the things of the spirit, even if it stooped to the things of the body ; this passion of Hadrian's was nothing but the curious, mordant affection of the body and the mind. And so that love — if we call it love, which slays love — and that beauty — if we may call that beauty which breeds weariness and satiety — must in time dispossess the heart of the knowledge of true love and true beauty. Natural things cannot linger with the cowardly, troubled affection of Antinous. His image has neither the splendour of Apollo nor the sublimity of Aphrodite ; it is a lost world that clings to his name, and a lost people that climbs to his shrine. He has nothing to offer — nothing but sudden death, and death in the great desert, death amid the horrible half-human, half-divine things that still haunt the low-lying plains of the Nile. Antinous is the sensuous counterpart 64 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE of those ambiguous deities that came, on a day, chattering from the streets of Cairo and the gates of HeHopoHs ; came, when the cry of " Pan is dead " had shaken the reeds of the Ihssus and stirred the grass by the Tiber, came at a run to the ancient, obscene desert, where death and the vulture reign, the desert that the immobile Sphinx guards and symbolizes. And when Antinous dropped into the Nile, the Sphinx claimed her true worshipper ; all the old gods, Pasht and Anubis and Apis had come to her ninety years ago, and now at last comes the latest of the deities, part woman, part brute, and part god, and loses himself in the great river, the river that bears through the wilder- ness all his secrets to the Sphinx his mistress. This is the god of Imperial Rome. In his honour — or rather with him as the excuse — and his own aesthetic egotism as the reason — Hadrian founded Antinopohs near the spot where his slave was drowned ; and all over the Empire sculptors were busy representing that petulantly melancholy mouth, the shadowy brows, and the unseeing eyes of the Bithynian ; to a world weary of complexity and civilization this was aU that its ruler could offer. Rome, I sometimes feel, created only this : the Roman character was the gift of Heaven, the old Republican character that we can all praise and criticize ; and when that character corrupted, when that temper was debauched and debased, we are given this to worship, this to adore. It is the last disastrous disease of a falling people ; no longer, as in that dim past, when the Kadeshim worshipped Astarte, and Atys was pursued by the lions of Cybele, do men, in their own persons, adore uncleanness and im- potence ; but in a more degraded humiliation of despair they pay divine homage to the symbol of another's sin, and offer incense to him whom the Emperor purchased and dishonoured. Of the purely Greek things in the Roman museums — ROME PAGAN 65 so beautiful a thing, for instance, as the fragment of the ** Throne of Aphrodite " — I am not going to speak. They tell us nothing of the secret of Rome. And of the more famous works, the " Laocoon," the three Venuses, the ''Apollo Belvedere," the " Apoxyomenos," the " Boy with the Thorn," " The Nile," with his sixteen putti, the " Dying Gaul," the Ludovisi " Juno," what need is there to write ? I would only warn others against the danger we all fall into of being slightly too indifferent about the more familiar things of art. It is a poor kind of originality that is unable to love what the many have loved, for no better reason than that the beauty is too well known. On the other hand, it is equally foolish to drag one's soul into loving merely because the crowd has loved. I did find the "Apollo Belvedere" disappointing : it is smooth, mannered, lacking in virility and force : and the " Laocoon " stirs rather to awe than to admiration. It is amazing : but ought it to have been done ? Few things in any art, however, have given me more pleasure than that figure of the Nile with his jolly (it is the only word), symbolic amorini. This placid, Zeus-like god with his reed-like hair, and his big, careless pose, is one of the most satisf5dng figures in the world. How good is the right hand with its bundle of bulrushes, how splendid the effortless attitude of the left shoulder, how admirable the artful, yet seemingly artless, disposition of the putti. After all, if this was admired in Rome, it does tell us something of Rome's secret : it tells us, as I have been forced to remind myself before, that there was always a remnant that did not bow to the Baal of the divine Princeps ; and the little company who ordered this work for the Temple of Isis were keeping alive the love of a true and pure art, were guarding the treasure that was to pass to the Delia Robbias and to Donatello. There is one other statue which I could never pass 66 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE without the profoundest emotions of pity and wonderment. In all the gallery of Roman emperors is there any more difficiilt to understand than Marcus Aurelius ? The busi- nesslike genius of Augustus, the wicked folly of Nero, the nervous, bruised idiocy of Caligula, the force of Vespasian or Nerva, the pedantic piety of Julian — ^how like Julian is to our own James I. ! — all these are intelligible. But what man can understand Marcus Aurelius ? His father is just human : but he ! We still read, many pretend to admire, the '' Meditations " ; but how totally is their spirit removed from anything that the most stoic of us can ever feel : " When you are offended at any man's shameless conduct, immediately ask yourself. Can it ever be that shameless men should cease to exist in the world ? It cannot. Ask not, then, what you can never have. The man who has offended you is one of those shameless men who must always, must always exist in the world. '' Argue in the same way when you meet a knave, or a fraud, or any man who does you wrong in any way. And then you will find that so soon as you remind yourself that these men must exist, you will be more kindly affectioned towards particular offenders." I do not wonder that Marcus Aurelius was disliked ; and I wonder less that he persecuted the Christians, and least of all that his son was a failure. How horrible, how truly damnable is this cold, impersonal method of treating sinners ! As I look up at the wonderful statue that stands at the top of Michael Angelo's steps, on Michael Angelo's pedestal, I feel a profound sorrow for the stoic emperor. That, then, was the best philosophy that ancient Rome could produce ; this calm, bloodless dealing with men as so many instances of a universal law. Worse than all prisons, worse than torture, would be this maddening insistence that some poor, foolish, guilty criminal was just a new specimen of a universal class ; this spirit, as much MARCUS AURELIUS ROME PAGAN 67 as the spirit of lust and cruelty, was anti-Christian, and had to be fought and conquered by the Church. For years, by an ironical twist of fate, the great statue of the Great Stoic was mistaken for one of Constantine, and so preserved for us to see Roman portraiture at its highest. And here it stands, between the Capitol Museum and the Palace of the Senators, and near the Church of Ara Coeli ; and I like to think that at Epiphanytide, when, after the solemn procession of the children of S. Francis, the priest holds aloft the Bambino that He may bless the city, the blessing of the Babe lingers a little while on the figure of the grey, disillusioned emperor who rides, rides for ever on the Capitol, at the heart of ancient Rome. CHAPTER IV ROME UNDERGROUND IDONT believe it," said Dominic. We were standing in the dining-room that once belonged to John and Paul, clients of Constantia, the daughter of Constantine the Great. The two men, now known to Romans as San Giovanni 6 San Paolo, were beheaded under the Emperor Julian, and buried in their own house,^ which now lies under the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, served by the Passionist fathers. One of the fathers, a dehghtful person, who spoke a little English with the quaintest Italian intonation, was showing us the treasures which the energy of Padre Germano has restored to us. Our guide had just told us, pointing to the frescoes : " They are pagan, before conversion." And Dominic whispered to me the retort I have already quoted. Well, it seems probable that some of the frescoes are of the second and third centuries — the authorities quarrel, as usual ; some say definitely that both the houses are fourth- century buildings. But leaving on one side the question of these frescoes, there is no doubt that in another room we have fourth-century frescoes of which some are ^ This, of course, was very exceptional. It is particularly mentioned in the Sacramentary of S. Leo, where the Preface for these Saints' day runs : "Of Thy merciful providence Thou hast vouchsafed not only to crown the circuit of the City with the glorious passions of the martyrs, but also to hide in the very heart of the City itself the triumphant bodies of Saint John and Saint Paul." 68 ROME UNDERGROUND 69 frankly " pagan '' while others represent Moses, and an Orante. What Dominic wished to protest against was the habit, almost universal in Rome, of ascribing to a purely pagan origin house decorations of a pagan character. It was evidently inconceivable to the Passionist father that John or Paul, after their conversion,^ would have had their ceiling decorated with Tritons and genii ; a line is drawn rigorously between Christian and pagan art. And this is done too by quite learned archaeologists, without, so far as I can discover, a shadow of evidence. Indeed what evidence we have all points the other way. It is certain that the early Christians, so far from objecting to pagan mythology wholesale, actually used it, at times, to illustrate Christianity. Even Brownlow and Northcote admit that Our Lord is represented in the guise of Orpheus ; there is reason to believe that He also figures as Hermes ; and we are not sure whether the frescoes that are said to have misled Raoul Rochette really came from a Gnostic cemetery. No one, of course, would argue that the Christian of early days was not extremely cautious as to how much of popular and pagan mythology could be safely admitted into Christian houses. A rigorous dismissal had to be made of all those frescoes which stood for lust and cruelty and pride and indifference and Fate. But the gentle gods of streams, and seas and trees; the beautiful figure of Orpheus who, in the process of years, had become semi- divine, and the office of Hermes all lend themselves, in a greater or less degree, to incorporation into Christianity. And there is another objection to the theory that the early Church made a clean sweep of all ** pagan " art, and bade the convert turn his back resolutely on the few gracious personages of his native mythology. If this ^ There is no evidence, by the way, that these saints were^not brought up as Christians. 70 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE theory were true, how can we explain the survival of such frescoes as those in the triclinium ? Even if they are second- century decorations, it would have been easy for John and Paul to obliterate them in the reign of Con- stantine. When we remember how the iconoclasts of later ages, of the eighth, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries treated an art of which it disapproved, we are surely justified in supposing that Puritans of the fourth century would have behaved very like Puritans of later times. It is true that individual persons, generally monks or hermits, did betray a great distrust of the use of art among Christians ; but this tendency to remove so enormous a part of life from the influence of the Church has always been an eccentric one, it has always failed before the bar of the universal Church. Nothing is more removed from the average character of the early Church than this Puritan ^ hatred of pictorial art. All the ^ An effort has been made recently to roll away the reproach of distrust and hatred for art from the Puritans. The ingenious author makes a fair show by dint of including such men as Dante among the Puritans. W^hat particular corner in the Inferno the author of the Divina Commedia would assign him for this blas- phemy we need not stop to inquire. But it is a little futile for anyone in England to proclaim that Puritanism has not opposed art while we can still look on the shattered and plundered skeletons of our cathedrals ; when we can still see in S. Bavon at Ghent the candlesticks that Cromwell stole from S. Paul's, and — did not crush and destroy — but sold to the Flemings ; when we remember that three or four of the best European picture galleries started with a nucleus from the dispersed treasures of Charles I. ; and above all when we recall the terms of the Act of Parliament that sanctioned the dispersal and ordered the burning of all pictures containing a representation of the Second Person of the Trinity or of the Virgin Mary : but the Commonwealth preferred hard cash to even indulgence in religious bigotry, and most of Charles' pictures, sacred and secular, were sold ; and the paltry ;^ii8,o8o, IDS. 2d. gained by the sale is the best answer to those who would profess that Puritanism fostered the arts. ROME UNDERGROUND 71 remains of primitive Christianity in Rome testify to a love for decorative art, and show how quickly and defin- itely the Church shook off the influence of Judaism in this matter. And if further evidence be needed that the early Chris- tians did not shrink from putting together what we now call '* secular " and " sacred " subjects it may be foimd in another room of the house, where the Good Shepherd stands between the sheep and the goats, and above them, in the vaulting, are the joyous, fanciful creatures of pagan folklore. In another room occurs a fresco, probably of the ninth century, representing the Crucifixion. As is usual in early crucifixes. Our Lord wears the royal robe ; His figure is resting on the cross — and there is no attempt at the realism which marks later representations of the Crucified. The fresco is not otherwise noteworthy, but its mention raises a question which puzzles most Catholics in Rome : How is it that the early Church, so far as we know, did not use the crucifix ? The earliest crucifix in Rome is probably that on the great door of Santa Sabina, which is said to have been carved in the fifth century. We look in vain in the Catacombs, in vain among the early sarcophagi for what has become to us the most natural memorial of the availing Passion. Christ in the arms of Mary, Christ as the Good Shepherd, Christ at Cana in Galilee, Christ and the Wise Men, are all found in third- or even second-century frescoes. The cross, in many forms, is also found, but in later inscriptions and pictures.^ There is a fairly general agreement among scholars as to one of the reasons why we do not get the crucifix in early art. Crucifixion was still a method of execution among the Romans, and the early Church shrank from a 1 If we accept the arguments of Mgr. Wilpert, the earhest cross is probably that on the grave of Bictoria in the Domitilla Cata- comb. 72 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE representation of Our Lord which might lead to blasphemy from the pagans among whom they Hved. There is, I think, another and deeper reason, and we can reach it by considering that not only is the Crucifixion absent from early art, but that we have no pictures which show Our Lord in agony or sorrow. All the early repre- sentations of Christ are joyful, sunny and light-hearted ; and the beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd, beardless and youthful, makes not the slightest attempt at reahsm. Why is this ? There are two reasons. Firstly, the early Church was so close to Calvary that she needed no reminder of the great Act of Atonement. The Blood of the Passion was no mere metaphor for the Christian of the first and second centuries ; Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, had sat at the feet of John, who had stood, with the Holy Mother, at the foot of the Cross and seen the piercing of the Sacred Heart. We can fancy those first followers of the Cross listening in a hushed and sacred silence to the story of Calvary told them by one who himself was so near to the Divine Wounds. And when they spoke of the Crucifixion, we may be sure that they did so with a reserve and a reverence that we might well imitate. Just as they signed themselves many times in the day with the sacred sign, so in their hearts they bore the Crucified. Then think of the lives of the early Roman Christians. They were joyful, aggressively joyful, to judge from the Acta Martymm ; but they lived in the midst of dangers, in daily expectation, in hourly defiance of the most hideous tortures. They had no need of any pictorial or sculptural recollection of the Passion of their Master : they had illustrations of the Passion recounted again and again in the deaths of their friends and their relatives. Every Christian was a crucifix. Every Christian walked under the visible shadow of Calvary, trod perpetually the vVay of Sorrows, was in immediate preparation for the vinegar ROME UNDERGROUND 73 and gall. So when they turn and try to represent some of the mysteries of their faith in painting they paint joyful things, symbols and incidents to remind them of their eternal home, the home not made with hands, and to recall to their hearts that they served a Master whose yoke was easy and whose burden was light. It was not until later ^ that the Church, now established and respectable and feared, no longer expectant of the imminent end of the world, no longer walking in tremulous happiness between the Garden of Gethsemane and the hill of Golgotha, needed to be reminded of the bitter agony that had gone to purchase her from the world. The martyr with his unflinching courage, his naif insolence, his indomitable hope, bad become '* canonized," smothered over by attributes of conventional sanctity. No longer did the Holy Father flee from house to tomb, from tomb to the Via Appia, and from the Domine Quo Vadis back to his sheep and to death ; and so, in her wisdom, the Church decides that from henceforth the crucifix is to be universal — and not the triumphant crucifix, which represents a king on the cross, and crowns Him with roses rather than with thorns — not the symbolic crucifix, with the Lamb, as it had been slain, against the Wood of the Tree — but the Man of Sorrows nailed on the Rood of Time, the Rejected of Israel murdered by the hands of the Jews, Jesus of Nazareth hanging on the Roman gallows. A wise man will not lament this inevitable transition. There is room in Christian art for the Good Shepherd, the Christ in Glory, and the Christ on the cross, just as there is room in Christian theology for the Incarnation, the Ascension and the Atonement ; one age or one tempera- ment may lay greater stress on one aspect of Christian truth : but what matters is that we should not blame those whose theological training or devotion leads them ^ A.D. 692. 74 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE to emphasize different truths from those which we our- selves particularly value. In the church above the house of SS. Giovanni e Paolo I received one of the best lessons I have ever had against hasty criticism. After our guide had showed us the houses, he came back into the church with us, and then said : " You would like to see San Paolo ? Ye-e-es ? " I am not over-critical of rehcs, but I was surprised at this offer to show the body of a fourth- century martyr. I knew the bodies of both San Giovanni and San Paolo had been removed from the house to the church ; but I had not heard that the relics were shown. We consented naturally, and were led to a gorgeous side chapel. The father left us kneeling at the foot-pace and went up to the altar. A sort of screen was rolled aside from the front of the altar, and there, behind glass, lay the figure of a man who did not look as though he had been dead much more than a day or two. I gasped, and looked at Dominic ; then we thanked our guide, and went out. " Well, Dominic, they really ought to prevent that good man showing that body as San Paolo's : it's absurd. Why, there's nothing left of San Francesca but her skeleton — and a man who was executed under Julian ! Really, I never expected to have Protestantism so roused in me." " Are you sure it was San Paolo ? " ** He said it was. You heard him. I don't know how they know it isn't San Giovanni. Besides, he said ' Padrone ' ; I'm sure he did. Oh, he meant it for San Paolo." " Yes — but mayn't there be another San Paolo ? I mean " ROME UNDERGROUND 75 " My dear Dominic, we have only just disentangled this Paolo from the apostle. It's not likely there would be a third of the name : at least, he wouldn't have the same church." " Well — but aren't they Passionists at that church ? " *' Yes — what's that got to do with it ? " " Oh ! I expect you know ; but I thought perhaps that the Passionists had a founder or something — mightn't you call a founder ' Padrone ' ? And wasn't he — mightn't he — have been called * Paul.' " My jaw dropped. Of course Dominic was right ; he always is when he ends an argument by saying, " I expect you know." The body we were shown was that of S. Paolo della Croce, who died in 1775 and was canonized in 1867. " Do you know," I said, " I feel I ought to go and apologize to that good father." " Oh ! I don't think you need do that ; after all, you didn't behave hke a sceptic." The house of San Giovanni e San Paolo is underground, because of that alteration of the levels which is so marked a feature of Rome. That other imderground Rome, so enormously impressive in its range, has of course been underground from the days when the Christians and the Jews dug out in the tufa burying-places for their dead. I love the way in which cities are guarded by the departed. Even our modem cities, even London, are shielded by a ring of cemeteries, cemeteries that we pass through whenever we go out of London : but nowhere is the guardianship of the dead so much in evidence as in Rome. The very number of the buried astonishes one. Whether or no the calculation that gives the Catacombs over three milHon graves be right or not, there is no doubt that the mind and imagination are stunned by the sight of those quiet, regular receptacles. It is true that to-day 76 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE but few of the bodies are left where they were. The Chris- tians of a later age, in their passion for relics, stormed the Catacombs and filled the churches. That was a great day when the dead, despised Christians, those whom the world had rejected, came back to take possession of the most holy places of the imperial city. There was a day — some authorities say under Boniface IV., others under Gre- gory IV. — when there came in solemn procession from the walls of the city thirty-eight waggons. They were escorted with lights and incense, with the magnificence that Christian love has always paid to the bodies of loved ones ; singing the Litany the clerics preceded the waggons, and halted at last in front of the great temple that was called All-Holy. And then the contents of the waggons — bones of the Christians buried in the Catacombs — were cere- monially taken into the Pantheon, and the Pope solemnly rededicated the building to the worship of God, and called it S. Mary of the Martyrs. So the dead took possession of the Pantheon. And the same thing happened in a lesser scale in many other churches ; it was felt that those who had gone before must share in the life of the present, and that those who were still in the body could not afford to lose the shadow of the sanctity of the departed. And we must remember that this feeling was very real and sincere. No one can read the inscriptions in the Catacombs without feeling that these men did really beUeve their Lord's saying : " He that believeth on Me shall never die." Their dead are all sleeping ; they ask their dead to speak to Jesus about them, left behind, sorrowful in their joy, joyful in their sorrow. The whole place, the whole religion is redolent of that family feeling which, as we have seen, marks the Liturgy, and which was the keynote of that Christian community. Learned men — Catholics and Protestants — ^go down now and read over the pathetic, sublime little notices, and argue THE PANTHEON ROME UNDERGROUND 77 gravely about " Prayers for the Departed — are they legitimate ? " ** Invocation — is any instance of it found in the Catacombs ? " Good God ! there were no dead to these men ; the tombs are full of that sweet chatter which man must indulge in when he parts from what he loves. Chatter meaningless and full of meaning, talk for the sake of talk and for the relief of one's soul; words that seem to express little and yet bear the burden of life and death in their syllables. Invocation ! The broken accents of a weeping mother saying, ** Do talk to Jesus about me ; ask him to comfort me. I shall be so lonely without you " — that's all, and surely no one can but feel the beauty and the sorrow and the deep truth of it. '* Yes ; but, after all, the question remains " said Dominic. " Oh ! I know it does ; and you know the answer to it. What we want to discover is that first flush of Christian love, that first glory of Christian hope, that first splendour of faith. When we pray for the dead as for the living, when we go to Mary as we go to our mother, and are at home in the Holy Family, then we shall understand that no one can help taking into his confidence those who are God's saints, that one must try and keep in one's heart the names of those who are dear to the heart of Jesus." " You mean you're a pragmatist ? " *' Perhaps I do ; but I know you agree with me that the only way really to test the use of * Invocation ' is to try it ; and as for prayers for the dead — did any Christian not yet pray for his beloved as he knelt by the clay that the spirit had just left ? And what we do by the deathbed is what we should do always." It is often difficult to decide what is cause and what is effect, and I would not be positive as to whether the neglect of the Catacombs caused the neglect of religion in Rome, or whether the indifference to religion made men forget the great sepulchres of their brethren; but the 78 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE fact remains that between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries the Catacombs were neglected. And then, in the dawn of the Renascence, Rome turned again to the great caverns of the dead that guard her fame. In an excellent little guide-book to Italy, anonymous and undated, but written some time during the reign of Cardinal Ferdinando de Medicis, Duke of Florence from 1587 to 1609, is one of the earliest English references that I know to the Catacombs. " S. Sebastian's," says the author, " stands on the wayside without Rome, called Appia ; . . . and hard by a Place called Catatunibae is a Well wherein did lie secretly hid the Bodies of S. Peter and Paul, as they say, two hundred and fifty years before any Body could know what was become of them ; on the same is built an Altar with especial privileges, at which Intercession is made for the afflicted Souls that, as j^et, are detained in Purgatory. " Then desire a priest to go with you that hath a Torch lighted, lest you lose yourselves in the Grotto or Vault, under which Hes buried Calixtus with one hundred eighty-six thousands Martyrs." The author of the guide goes no further ; but a much fuller account was written by another Enghshman, an enemy of the Catholic Church. Anthony Munday, an indifferent Elizabethan playwright, pubhshed in 1590 a pamphlet called '* The English Romayne Life." It was an account of the Hves of the students (Munday had been one of them) at the English College, and he narrates by the way various details of what he has seen, saying in his own brisk style : '* And now, seeing I am among the Pope's Pageants, I will blaze a little more of his holy Hell." And he gives a very good account and, barring his prejudices, which are bitter and unscrupulous, an accurate one of how the Cata- combs were visited in 158 1. ROME UNDERGROUND 79 It was on 31st May 1578 that some workmen were digging pozzolana from a vineyard near the Via Salaria. They suddenly shpped into an ancient cemetery, where they found painting and sarcophagi. Thus were the Catacombs rediscovered. Rome and the churches all over Europe were still staggering under the blows given by Luther, by Calvin, by Cranmer, and most of all by the faithlessness and wanton indifference of those who were the guardians of the Church of God. Ignatius, surnamed Loyola, who, with S. Teresa, did most for the Catholic revival, had been dead twenty-two years ; and now new allies were brought in to quicken devotion and inspire faith. We can only lament that the arrival of this reinforcement did not ensure methods of peace : but by now the spirit of schism had spread like a plague through Christian Europe. Men were more eager for victory than for truth ; fought more vigorously for party than for the Church ; were appetent of all that was novel, and con- temptuous of all that was old. The day of compromise was over. Erasmus was dead, More was dead, and not all the zeal of S. Ignatius, not all the love of S. Philip, could achieve what might have been won by the sweet sanity of the Catholic humanists. Still zeal and love were kindled anew at the Catacombs. It was there that those brave Jesuit missionaries, saints like Campion, caught the courage that was afterwards tested at Tyburn ; it was there that Southwell learnt how to sing of the love of God, and how to die for the faith ; and it was there that Anthony Munday, sedulous spy on his fellow-countrymen — well, here is what Munday wrote about the Vautes which, in all good faith, the priests and scholars of the English College showed him : " Among a number of theyr Inventions to uphold and maintaine their wicked Dealinges, they have certaine Vautes underneath the Ground, wherein they say howe, in the Time that the persecuting Emperors lived in Rome, 8o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the Christians were glad to hide themselves, and there they lived many yeeres, having no Foode nor Nourishment to maintaine them, but onlie that they were fed by Angels. ... At a church there called Saint Pancratia ^ there is a Vaute, wherein I have gone with the Jesuites of the English Colledge and the Students ; and there they have shewed me in divers Places, made on either Side in the Vaute as we go, that there lay such a Saint, and there lay such an other ; then they were buried, and none was there but they were all Saints. Then (having every one of us a waxe Light in our Hands, because it is impossible to see any Light in the Vaute and for those Lights the Fryers, that keepe the Church, must have Money, which we put into a Basen that standeth at the Going downe into the Vaute) they looke on the Grounde under theyr Feete as they goe ; and, if they chaunce to find a Bone (as some sure are thrown in of Purpose to deceive the People) whether it be of a Dog, a Hog, or Sheepe, or any Beast, they can presently tell what Saint's Bone it was, either Saint Fraunces, Saint Anthonie, Sainte Blaise, or some other saint that pleaseth them to name : Then must no Bodie touch it without he be a Priest, or it must be brought home for an especiall Relique ; and thus (saving your Reverence) encreaseth the Genelogie of the holy Reliques in Rome. . . . Without Rome, about the Distaunce of half a Mile from the Cittie, there is a huge great Vaute, which they call S. Priscillaes Grote ; and within this Vaute there is a great many of severall Places, turning one this way, another that way, as, in one street, there may be divers Streetes and Lanes turning every way ; so that, when they goe into this Vaute, they tye the End of a Line at the Going in, and so goe on by the Line, else they might chaunce to loose themselves, and so misse of their Coming out again : or else, if they have not a Line, they take Chalk with them, and make Figures at every Turning, that, at their Commin again (being guided by Torch Light, ^ Evidently San Pancrazio is meant. ROME UNDERGROUND 8i for Candles will go out with the Dampe in the Vaute) they make Accompt, tyll they get foorth ; but this is not so ready a Way, as by the Line. . . . One of the Priestes, two of the Schollers and I toke with us a Line, and two or three great Lightes, and so went to this aforesayde Vaute : We going along, in farther and farther, there we sawe certaine Places, one above another, three and three on either side, during a great Way in Length ; and these Places, they sayde, to be some of them Graves of persecuted Saintes and Martirs, when they hid themselves in the Time of the cruell Emperors of Rome, and there they died. *' Proceeding on forwarde, wee came to an olde Thinge like an Aultar, whereon in olde and auncient Painting,^ which was then almost clean wome out, was Christ upon the Crosse, and our Lady, and S. John by him ; there the Priest sayde, S. Peter, S. Paule, and many other Saintes had sayde Masses to the Christians that hid them- selves there." ^ Dominic and I chose to go to the Catacombs of Domi- tilla rather than to those of Callixtus, mainly on account of the freshness of the frescoes in the former cemetery, and partly because we both felt that it was a journey — this visit to the old home of the dead — to be done as quietly as possible. As it happened we had the Catacombs to ourselves, and the guide was one of those excellent men who left one to one's owai reflections, while h'^ was careful ^ If this was a fresco of the same date as most of the decorations in the Catacombs of S. Priscilla, it would be easily the oldest Rood in the world. But I can trace no other reference to the " painting " in ancient or modern literature on the Catacombs; If it was really a representation of the Crucifixion, it was probably a fresco added in the sixth or eighth century. « '* The Enghsh Romayne Life ; etc. Written by A. M. Some- time the Pope's Scholar in the Seminarie among them. Imprinted at London by John Charlewoode, for Nicholas Ling, dwelling in Paules Church-yarde, Anno 1590." F 82 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE to show us everything, and to explain all that needed explaining. No one who has undergone the experience of walking along those apparently interminable corridors, with their serried rows of graves, with the little bottles for wine, and the lamps for oil, can ever forget it. It gives one a proper sense of the position of the living, this great city of the departed. We talk and quarrel over rights and duties : these, too, have their rights, this great silent proletariat, so far outweighing us in numbers and wisdom and influence. The cemetery seemed to me to be instinct with life. We stood and gazed at that fresco where Petronilla the Martyr welcomes Veneranda to paradise ; we felt that the man who drew it knew that these two were occupied with the real business of hfe. And then you can find here two of the most poignantly attractive pictures of the Good Shepherd — one sheep clasped over His shoulders, the other round His feet ; and here too some artist of the third century painted Mary and the Child Jesus, and on either side two men, bearing gifts — the Magi— so they say, with their symbolic offerings. The only thing that speaks of death is the bas-relief on a column, that shows the martyr- dom of S. Nereus and S. Achilleas. Yet here there is no thought of realism : over the heads of the martyrs the sculptor has put the laurel crowns of victory. And amid the scenes of Christian life we find one of the earliest renderings of a legend that Christianity could not lose. The burial-place of the Flavian family — to which S. Petronilla probably belonged — consists of a corridor and two small rooms. In the corridor are frescoes of Noah and Daniel; but one of the rooms is given up to pictures, pretty, childlike pictures of Psyche and Eros. Psyche, in her green frock, and with butterfly wings, is picking flowers ; Eros pours fruit into a basket. So the soul of man wanders, gaily, after the flowers ; and the Divine Lover brings to her what he alone has, the real ROME UNDERGROUND 83 fruit of Faith, grapes from the Living Vine, the golden apples of the Hesperides of God. The seven great churches of Rome to which in particular pilgrimage has always been made are : S. Pietro in Vaticano, S. Paolo fuori Muri, S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Lorenzo, S. Sebastiano, S. Croce in Gerusalemme, and S. Maria Maggiore. Of these S. Sebastiano has the most intimate connexion with the early history of Christian Rome. Not only is it the memorial of the martyr, that Christian soldier who has in later times become a kind of Apollo ; but it was for a time the resting-place of the bodies of the Holy Apostles, Peter and Paul. During the persecution of Valerian, in 257, the bodies of the two great patrons of Rome were taken from their tombs on the Via Cornelia and the Via Ostiensis and hidden in a crypt off the Via Appia. When Sebastian, after recovering from the torture of the arrows, was stoned to death by the order of Diocletian, his relatives and friends took his body and buried it, as he had desired, " ad cata- cumbas : apud vestigia apostolorum." In later years the crypt near the church, built by Constantine, over the m.artyr's body, became known as the Coemeterium ad Catacumbas. To it devout people went, partly, no doubt, because it is easy of access ; partly for the memory of the Apostles ; and partly for the sake of the other great saints who were buried there. The place became known collo- quially as " The Catacomb" ; and this name extended itself to the other subterranean cemeteries which surround Rome. To-day one can go down and see the place where the bodies lay, according to an itinerary of 625, for forty years. The place where the Apostles' bodies were brought is at the back of the High Altar. It is a curiously shaped room, half underground ; and under the altar is the chamber, lined with marble, where the bodies were hidden ; there 84 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE are also paintings here which Lanciani ascribes to the time of Damasus, who was Pope from 366 to 384. Other archae- ologists say that the chamber is the tomb of Quirinus, Bishop of Siscia (Sissek, in Croatia) , who was martyred in 304. Whatever be the truth about this, it was here that Damasus caused an inscription to be put up, recording the fact that the bodies of the Apostles had lain here : ** Hie habitasse prius Sanctos cognoscere debes, Nomina quisque Petri pariter Paulique requiris. Discipulos Oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur, Sangiiinis ob meritum Christumque per astra secuti, Aetherios petiere sinus et regna piorum. Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives, Haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes." ' A rather sceptical friend, an archaeologist, had asked where we were going on the day that we set out for S. Sebastiano. When we told him " Ah ! " he said, " don't forget to go to the Platonia : there at any rate it is certain — as certain as anything can be — the bodies of S. Peter and S. Paul did lie." His scepticism about most of the relics and memories of Christian Rome had somewhat annoyed us ; he seemed at times to be kin to that Bollandist of whom it is said : " Pere has destroyed more saints than the Holy Father ever made " ; but one should not, I suppose, do anything to lessen the healthy critical atmosphere of the * The odd reference to the East is probably a discreet reminder that, after the death of the Apostle, certain Christians attempted to carry back their rehcs to the home of their birth. It was during this attempt that the bodies were first placed here ; they were then buried in tombs near the actual place of martyrdom. Then they were again brought to the Platonia in 275 (or 258, according to Mgr. Barnes) ; and then were restored to their respective basihcas under Pope Marcellus about 307. A great deal of suggestive writing, perhaps shghtly too confident in tone, on this question will be found in Mgr. Barnes*' ** St Peter in Rome, and his tomb on the Vatican Hill." ROME UNDERGROUND 85 Roman archaeological schools. Nothing was more sur- prising to me than to find that scholars of all creeds, or none, were busily engaged in confirming many of the most cherished legends of the Church. A ruthless and even extravagantly destructive criticism is, almost with reluc- tance, compelled to acknowledge the essential truthfulness of most of the early stories of the Roman martyrs. And so touched is one by the spirit of the age that this discovery made me happier in paying my visit to the altar in the crypt of S. Peter's, which is as close as one can get to the tomb, sealed with the great gold cross of Constantine, that contains the relics of the Prince of the Apostles. Dominic and I were rather upset when we heard that it was not altogether easy to visit the Sagre Grotte. We had set our hearts on going to see the splendid ruins of old S. Peter's, the tombs of the Popes — above all the place below the Confessio in the great Basilica. And go we did ; but by a kind of accident. A Roman priest — I must not put his name here, but I have mentioned him before apropos of Modernism — of whom we were seeing a good deal, and who was always most kind to us, said he would see what he could do. He met us one morning in the cathedral, and hurried us into the sacristy ; there we were introduced to a friend of his, a canon of the cathedral, who was, he said, only too charmed to have the opportunity of showing us the crypt. " Could we go now ? " queried Dominic. " Well — now — no, it is too late " — with a delightful smile ; *' but on Thursday, yes ? At ten- thirty ? " So, having made our engagement, we thanked him, and our friend, who beamed during the conversation, and went our way. On Thursday we arrived, and went to the pillar where is the little-noticed entrance to the Sagre Grotte Vaticane. We were a little early. 86 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE So we waited patiently : ten-thirty, no canon ; ten- forty, no canon. It began to look serious. " Let us go to the sacristy," said Dominic. So there we went, and found it, as before, very full of very busy people, who didn't seem to mind in the least what happened to us. Priests were vesting and unvesting ; servers running about — but never a sign of the canon we wanted. We came back into the church, and wandered back again to the statue of S. Veronica. When we got there we found two ladies waiting. " Excuse me, but are you going to the crypt ? " " We are — our guide has just gone — but will be back in a moment." '* Is he Canon ? " "No; I'm afraid " At this point their guide appeared. He was not our canon, and, with scarcely a glance at us, gathered up his flock of two, and went to the door. But this was more than we could bear. Politely, but urgently and firmly, I attacked him. Couldn't he let us go with him ? Somehow our friend. Canon , had missed us. Or we had mistaken the day. He was sorry ; but it was impossible, unless we had an order. We had an order ? " No." Then he mustn't risk it. ** Oh ! but you understand, we were going to go to-day." And then I named my other friend, who had introduced us to the canon. He wavered — ^but then shrugged his shoulders and pro- ceeded to the door again. We were desperate. I suddenly remembered that our friend Padre Benedict had been secretary to one of the most important of the cardinals. I named the cardinal. I don't know what I said about him ; but it was sufficient. With a smile and a beckoning hand the guide bade us come after him, and we went down to the level of the old church. ROME UNDERGROUND 87 The authorities have had the sense and the good taste to light the crypt with electricity ; so the art treasures there are no longer stained and blackened with the smoke of many tapers. We went round slowly, listening to the canon (for this guide was a canon as well, we discovered). It was difficult not to linger over the exquisite fragments by Mino da Fiesole and Donatello, the sculptors who are the spring and summer of Italian sculpture. There is a wonderful angel by Mino, with a charm and gracefulness that makes the marble tremble with beauty. Then there are the entrancing reliefs from the tomb of Paul II. Then we went past tomb after tomb of the Popes ; one especially we noticed, that of Adrian IV., a great granite sepulchre, severe and cold. The canon talked a good deal about most of the tombs, until he came to one at the end of a transept. " Whose is that ? " I asked. He glanced. " That — Alexander VI. — Borgia." From his tone the speaker might have been an Orsini. Then quite suddenly, or so it seemed, the electric lights glowed, not on dim, cold tombs, nor on the half -seen out- lines of ancient sculpture, but on a gorgeous chapel of gold and jewels. We were at the altar where priests, who are privileged to do so, may say Mass " over the body of S. Peter." We were just under the Confessio ; and between the High Altar and the Altar of the Crypt, if we accept Mgr. Barnes' arguments, is the body of S. Peter. It was impossible for me, as I knelt there, not to go back in thought to the moment in the life of Jesus when Peter burst out into his confession, " Thou art the Christ." If the great Basilica and the High Altar therein commemorate the promise of Our Lord to S. Peter, that he is the Rock of the Church, the quieter, less frequented space beneath the Confessio is the eternal shrine of Peter's assured declaration. Up above we come humbly to the Prince 88 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE of the Apostles ; down here we can approach the Fisher- man, trusting in the common love for the common Master, remembering his vision of the great sheet, and confident of our reception. Up above S. Peter is holding his public receptions ; down here he still gives his private audiences, and his message for us is the same as was his message for the people of Jerusalem : " Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." . . . " The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall caU." CHAPTER V ROME AT CHURCH " A/'OU must not spit," " Spitting is forbidden," and X " You are requested not to spit " — notices such as these, to be found now in most of the Roman churches, remind the pilgrim that he has come to a strange country. We talked the matter over with Dom Benedict : he was apologetic, in both senses of the word. " Yes — it is nasty : but it is of a necessity, is it not ? All thees is a matter of 'abit — national 'abit. In England — well, do you not blow your nose at Mass in England ? Even if you are saying Mass " — this with a startling directness to Dominic, who was forced to admit that the handkerchief was used. He wanted to go on arguing that the use of the handkerchief made all the difference — but Dom Benedict was too quick for him. " We have sand — and it is swep' out ; and we have the notices, and people do not do it so much. No. And we who are priests hardly ever now — I would never spit in church." There is, I suppose, something in his standpoint ; but prejudice was too strong for me — not that my senses were often offended. The notices have had a great effect, and one was only troubled seriously in great miscellaneous crowds in poor churches, or by some of the scholars of the great colleges, of whom the worst were, not the Romans, but the Germans. Apart from that one question, we never felt otherwise than at home in the churches and at the services in Rome 89 90 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE — except, of course, at the Uniate Epiphany Masses ; those, however, must wait their turn ; my present purpose is to give some idea how the Roman Liturgy is performed in the city of its birth. Our experience was that in Rome you can find almost every type of service, every degree of reverence, and every variety of music. The best ? — well, the best to my mind is the High Mass at the great Benedictine Church of San Anselmo. When one English friend, hearing that we only had three Sundays in Rome, urged us to spend at least one Sunday morning at San Anselmo, we were a little doubtful. The church is modern, we thought, and has not half the interest of other Roman churches ; and when in Rome we dis- covered that the High Mass was at nine o'clock, and that the church was on the Aventine, nearly half-an-hour from our hotel in the Via Tritone, we were even more doubtful. We mentioned our doubts to a friend whose acquaint- ance we made in Rome, who happened to be one of the greatest living authorities on plain-song. Our doubts were soon scattered. ** Not go to San Anselmo ! Of course you must go. It is the only church in Rome where anyone who loves music can worship without being sick. Good as Solesmes ? Better — that's the advantage of plain-song, when you've once got a large body of men to sing it, they go on improv- ing. Early ? Mass is at the canonical hour — and a good job. They don't want tourists. Of course, if you've only come over to sight-see, and don't care about hearing a decently sung Mass — don't go ! " And with a shrug, he turned, and left us decided. The Church of San Anselmo, whose monastery is now the chief house of the great Benedictine Order, stands on the Aventine in one of the most charming situations in Rome. The churches — upper and lower— will compare for dignity of effect and severity of motive with any ROME AT CHURCH 91 modern church in Europe ; and the fact that their archi- tect was the Lord Abbot Hildebrand de Hemptinne, Primate of the Benedictine Order, shows how the most ancient order of rehgious conserves its reputation for soundness in art and workmanship. The upper church, in which we heard Mass, is perfectly plain, contains only two altars, one picture over the Lady Altar, and one image over the High Altar. One felt curiously at home in the church ; the whole impression was non-Italian. When we arrived the monks had not yet come, but they arrived in a minute or two, about three hundred of them, and sat in open stalls with their hoods over their heads waiting for Terce to begin. What is there about plain-song that charms even the unlearned in music ? I have no knowledge of and little taste for a great deal of modern music. To hear a Credo sung by a magnificent choir, and with orchestral accom- paniments, with all the artificiality of repetitions and false emphases and solos and emotional passages of singular fioridity, is for me a trial that experience makes little easier. Even a Mass of Mozart's, with its quaint sugges- tions of a dance, some old-fashioned, sedate, decorous dance, yet, for all its formality, full of a certain restrained passion, is for me too individual, too personal a music. And Palestrina ? — well. Palest rina is the one composer who not only respected and understood plain-song, but, in his efforts to surpass it, knew on what lines alone success might have been achieved : that he did not achieve success is only to say that success is not possible. Plain-song, for all sacred things, is incomparable : and for a very simple reason. Plain-song has grown up alongside the rites and the ceremonies of Holy Church : it is the living expression, in music, of that which is expressed also in the language of the Divine Office and the Missal, and 92 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE in the ceremonies that have gradually become attached to the rites. Plain-song is not separable from the glorious actions of praise, prayer and devotion which it accom- panies ; plain-song is not so much subordinated to the words and ceremonies, as indistinguishably interwoven with them. For a man who has once heard plain-song properly sung it haunts for ever after the rites with which he first heard it associated. It is the soul of music — music in religion. That last is why plain-song so frequently fails when introduced into village choirs ; it is just as easy to sing plain-song as it is to pray properly — and no Christian who has tried will fail to acknowledge that prayer is the hardest of Christian duties. And if prayer be hard, the regular recitation of the Divine Ofhce, the perpetual repeti- tions of the Mass, with its suitable music, is almost impos- sible save for those who have devoted their whole lives to that divine energy which creates and directs so much of the world's happiness. The home of plain-song is the convent — and of all convents that of San Anselmo shows it at its best. With the first words of the Gloria in Excelsis we knew that we had nothing less than the voice of the Soul of the Church praising the Eternal Trinity. Like some quiet, immense, unescapable ocean the music flooded through the church, throbbing with the ebb and flow, secure, majestic, divine. And all through that Mass I had the feeling, which one has so rarely in church, that we were not only assisting at a divine mystery, not only at a human expression of love, but that we were the guardians, the sharers, the creatures of some enormous natural process, some potent and availing act, of which the Mass was the symbol. One's mind and heart were carried back not only to the upper room at Jerusalem, when the Lord Jesus and his Apostles sang the Hallel, not only to the Mount of the Crucifixion, to the broken Tomb, and the Hill of the Ascension, not only to the Heavenly Session and the Eternal Presentation of the Sacrifice and the Spilt Blood ROME AT CHURCH 93 — but back, far back, into the counsels of God, into the very mind and being of the Creator, the Saviour, the Inspirer, carried back until one was dizzy with a faint revelation of what the Sacraments signified, and knew with a certain and blinding knowledge that all Acts of Love were sacramental, and that the Mass, which was the summary of all, was also the pattern of all. Then, as the music of the Agnus died away in the roof, I repeated " Agnus Dei, qui toUis peccata mundi " — mundi, not terrae, koctjulov not yrjg : it is that which divides Chris- tianity from all else, that vivid truth that God died for the sins of the whole universe, that if this planet was the scene of His human life, all the whole cosmic scheme comes within reach of the Outpoured Blood, and the wonders of the Unflagging Love, that at the centre of the world beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church of San Andrea della Valle is not beautiful. It was built in 1591 on the site of at least two earlier churches, and has always been in the hands of the Theatines, an order which shares with the Company of Jesus an unenviable reputation for florid art and bastard ornament. Of details of interest the church possesses a few : there is the tomb of JEnesiS Sylvius Piccolomini, immortalized elsewhere by Pinturicchio, and in the dome are frescoes by Domenichino, which are keenly representa- tive of that rhetorical and vigorous painter. In this church, however, occurs every year one of the most remark- able ceremonies in Rome. Those who know anything of the ways of the Western Church are aware that although she has not encouraged the perpetuation of local habits, local liturgies and local ceremonies in the West, she has, on the other hand, been very lenient towards those Easterns who have submitted themselves to the authority of the Holy See. Their language, their ceremonies, their wives are all left to the Uniate Roman of every kind : 94 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE indeed the late Pope Leo Xlll. was extremely severe on the tendency to Romanism which some of these small bodies have shown at different times. I have been told, for instance, that the Armenians and the Ruthenians both attempted to substitute the Roman Canon for that of their own rite, and were only stopped from this vandalism by papal authority. The Holy See in its efforts to preserve distinctions of rites goes very far — and in Antioch you have the curious and extremely un-Catholic spectacle of five archbishops all in communion with the See of Rome ; and while the Greeks, the Armenians, the Sjnians, the Maronites, the Syro-Melchites, the Chaldeans, and the Ruthenians are all in communion with the Holy See, no Latin may make his communion at any Uniate altar, and no Uniate may communicate at a Latin Mass. Every year, however, there is now given ample oppor- tunity for Western Churchmen to see the rites of the East, for during the Octave of the Epiphany there is sung in S. Andrea High Mass after the various rites which I have named. This function was inaugurated in 1830 by Vmcenzo Pallotti, now Venerable, and has been continued ever since. If only because it gives one an opportunity of seeing a Greek Mass without the intervening iconostasis, the services at S. Andrea would be worth attending ; but apart from that, the strangeness of the language, the scarcely hidden savagery of some of the ceremonies, redolent of the desert and the older East, and the charm of the singing, all combine to make the Solenne Ottavario deir Epiphania del Signore at S. Andrea an experience that no visitor to Rome should miss. On the Eve of the Epiphany Dominic and I went to the Church of S. Athanasius of the Greeks. This is arranged exactly like an orthodox church, with a solid screen, icons, and absence of images. Vespers were pontifical ; the bishop, Mgr. Lazzaro Meladinoff, was vested in the ample, heavy garments of the East, and crowned with the Eastern ROME AT CHURCH 95 crown. The service was very long — and at times the numerous lections even rather tedious ; but the wonderful singing of the youths of the Greek school was a thing never to be forgotten. At the end of Vespers the bishop solemnly blessed the font, singing the Plain Chant in an old, uncertain, rather husky voice, and waving candles in a measured, quaint manner that made us feel we had passed out of the Christian times into some semi- Jewish age. Then he returned to his throne, and stood there, holding in one hand an image of the Bambino, in the other a brush of short twigs. All the congregation — except a few sight- seers — went up to kiss the Bambino, and the Episcopal ring, and to receive on the forehead the blessing of the Holy Water. The Greeks have always at Epiphany commemorated the Baptism of Our Lord as well as the showing to the Gentiles, and this final ceremony of bene- diction is symbolic of the Baptism of the Saviour that all Christians must share. I cannot describe in detail the wonderful series of services at S. Andrea. Altogether there were eight Uniate solemn services. On Monday — Epiphany Day — there was Pontifical Mass of the Syrian Maronites ; on Tuesday, High Mass of the Greek rite ; on Wednesday, High Mass of the Chaldeans ; on Thursday, Pontifical Mass of the Syrians ; on Friday, High Mass of the Greek Ruthen- ians ; on Saturday, High Mass of the Greek Melchites ; on Sunday, Pontifical Mass of the Armenians ; and on Monday Pontifical Mass of the Greeks, at which the bishop, Mgr. Lazzaro Meladinoff , celebrated. Dominic and I went to all of the services, except on Tuesday and Saturday, but, as I say, to describe all of them would be tedious save for liturgical experts, for whom this book is not written. Of all the Masses the most dignified — it was curiously English in form and feeling — was the Armenian ; the most affecting was the Greek ; and 96 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the strangest, and to me the most wonderful, was the Syrian. It was not only the strangeness of the vestments, the Eastern appearance of the bishop, with his long, black Assyrian beard, and of his assistants ; the elaborate com- plexity of the service, baffling and yet strangely fascinating to the Western worshipper — but above all two things that charmed me, the wildness of the music, and the use of the *' fiabelli." I have no knowledge of music, and so cannot say what it was that made the music of these Easterns so different, so unearthly : but from the very first strains of it I realized that I had here a form of music that was to me greater, more essential, more elemental than even the Plain Chant. Only once — or twice — have I heard anything like it before. Years ago some enterprising showman brought over to England a company of Somali from Africa : I remember a war dance, as vividly as though I saw it yesterday, in which squatting on the ground the men clasped their hands, stamped on the soil, and kept up all the time a long wailing chant — almost all one note. This chant seemed to evoke all the savagery and mystery of Africa : its dull, repeated insistence, combined with the stamping and clapping, had an amazingly weird effect. Well, there was something of that, of course elaborated, in the Syrian music. Then, when Sada Yacco and her company brought Japanese plays to the Criterion, I heard a music, which my soul recognized as the music natural to me : the night I went to the theatre they had a comic interlude between two acts of a tragedy. A little misshapen figure, like one of the dwarfs with which Beardsley decorated Salome, came forward, with a drum ; another long, lean figure had some other musical instrument. The two mopped and bowed at each other, then smote their instruments and sang some dreadful little ditty, dancing the while, and ROME AT CHURCH 97 smacking each other. The thing might have been a grotesque parody on the music and the movement of that Syrian Mass. The Syrian music seemed to shiver on the verge of Plain Chant. Time and again one heard a note or a phrase that seemed as if it would drop into some of the regular tones of Western music ; then with some wrenching discord the music broke free, and ran, scam- pered, flew, shrilled over the sand and through the palm- trees of the desert. As I listened, I could see S. Simon of the Pillar, gaunt, half naked, half blind, preaching with hoarse emphasis to the crowds from Alexandria ; and then came Antony, not the Antony of Pachomius so much as the Antony of Flaubert, struggling with living passions, the sin of the Cainites, the scandal of the Worshippers of the Serpent, the sordid horror of the Paternians — struggling and conquering, for all through the wild strain there was a note of victory, of a victory gained perhaps rather in the Eastern way, by yielding a little to the foe; and at times the victorious music was not so much triumphant as mocking. And then, when the bishop began the Canon the chant died away, and suddenly two of the assistants, who had been carrying long poles with what I thought were eagles on the top, began to shake these. They were the " fla- belli " ; and the figures at the top were cherubim, sur- rounded by little bells ; and all the time of the Consecra- tion the bells shook, shook continually with a beautiful running, subdued music, a kind of echo of the song of heaven which we, in our Latin rite, have reduced to the clanging gong that rouses the worshipper at the Sanctus. I have -never heard anything like those bells. Perpetual, persistent, they seemed to ripple along on the highroad of the King ; they whispered, they chattered, they sang, unfalteringly, securely, and all the tenor of their music was " Coming, coming, coming ... he is coming ; be ready, be ready, be ready." They were evocative, magical, mystical — they seemed to open doors that had always been 98 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE shut, to disclose secrets that had never been spoken, to describe a beauty that no one had seen, to invite us on untrodden paths and to the very gardens enclosed of God. When the Consecration was over and the bishop had made his communion, Dominic touched my arm. He was ghastly white. '* Are you seedy ? " He just nodded his head. " Shall we go ? " " Please." So out we went. When we were in the street Dominic gave a huge sigh and exclaimed : '* If I'd stayed any longer, I should have been sick." " Good gracious ! Why ? The garlic ? " " No ; that horrible music : it nearly killed me. I never heard anything so terrible, so — ^so — obscene, so dreadful. I can still feel it. It was awful." ** But," I protested, *' I thought it was simply wonder- ful. I liked it better than the music at S. Atanasio. It was more primitive — easier to understand. It's the kind of music I should like to sing to " *' Primitive. It was savage. I always knew you were not musical, but I did not know you could enjoy a sort of perverted music. It wasn't — wasn't clean." I never argue for long about music with Dominic ; and I saw that he really had been made physically disgusted : it amazed me, it amazes me still. And I wonder which of us is right. We were quite nervous about going to the rest of the Epiphany functions — but no other music produced any similar effect on Dominic : though he was a little uneasy with the Armenian. On the Octave-day, however, we both went securely and gladly to the Pontifical Mass of the Greeks. The Mass used was that of S. John Chrysostom, and we had, as I said, the rare privilege of seeing a Greek Mass from beginning to end, without any iccnostasis. ROME AT CHURCH 99 Little curtains, shrouding sacristies, were put up for the deacon to enter and emerge from ; but the whole action of the Mass was visible. The most striking ceremony is certainly the blessing, by the bishop, of the congregation with the two candlesticks. The bishop comes forward, supported by the Archimandrites ; in each hand he holds a candlestick, one with three, the other with two branches. One represents the Most Holy Trinity, the other the Divine and Human Natures of Our Lord. With these he blesses the people, making the sign of the cross three times, and doing it with astonishing skill. We had seen this cere- mony when we attended the Epiphany Vespers ; and while he held the candlesticks there he sang an Epiphany hymn, of which we could distinguish the words. Scarcely less interesting than the services was the con- gregation of S. Andrea. There were many who had come, like us, as visitors to Rome, and who welcomed this unusual opportunity of seeing East and West meet ; there were musical experts, one man who was always there, and who made elaborate notes of the music in a large volume. Dominic says that he shut his book up at the Syrian Mass "in despair." "Not at all," I retorted; "he was so entranced he couldn't be bothered making notes." There were many students from the different colleges, some of whom had the texts of the liturgies, and tried diligently to follow the Mass in the strange reversed languages of the Orient. There were a few ordinary tourists, who had wandered in to see the Domenichino Evangelists, and retreated in disorder from the packed transepts. There were a good many pious Romans, who perhaps had at last determined to see what was so customary to them that they were in danger of missing it altogether. One morning I remember an old woman jogged my elbow just about the time of the Offertory. " Si ? " I whispered. "It is Mass, isn't it ? " " Si, si," and she turned to her devotions again. But a few moments or so afterwards, hearing no 100 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE bells, and seeing no genuflections, she jogged me again. "Is it a good Mass ? " " Yes," I assured her, and she went on praying in contentment. Where she imagined she had got to I don't know ; perhaps she thought the Methodists worshipped hke that, or that she had caught the fellow-countrymen of the Syndic at their devotions. After the Uniate Masses there was preached each day a sermon in a foreign tongue ; but not in a language corresponding to the various liturgies. French, English, German, Spanish and Polish were the languages of the sermons ; and as I looked at the list of the preachers, I could not help thinking, " Why don't we have the Mass in these languages as well ? Why should it be permissible to say Mass in Armenian, and not in English ; in Syrian, and not in German ; in Chaldee, and not in Spanish ? " I was very much impressed with this piece of silent evidence that the Church of the West has forsaken her old ideals. Surely it cannot be a matter of principle that the tongue (other than Latin) in which it is lawful to offer the Holy Sacrifice should be the language of small or remote peoples. When will the Western Church boldly overcome this anomaly, and permit not only the Mass but the Divine Office to be said in the tongues of the people of Europe and America ? We did not hear any of the sermons. One of the English was to be preached by a famous Jesuit who has a great reputation as an orator. And we meant to stay and listen. But he prevented us. The beginning of the sermon was like this : " What did the Wise Men come to see ? Did they come to see Kings and Palaces ? Did they travel so far after the Heavenly Star to see Wise Men ? Did they leave their distant land to go to the wealthy ? Did they " But there is no need to go on. The preacher seemed thoroughly set on exhausting all the subjects which were not the motive of the Magi's pilgrimage ; and ROME AT CHURCH loi so we left him doing it. Isn't it a pity that on such an occasion a man could not be natural, forget his rhetoric and his oratorical lessons, and speak simply and plainly ? What is wrong with modern sermons is not as a rule their lack of matter, but a strange passion for clinging to the frills and fashions of preaching : to indulge in ten words where one would be more than enough. It is a typically English habit — because English rhetoric has not, as a rule, the beauty of form that saves the French, or the passion of wit that saves the Italian. Its greatest master was, I suppose, Mr Gladstone ; and it was of something of Gladstone's that Huxley said, ** Gladstone's attack on you is one of the best things he has written. I do not think that there is more than fifty per cent, more verbiage than necessary, nor any sentence with more than two meanings." That would be a golden rule for all preachers to try and keep — " not more than fifty per cent, more verbiage than necessary, and no sentence with more than two meanings." It would not unduly restrict the most luxurious talent. Up on the Celian Hill, on the road called after San Stefano Rotondo, is a gateway that leads to the Convent and Hospital of the Maternal Heart of Mary. We had two friends staying in the convent — one an old parishioner of Dominic's — and so we went up to see them, to have tea in the guest-chamber and to attend Benediction. Benediction is a service whose beauty varies astonish- ingly with its performance. I have been at Benediction — generally in Jesuit churches — where my whole spirit has cried out against the service as a vulgarism : it seemed like an advertisement, a demonstration, a rather florid challenge. Then there are Benedictions which are spoiled by the music. At another convent — more famous than that of the Little Company of Mary — by the Trinita de' Monti, we once went to Vespers. It was terrible. Half 102 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the people in the church had apparently come to a concert. They were yawning, sitting, talking. And the music ! — of course the voices were astonishingly good — as instru- ments ; but we had that tawdry, flagrant " O Salutaris " of Gounod's, a tune so debased that it would be more reverent if the singer simply sang the scale before the Divine Victim. Dominic even admitted that it was worse than the Syrians, and the moment benediction had been given we slipped out, as we heard rumours (which were false) of more sacred songs afterwards. Then at Normandy I once attended a Benediction — held in a chapel that was really nothing but the end of a hospital ward, when they sang ** Sacris Solemniis" — "they" being three or four old Carmelites with thin, throaty voices, and a few peasant women in the congregation. And the solo parts of the Tantum Ergo were broken and hoarse, and the responding verses too loud and untuneful ; and yet the whole service was redolent of love and service and devotion and reality. The Benediction at S. Anselmo is as perfect as their Mass. But the severity of their music scarcely suits a devotion that is nothing if not familiar, homely, an act of friendship. And so I remember best the Benediction at the con- vent on the Celian ; we went to it four or five times. I suppose there were about twenty or thirty sisters ; some sat right in front in the little chapel ; then came the pews for the visitors ; and then more seats behind, reserved more especially for the choir. The hospital, I was told, was run by Englishwomen ; as it happens, all the nuns I spoke to were Irish, and I believe the Mother Superior and Foundress, still alive, is an Irishwoman. It may be fanciful, but I thought I had caught a hint of that yearning sob, half humorous and wholly pathetic, and quite in earnest, which marks so much of Irish popular melody — I thought I caught it in the first words ROME AT CHURCH 103 of the hymn. And then they began the Litany of Our Lady. When that is well sung, by women's voices, I think it excels in sheer poetic beauty any other litany of the Church. It does not reach to the cosmic sweep of the old Easter Tuesday and Rogationtide Litany : there is not the marshalling of the saints which comes there. But it has, this hymn to Mary, a note of poignant splendour, of personal passion, of a gay happiness that somehow suits Benediction, and is characteristic of Catholic devo- tion to the Mother of God. What a wonderful series of titles is that at the beginning, starting with Mater Christi and ending with Mater Salvatoris ; between these two enormous realities, we hail Mary by all that was necessary for her to be, if she was to be really Mother of Christ, and Mother of the Saviour. Before that honour came to her she was Mother of the grace of God, the purest, the chastest, the unspotted, the immaculate, the lovable, the wonderful, — all these spring from her destiny as Mother of Christ and Mother of the Saviour. Then we hail Mary the maiden, Mary, daughter of Joachim and Anna, Mary the simple, trustful girl of Nazareth, praise her for her pru- dence, her worshipfulness, her capacity to engage the hearts of sinners, her power, her kindness, and her faith- fulness. One girl's voice soared with an unutterable beauty when we came to the titles which the poets have given Mary ; *' Rosa Mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris ebumea, Domus aurea. Foederis area, Stella matutina." How triumphantly, how securely we could sing the Ora pro nobis : '' Rose of roses, mystic rose, Fairest flower of all that grows In the great God's garden close Ora pro nobis ! 104 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Tower of David set on high, Tower of finest ivory, Tower and guide to passers-by, Ora pro nobis ! Mary, house of purest gold. House of treasures manifold. House that heaven alone can hold, Ora pro nobis ! Ark of promise, seen afar. Gate of heaven, thy bolts unbar ! Mary, shining morning star, Ora pro nobis ! '' And after the poets you have the plain people ; the echo of popular proverbs sounds through such a title as " Salus infirmorum," *'a sight for sore e'en"; hope of the sinners; and consoler of the oppressed. Then, now that Mary in her office, Mary in her character, Mary in her beauties, Mary in her attributes has been honoured, we pass on, still sustained by the lyrical rapture of the nuns' singing, to pray to Mary in her heavenly glory — Mary the Queen. And so with Regina Sacratissimi Rosarii, the prayer to Mary ends. And we remember : we look about us, dazed. Who are we, unclean, that dare come to her, the pure, the perfect, come in our sins ; and then with a sudden change we swerve round, in longing anguish, to Him who alone can cleanse from sin, to Him who alone can take us to His Mother — and break out : '' Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Parce nobis, Domine ! " In a moment an act of contrition can be made. And how could any Christian help making it, with that cry in his ears ? And so, cleansed and penitent, joyful and humble, we sing the Tantum ergo, and acclaim the Blessed Sacra- ment with the inspired word of the Psalter : ** Omne delectamentum in se habentem." ROME AT CHURCH 105 Sometimes one has wondered whether the Latin Church has done well in allowing extra-liturgical devotions of the Blessed Sacrament ; when one thinks of all the hideous quarrelling in the West over the Sacrament of the Altar, and then turns to the unity of the East, it may seem that part of our disunion is a judgment for our use of the Sacrament for what I have called advertising, declamatory purposes. But in the calm and certainty of a religious house one feels that Benediction and Exposition are not merely lawful, but natural : they are the overflowing of human love.^ ^ It is curious how the sense of mystery, while it is still implicit in the Uturgical forms of the West, seems to have been lost by the people in high places, by officials, bishops, nuncios, legates and so on. The astonishing proposal to carry the Host through the streets of London, happily frustrated at the instigation, it is said, of a devout Catholic, was an amazing instance of this. The modern Latin is too apt to treat his most holy things as the Jews treated the Ark when they sent it into battle with the Philistines, and to subject the shrine of the Shekinah to the degradation of sharing a roof with Dagon. It is not thus that we win in battles of religion, not by this aggressive advertisement of the central things of the Faith. I suppose that a good deal of this is due to a wrong idea of mystery. Mystery in its full meaning is expressed in the formula '' ay ta aylois " ; a mystery is precise^ not a secret which must not be told : it is a secret that must be told, but only to the fit, to the initiate. It is something which is known to the elect — that is why S. Paul calls marriage a great mystery — marriage is something essentially unintelligible to the unmarried. Though with regard to that one must remember that it is not so easy to get married — in the Christian sense — as most people imagine. Now the common idea of a mystery is far away from all this. A mystery is just a secret, something that you won't tell, or you won't reveal, something to be hinted at ; the way to it is not through a door flung wide, but through a curtain only gradually drawn away. A mystery has become something that you are anxious to flaunt without explaining, and to display without dis- covering ; it is the palladium, not of people who have been chosen out of the world, but of people who have arrogated to themselves a superiority over their fellows. io6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Still I am not sure whether in secular or parish churches the privilege of Benediction should not be more scantily given ; and also more associated in time with the Sacrifice of the Mass, as is done in German churches, and as was, in all likelihood, the custom of Renascence times when the devotion arose. Certainly Benediction and Exposition are devotions that should be practised in quiet, and where there is no sound of the disbeliever or the mocker, or even the murmur of the well-intentioned, but misunderstanding, Catholic. It is eminently a kind of prolonging of the Kiss of Peace, and of the moment of Exposition ; and just as no one who is in love cares to make a public show of his affection, but keeps his caresses, his endearments, his whispers for the hour of solitude, so with Our Lord, the lover of Jesus in His Sacrament will prefer to meet him in quiet, in that passionate hush when all the world and the sorrows of the world and its joys are seen only in the per- fect mirror of the Sacred Heart. It was on i8th January that Dominic and I went to pay a last visit to San Pietro in Vaticano. We lingered for a while at the Madonna of the Pieta, in the chapel near the crooked column, which Bernini chose as model for the twisted height of the pillars of the baldachino ; and then we wandered right round into the apse, and found, to our surprise. Pontifical High Mass was proceeding at the altar there. Then I remembered that it was the Feast of S. Peter's Chair at Rome. It was under the actual chair which, according to tradition, S. Peter used, that on this morning Cardinal Rampolla was singing Mass. It was a reverent service, even if the ceremonies seemed a trifle over-familiar to English eyes ; but the congregation was not devout. It was not so much a congregation as a crowd — a crowd that had gathered there without any particular reason, and stayed without any particular object. It was not the visitors — or at least not the ROME AT CHURCH 107 foreign visitors to Rome who behaved worst ; it was an Italian gentleman standing next me who chattered loudly through the entire service, and kept his back turned to the altar, save for one brief moment, when he hurriedly turned round to acknowledge the sacring bell. I suppose what most people stayed for was the music. It was a Mass of Palestrina's, and certainly was most desirably rendered. Dominic would have it that the choir played about too much with the old music ; that it was ** given its head " and indulged in frills and trills to a disgraceful extent. Still he admitted as fully as I that the manner in which the Offertory sentence — Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam : et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum — was rendered could not be excelled. The eternal promise swayed up to the apse, was caught there for a brief moment, and then thrown up into the dome, where it broke into spears of sound that carried a certainty, almost of defiance, right along the building. The voices were not, perhaps, devotional enough ; there was some- thing of the opera about the way in which they rendered the Gloria ; but as instruments, as mere melody, they were superb. The strong, sexless music, full not so much of meditation as of thought, expressive in so high a degree of organized, embattled religion, tinged ever so slightly with that scholasticism that the pure plain-song escapes, was not ill-mated with the professional choir of the Vatican. It was our fate to leave Rome without hearing High Mass in what is in some ways the most perfect church in the city. If you want to see how decidedly the church adopted local customs, and how definitely the order of Christian worship is allied to the older traditions of things Roman, go to San Clemente. There you have the best pattern possible of an ancient basilica. The church is arranged on the ancient model — that is, you have an apse, io8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE at the back of which is the bishop's throne — the one at present at San Clemente is of the twelfth century — and this chair is flanked by other stone seats for the clergy. The High Altar stands on the line of the apse, in the middle, and when it is used the celebrant faces the people, looking out over the mensa. Lower down the church are two ambones — the present ones were made for John VIII. (873-882) and moved by Paschal II. to the upper church, which he built in the early years of the twelfth century — from which the Epistle and Gospel are read when High Mass is celebrated : and what are these but a development of the rostra, which for centuries the Romans had used for declamation and oratory ? The church is in the hands of Irish Dominicans, and we were shown over it by one of the brothers. " Do you have High Mass every Sunday ? " " Indeed, then, and we don't. We manage it only for the feast, and at Easter, or perhaps once or twice beside." With the brother we descended into the lower church, the finest example left in Rome of early mediaeval building. According to tradition the first Church of San Clemente was built on the site of the house occupied by Clement, Bishop of Rome, or else on the site where the Christians of his day were in the habit of meeting for public worship. Beneath this building, it is said, there is another of the second century B.C., which was used as a temple of Mithras. The Clementine building is, of course, of the first centuiy a.d. It is now usually submerged with water ; and we were not able to visit it, although our attendant friar gave us a picture postcard showing the Prince and Princess of Wales, in old-fashioned garments of the middle sixties, listening to Prior Mulhooly's dis- course on his discoveries. The next church was used, perhaps, from about 387 to 1084, when it suffered badly in the general sack of Rome ; ^^^1 m * m ■ h' ^s 1 w/K^ I "^^^3 "i "**. *■ ^ ^ttl 1^ % SAN CLEMENTE ROME AT CHURCH 109 and was replaced by the new church built by Paschal II. The chief glory, both of the upper and lower churches, is the wonderful series of mosaics and frescoes. If Italy in general, and Florence in particular, is the home of fresco- painting, Rome is more particularly mistress of the mosaic. It is a form of art whose attraction is a little hard to define. One is quite sure that mosaic has been wrongly used in those marvellous examples of misapplied ingenuity, the mosaics in San Pietro, where oil paintings are copied with a vraisemblance that at a distance can deceive the ordinary eye. There is none of this effort to imitate another art, with such different aims as has oil painting, in the mosaics in San Clemente. I sometimes think that the beginning of " values " and ** tone" in pictorial art can be found in mosaic work ; it seems to me natural enough to suppose that the craftsman was more struck by the effect of juxtaposed colours when his actual work con- sisted of juxtaposing particles of mosaic. I mean that in early painting line is the dominant feature ; it is purity, and ultimately suavity and buoyancy of line that the great painters strove after ; their colour is frequently conven- tional, governed not by its suitability for the scheme of the picture, but by its obedience to the canons of tradition. With the worker in mosaic the line is purely conventional ; while even in the early frescoes of the lower church we can see the painter struggling after expression in line. It is ninth-century work, and there is a real effort to produce an effect by line, although only by the most rigid use of angular and awkward gesticulation. This, of course, is partly due to the period ; but I think that, compared to a mosaic work, it will be found that the tendency to allow the line to be, so to speak, a series of lines, broken, eccentric and rather undignified is far greater than in the fresco. For instance, we can see in the upper church the wonder- ful mosaics in the apse. They are of the twelfth century, and mark that departure from early Christian artistic no A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE ideals that I have already noticed. Christ is here not throned, nor ascendant, nor the Good Shepherd, not even crowned on the cross, but hanging, dejected, disfigured, emaciated with anguish ; His feet are supported by the small cross-beam, and at the foot of His cross stand His mother and S. John. Then the artist seems to have re- membered that, after all, the sanctuary, with its surround- ings, was an occasion for displaying Christian joy, and below the cross he has pictured the River of Life ; while above the head of the Divine Victim the Hand of God holds the crown of victory. The four rivers of the Holy Gospel spring from the fountain of life ; and there the harts drink of the water springs after which they have desired and panted. The fountain feeds also a tree whose foliage ambitions upwards and covers the semi-dome of the apse ; this tree is the Vine, whose planter is God, and in the branches are the Apostles, whose life is only with and of the Vine, Jesus Christ ; and on either side the pelican, type of the Sacred Passion, signifies that nothing avails save by the out- letting of the Blood of the Crucified. Below all this are two little processions of sheep coming, one from Beth- lehem, the other from Jerusalem, one from the city of His birth, the other from the city of His condemnation, the children of the Saviour and the children of the King, the sheep of the Son of Mary, and the sheep of the Son of David — moving, each on their own road, to the Lamb, the Son of God, who stands in the midst. Over the frescoes in the Cappella della Passione we did not linger. Whether they be by Masaccio or Masolino they belong quite definitely to that school of Tuscan painting which, while full of a certain decorative chann, misses the religious beauty which lingers, for me, even in painters commonly regarded as secular, like Pinturichio. There is a lack of fervour, a freedom from passion which, while it does not achieve the immortal colour of the great Raphael, does effectually prevent me from getting that ROME AT CHURCH iii acute pleasure from their work which can be found in indifferent pictures by inferior masters. There are two frescoes in the lower church of great historical importance. One, in the nave, attributed to the eighth century, is the earliest representation of the Crucifixion in fresco ; another shows Our Lord blessing in the Greek instead of in the Latin mode. This is of parti- cular interest as San Clemente is connected historically with S. Cyril and S. Methodius, apostles to the Slavs ; they brought back the body of S. Clement from the Crimea, and later on S. Methodius argued with John VI I L the right of the Slavs to have the Mass in their own tongue. Then in the fresco of the Assumption of Our Lady, to which I have already alluded, there are several points of interest. First, the figure of Leo IV. is represented with the square nimbus, used only for living people ; this fixes the date of the fresco between 847-855, so it is one of the earliest representations of this incident. Our Lord has a cruciform nimbus; the angels supporting him are also nimbed ; while the Apostles, who are watching their Mother return to her Son, are neither vested sacerdotally nor have they nimbuses. The fresco is, then, a curious mixture of realistic and conventional work. It is obvious that the absence of nimbuses is no mere accident, and I believe that the painter wished to give what he thought was a plain picture of the event, and so represented the Apostles as he fancied they originally appeared. Our Lady is given a nimbus because she has already entered into glory, and for the same reason her Son and the angels receive their symbol of honour. The Apostles, of course, could not be given the square nimbus which is given to the Pope : if they were nimbed at all they must have the nimbus of heavenly glory, not that of earthly honour. In some ways, then, this ninth-century fresco may be taken as the parent of those later pictures of this mystery in which convention is openly abandoned, and the story 112 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE frankly followed with an accurate attention to the recorded details. The friar who took us round the church was very friendly, and before leaving we asked him questions about different things in Rome. It was a delight to hear an Irish accent, even if the speaker had not also a good many entertaining things to tell us of the life in Rome. Among other things, I asked him, " Do you know the Church of S. Maria Egiziaca ? " " I do.'' " It was an old pagan temple, wasn't it ? " " Ah ! that it was, and they still quarrel as to what goddess had it. Some say it was Fortuna, others Mater Matuta, who was Queen of the Sea, and of the harbours." " Do they ever have Mass there ? We tried to get in the other day, and failed. I have always been interested in S. Mary of Egypt and should like to go now, if it is possible." " Ah, then ; is it a Mass that you want ? Och ! I shouldn't go there, if I were you. To be sure it's only once or twice a year they have a Mass ; and do you know they don't behave at all well during their devotions. They will call to one another from one end of the church to the other in the middle of the Holy Mass : and I have heard " — he sank his voice to an impressive whisper — " I have heard that they will even spit on the pavement ! Oh no ! you mustn't go there. I shouldn't like you to see things of that kind." We kept a perfectly straight face at his warning, but it was difficult when we remembered the notices about spitting in nearly every church in the town ; in fact, we had remarked on their absence from the Church of San Clemente. But it was rather pleasant to find this Irish brother quietly contemptuous and distressed about the habits of the people in whose country he was living ; and ROME AT CHURCH 113 talking, in an assured and determined way, as though he and his brothers were the true Romans, the real repre- sentatives of Catholic worship in the city. And it is not for me to say that he was wrong, though I should hke to put in a plea, if he will allow it, for the Church of San Anselmo on the Aventine. This is not a guide-book and I shall not attempt to give any account of every important church in Rome ; we did not even see every church that might claim the attention of the visitor. In Rome, more than in any other great city, personal feeling should be allowed its full play ; there is so little, and so great, a difference between one Roman basilica and another that it is hopeless to justify one's preferences except by purely personal reasons. What one misses most in Rome are churches to love. I mean that you wander from one magnificent temple to another, and yet are not overcome, as a rule, by that quick happy flush of something found, and something needed. It is a sensation that I have often experienced in Cornwall, in England, in Germany. You walk out from S. Ives, up the long, dirty, discomfortable and rather ungainly Stennack, straight up the road to Zennor, where the big hill in front shoulders towards the sky. About two miles from the village you turn off the highroad and go through field after field, where the cattle seem to graze on granite and every stile you cross is the stile of a churchyard — and there in the end you find the Cornish church towered, four-square, amazingly restful, surprisingly beautiful, adequate with a heavenly and eternal adequacy. And not all the modern woodwork, nor the feminine decora- tions, nor the disheartening way in which you stub your fingers against stone, instead of finding water, in the holy- water stoup, can remove from you that complete assur- ance of peacefiil strength, of tranquil and unboastful simplicity. 114 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Or, in Bristol, a little tired of S. Mary Redcliffe and the Cathedral, a little overcome with the splendours of those two great fanes, you suddenly turn in to S. Mark, and then you have a feeling of personal business in the place, you are one in memory with the old builders, the builders who mixed their stones (if one may adapt Opie's famous retort) with sympathy and prayer. Now the churches in Rome are civic, are patriarchal, are papal, are splendid and magnificent decrees of the Univer- sal Church. They stand for Unity, for Catholicity, for Apostolicity — they stand for the great notes of the Church — but — but — one misses rather the greater note of personal love, of human sympathy, of divine sacrifice. But I forget the shrines. That is, is it not, the secret at the heart of relic-worship ? One has seen old women, and children, ay, and young men, come into a church eagerly, alert, conscious, desirous. They almost forget the church, they almost forget the tabernacle, and they run to the Confessio — and then babble into the ear of the saint things too trivial to trouble God with. Idolatry ? Surely not. In sterner countries the trivial side of life, the foolishnesses, and the little aches and longings, the small losses and gasps and climbings of the human spirit are left out of religion altogether. That is why we have that horrible tradition that a *' good " person is rather unpleasant : of course no unpleasant person can be really good. And your Puritan doesn't think of praying in his Calvinistic chapel to be made less sour-faced, more sunny, more obviously happy. If he approached God in His saints he might gain that sweetness, that lightness of temperament which, with all their disadvantages, do seem akin to the religion of Him who bade us not to be anxious over to-morrow, and to love one another so much that the world should know we were His disciples. I feel that one reason for the sublime, rather heartless sanity of Roman Christianity, for the persistent discour- THE TEMPLE OF VESTA ROME AT CHURCH 115 agement of the mysticism which, as persistently and by suppression more strongly, rises in her midst, can be found in the history of the Rome that saw the growth of the Gospel. We have to remember that in this city, where Peter died, and Paul ; where all that was strongest and most governing and clearest in Christianity was to find a home ; where we were to have that great series of Imperial rulers who fostered the civilization and kept the peace of the world — that there had been strange growths of strange religions. Roman architecture, Roman devotion has no different source than had Roman religion : it grew on the decaying folly of Imperial pride, and in very terror of the hidden Eastern religions ; the builders of its churches have contrived to remove from them the note of secrecy, of personal love, and of personal devotion. The Rome of Hadrian was under the rule of that sovran whose praises Baudelaire, centuries afterwards, hymned : " Tu seras la reine des hommes aux yeux verts dont j'ai serre aussi la gorge dans mes caresses nocturnes ; de ceux-la qui aiment la mer, la mer immense, tumultueuse et verte, I'eau informe et multiforme, le lieu ou ils ne sont pas, la femme qu'ils ne connaissent pas, les fleurs sinistres qui ressemblent aux encensoirs d'une religion inconnue, les parfums qui troublent la volont^, et les animaux sauvages et voluptueux qui sont les emblemes de leur folic." The passion for the unknown, the desire that never achieves — that had been the hell of Rome : it was that which Christianity dispossessed, and so in Rome you find no official sign of that wonderful transformation which wor- ships, instead of desiring, the unknown, and achieves by loss, and by the passage of the dark night of the soul. The story of Roman Christianity is thus the story of an emergence into light. It does not despise the beautiful things which grow in darkness ; but it compels the dark to deliver up whatever of truth and beauty it holds, and ii6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE then so merges them in the Hght of every day that, except with the most eternal mysteries, such as the Mass, we seem to lose that hidden beauty, that fountain sealed, that glory of great colour and restful drawing, which fills the Catholi- cism of other lands. And here we can see how much in a way Rome, by destroying, created. The very emphasis laid by the Church on the laws of reason, on exact truth, on clarity of outline, the very reason for openness, for public mysteries led, inevitably, not only among those who were inimical to the Church, to a tendency that recalls the older and permanent quality of withholding, of remoteness. The Church which, in its influence on the supreme mind of Dante, gave us a supernatural world that is rather more exact in treatment than the average contemporary map of the mun- dane world, gave us also a S. Catherine of Genoa, with her poignant, individualistic, acutely loverlike and mystical treatise on Purgatory ; gave us also in a later day the in- comparable vision, fruit of devotion and friendship, which inspires " The Dream of Gerontius." Nay^do you ever in any other community get so startling, so whole-centred, so clear-eyed a woman as S. Theresa, who in the midst of mystical experiences from the heart of the rose and the cross, will write to her friends, *' Never despise reason " ? This revelation, however, hardly seems to have affected Rome itself ; its saints are the wonderful, practical people like S. Philip ; and so you do not have in the Church, as a rule, that aroma of wonder and hope and ecstasy which fills the whole of some lesser shrines. Service we find, sacrifice we find, beauty and splendour and elaborateness and awe : but not Mary at the feet of the Master, not the broken box of alabaster — and if there is spikenard it is not wasted supremely and simply on the Divine Feet, but measured, not at all grudgingly, but with grave decency and order, for fear of those evil spirits of indulgence and wicked exultation that may still haunt the shrines of their ancient allegiances. ROME AT CHURCH 117 Still there are a few churches which do compel love as well as admiration and awe. One is S. Maria in Cosmedin — Our Lady of the Decoration — a charming building, of the same type internally as San Clemente. It stands in the quarter where the Greeks once lived, and used to be called S. Maria in Schola Graeca. Something of the Greek spirit lingers in the place. There is a lightness, a delicacy of touch which are indescribably fascinating. The church and its contents are not at all of one period ; yet the Gothic tabernacle does not clash with the rest of the basilica, and the ambones, which are more exquisite than those in San Clemente, have a suitability with the screen that might easily be sought for in vain in the details of a church which was the work of one period alone. There is but one church in Rome where the Gothic has managed to survive. It is not Gothic of a very distinct type ; or, rather, it has not those details, such as the rood- screen, heavy, solid, of carved wood or stone, which make so mysterious an appeal in our old English churches. Yet Gothic it is, and we felt, on entering it, that somehow we were out of Rome. It seemed impossible to realize that from here Giordano Bruno was led away on 9th February 1600 to be burned in the Campo di Fiore, that here his splendid words were spoken, ** Ah ! the sentence you pro- nounce — does it not trouble you more at this moment than it troubles me ? " — a word that should have found some place in the armour of the religious bigotry that murdered him. It was here too that Galileo knelt to be taught astronomy by men who could not even recognize the true meaning of the Bible ; from here he was taken to his gentle imprisonment near Florence. The church has these gloomy memories, because it is the Church of the Dominicans ; the sons of Dominic were, alas ! only too for- ward in the work of the Holy Inquisition. In time, perhaps, we shall find Catholic theologians and ecclesiastics who will write of Bruno as they now write of Joan of Arc ; at ii8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE present you can only find him referred to as the " notori- ous apostate friar " who " resisted all efforts to make him repent." The bitterness of hatred will outlast even the bitterness of death. It is not, though, of these things that one thinks in S. Maria sopra Minerva. We thought first of that marvellous girl, Catherine of Siena, who brought back the Bishop of Rome to his own city, and whose ashes lie under the High Altar, with the image of her in the robes of her order. To her in 1866 Pius IX. dedicated the city of Rome ; but the people are still faithful to S. Francesca ; and somehow S. Catherine does not belong here as she does in her own Siena. Still here is her room — or rather the four walls of it, moved from the Via S. Chiara in 1637. Then it was in the friary connected with this church that Beato Angelico lived while he was painting the frescoes for Pope Nicolas ; and here, far from his own Florence, he lies buried — Hie jacet Venerabilis pictor Frater Joannes de Florentia Ordinis praedicatorum. Here too is the tomb of that master of the sacristies, Durandus, Bishop of Mende, whose Rationale divinorum officiorum is still the best guide to the spirit of Gothic worship. The tomb is peculiarly beautiful, the work of that Giovanni, scion of the house of Cosmas, who designed the tomb of Gonsalvo, cardinal in S. Maria Maggiore. This tomb, with the graceful, Gothic canopy sheltering Our Lady and the Child done in mosaic is an exquisite reconciliation between the genius of the North and the South. It is the only thing in Rome, to my mind, which gives the slightest indication that there might have been, had the genius of the place been less prepotent, a Roman Gothic that would have combined the qualities of sun and shadow, of mass and detail in some building that would have been the wonder of a united Christendom. It is this emotion, born in S. Maria sopra Minerva, which makes one love the Church of the Dominicans ; I could feel there. ROME AT CHURCH 119 that, after all, when artists and archaeologists talk lightly about the Latin temperament and the northern spirit — separating them as the modern realist will separate East and West, they are only perpetuating a quarrel that has in it nothing of the essential. It could just as easily be argued that as in the South they have plenty of sun and warmth, therefore they would prefer the cool shadows, the hidden comers, and the obscure chapels of our huge Gothic build- ings, would revel in the sun smiling through the coloured glory of glass, glancing on the lamps of the sanctuary, and crowning with clear, beaconlike rays the beauty of the reredos ; and that we who have so little light, so little sun, would build huge basilicas in which we could have as much of God's gracious daylight as possible, instead of having to peer at ill-printed hymn-books in the dark naves and dim chapels of our Gothic churches. Let us, if needs be, exaggerate the points of agreement rather than the points of difference between North and South, East and West. The religion which we practise began in an Eastern country ruled by a Western people, and was preached by an Eastern trained in Eastern tradi- tions, in a Western city full of Eastern superstitions ; the line between East and West is a real line, but it is perpetu- ally being overpassed, and the notion that it is not a line, but a wall, a barrier unsurmountable, is an idea sprung from that English habit of mind that finds it so difficult to respect a people that has been conquered. The tomb of Durandus guards the Caraffa Chapel, whose walls Filippino Lippi painted to the glory of God in honour of Thomas of Aquinum. It is a beautiful accident that has given the most childlike of the Italian painters the work of commemorating the most intellectual of the Western theologians. One can imagine how Michael Angelo, with his flamelike concepts and his architectonic skill, would have built up some stupendous memorial to the doctor of 120 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the Summa Theologia, or how Leonardo would have thrown over the clear, maplike theology of S. Thomas that incomparable haze, that splendour of mystical beauty which writes the whole of Christian theology in the curve of Madonna's lips, or the grip of the Bambino's hands. Filippino Lippi does what we may believe S. Thomas would have preferred. He represents, not the great doctor of the Church, but the humble religious who by God's grace has been able to reveal to the brethren something of the truth of the Gospel. If you take the main fresco, the Dis- puta, what do you find ? No glorification of intellectual ability, no glowing commentary on the mystical value of Catholic theology, but plain, simple statements that might apply to any who repeat the Creed. Two little angels, those chubby angels of Lippi's, who always seem to be whispering to the children, " Wouldn't you like to be one of us ? ", hold an inscription : " The opening of Thy words giveth light : it giveth understanding to the simple." S. Thomas himself holds a book on which are written the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles : " I will destroy the wisdom of the wise." And below him are the symbolic figures of old heresies, Arius and Sabellius and Averrhoes, representing that pride which is the strength and shame of Islam. The whole fresco is emblematic of the foolishness of God which shall confound the wise. It is the reiteration of that " high humility " which knows that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings praise is perfected, which preaches a Gospel which is foolishness to the Greeks. At the entrance to the choir, on the north side, is the statue of Our Lord, ordered from Michael Angelo in 15 14, by Bernardo Cenci, Mario Scappacci and Martello Vari : the price was two hundred ducats. The master did not finish his work on the statue till 1520, and then it was sent to Rome to be finally " touched up " by a pupil, Pietro Urbano. It is not surprising that the statue fails to satisfy ROME AT CHURCH 121 one. The bronze drapery has, of course, been added by some vandals, like those who perched the wretched little angels over the head of Our Lady of the Pieta ; but apart from that, in this one work Michael Angelo seems to have been doubtful of his purpose. We cannot put much more down to the credit of Pietro Urbano ^ than the rather modish finish which is so uncharacteristic of Buonarroti's own work ; for the idea and composition of the statue the master must be held responsible. The tradition that calls it '' The Risen Christ " is old and quite trustworthy, but a critical mind will hasten to find some other name for the statue. Our Lord is represented holding to the cross, from which His head is turned away, looking not up, as one might expect, nor straight in front, but rather down- wards, as if towards the tomb He has abandoned. There is a look of weariness about the face, almost a kind of boredom, a lack of dignity which is singularly untypical of Michael Angelo, and peculiarly unsuitable to the subject. By far the most beautiful parts of the statue are the arms and hands ; and the long fingers of the right hand, which rest on the cross, recall the hand of the " David." The whole arrangement of the statue, except possibly the firm pose of the feet, suggest to me a Christ starting on the Way of Sorrows rather than a Christ bursting from the bonds of death. There is no exaltation, no joy, no movement ; nothing but a placid subjection, an almost hopeless expec- tation of some ineluctable doom. ^ Or to Roderigo Frizzi, who also had a hand in -- finishing ' ' the statue. CHAPTER VI OUTSIDE ROME WHAT is the Campagna ? It is not a question I can answer. I have Hved in the middle of those Cornish moors that stretch all the way, disdaining the few roads thereon, from Penzance to S. Ives. They are full of a certain uncanny, but not unfriendly, life. I know and love the deceitful levels of the hills, which as you look at them seem good walking, and when you approach nearer become nothing but gorse-bushes and rabbit-holes and those large boulders which were the playthings of the saints and the giants. Yet, however deceptive they may be, they are friendly, even when they are most lonesome ; they need winning, but they are to be won — even the deserted mine-shaft, or the loamy side of the clay-pit ; the sharp yelp of the fox and the snuffling cry of the badger do not terrify, but rather allure one. Life is scant, and scattered, but it is vivid and real ; every moor-dweller is quick with lively gestures, and swift speech and fiercely familiar action. Yet there would be some reason if the Cornish moors were crammed with that quality of terror that invades certain landscapes, for they are far from big towns, far from what we call civilization, and have never, so far as we know, been subdued by men. The Campagna surrounds the most ancient city in the Latin world ; it has seen other cities built upon it, and has swallowed them, inscrutably, leaving no vestige, no trace but a memory and a name. It is not plain or moor. It is rather a volcanic sea, surroimding the city of Rome ; 122 OUTSIDE ROME 123 and the people who live there are as people who live in the sea, dejected, depressed, held by some fate to the perpetual service of strange gods. It is, no doubt, partly because we find remains of so much of the past, the early past — as the history of the Campagna goes — that we are so obsessed with the definite feeling of something that broods over the land ; the great company, not of dead people but of dead houses; of dead cemeteries, comes so suddenly on the imagination ; it strikes us like a wind from nowhere blowing, with a mortal chilliness, down the passages of human existence. Yet the Campagna can smile. The Campagna has moments when we can forget its past, forget a great deal of its present, and treat it as though it were a friendly and hospitable country, willing to be gracious to the traveller. The influence of country on man is a problem that is not likely to be solved in our time : I have heard some argue that any solution is impossible because the influence of the same country on different minds is absolutely different. The mountains that fill some of us with awe, and a sense of freedom, seem nothing to others but unnecessary excres- cences on the face of nature ; the landscape that brings ideas of heaven to one mind, that seems soaked in supernal memories, may live for another as a road to the gates of hell. This fact really proves that one day it may be possible to show that places are really saturated with some definite, subconscious atmosphere ; haunted, if you will, by the ghosts of a remembered past. If the same land- scape produced the same effect on all, it would show that there was in the landscape itself little definite character of its own ; one would not care for a book or a picture that everyone admired or admired in the same terms. It is not easy to express what we mean, we who believe that the line between the organic and the inorganic wavers, wavers all through the world of our experience, and at times breaks with a snap, a drop that can do nothing but startle 124 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE and amaze. Everyone who is at all sensitive has this feeling that places have a soul, a personality, a something which, if it is not higher, is at times bigger, more massive, more resonant and universal than the personality of a man : for most people that feeling is about places bound into the texture of their lives, thronged with an hour, a day, a week, of beautiful or horrible experience, or packed with the most permanent memories of some inalienable love or hate. It is the feeling that Kingsley expressed in the " cruel, crawling foam " ; the feeling that all poets have, when they regard nature with horror-struck, or adoring, or sympathetic eyes ; it is the feeling which Ruskin in a moment of superb stupidity called the " pathetic fallacy." He would have it that the woman who curses the sea merely transplants her own over- fierce sorrow and ascribes it to the foam, which has no sentience, no motive, no hate and no love. Without subscribing to the traditional philosophy of all primitive people that gives an active intelligential principle to places, to trees, to stones, to mountains — I assert con- j&dently that this old naked faith is far nearer reality than Ruskin's effort to put away the natural and universal feeling which, in stress of circumstance, clothes nature with will, and strength, and purposeful consciousness. The certainty which makes some of us give distinct qualities, distinct character, and definite personality to inorganic things has just the same validity as the certainty that prevents us from being sophists, that drives us into allowing reality to our fellow-creatures ; and indeed I believe modern science here upholds the poet, and even materialism cannot remove this belief, unless someone can, by some hitherto unobserved process, prove that matter is anything else than the manifestation of spirit. While the ordinary man sees this personality only in the natural objects which are, to him, vivid and full of experience, poets and those who have the imaginative OUTSIDE ROME 125 temperament will find it in everything. We are quite removed from that pantheistic position which makes nature the measure of God : but we find God — that is reality, life — in nature just as we find Him in man ; and where we find life we are bound to find distinction, separateness, individuality. It is commonest to exercise this feeling about towns ; it is easy, comparatively, to evoke and make dynamic the curiously vivid quality of cities — they are more quickly grasped and held, they yield a secret, even if it is not their own peculiar secret, to all who approach them with wit and reverence. With the country it is different. It is easy to find, if we look, not a definite consciousness, not a separable personality, but that genuine and vague feeling of some- thing that beats and pulses behind the smallest stone, the tiniest flower, or that whispers in the bowed movement of the grass. We can repeat with a real truth of feeling : " Elder father, though thine eyes Shine with hoary mysteries, Canst thou tell what in the heart Of a cowsUp blossom Hes ? Smaller than all seeds that be, Secret as the deepest sea, Stands a little house of seeds Like an elfin granary. Speller of the stones and weeds, Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds, Tell me what is in the heart Of the smallest of the seeds ! God Almighty and with Him Cherubim and Seraphim, Filling all Eternity, Adonai, Elohim ! -' But it should be possible, and it very frequently is, to go on from that to the discernment, not only in small 126 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE things, but in great, of a distinct form of consciousness. What we mean by individuahty is, I suppose, that quality in a person or a thing which, apart from our own wills, impinges upon our minds with such force and directness that ever afterwards that person or thing is inseparable from that impression. Of course one can make mistakes. People of a conceited and dull temperament too often determine beforehand the position and character of those persons or places whom they are going to meet ; and they go ludicrously astray in estimating the truth of character. They cannot even attempt to see others except as part of some large external whole, something not themselves, that matters only as it bears on and influences their own lives. A capital instance of mistaken judgment is Matthew Arnold's estimate of Oxford. For him Oxford is the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and of impossible loyalties ; she is dreaming among her gardens, and whispering from her towers lost enchantments of the Middle Ages. A stranger would have the impression of a city and a society alike confounded with some Epicurean heaven of light divinity and easy ethics : a society where nothing interested save what was past, where nothing intrigued one save what was dead and embalmed, where nobody was enthusiastic except in carving and adorning the details for neglected temples and the tombstones of forgotten prophets. And you go to Oxford and you find yourself in the midst of the most sceptical, the most inquiring, the most active, the most aggressive society in England. You can escape from the chatter of social problems only to fall into the whirlpool of science and theology ; you can leave theology and find yourself reading, with undergraduates, French poets whom Paris has scarcely heard of and London never ; or you can discuss with those undergraduates the position in art of masters whose very names are unheard elsewhere. Ten years or more ago Oxford was discussing Gauguin, OUTSIDE ROME 127 van Gogh and van Toorop and Fernand Khnopff ; Oxford knew all about Nietzsche and Shaw and Butler and Chester- ton — I don't mean that this excessive modernity is all good, but it exists, and, except for that terrible Hanoverian epoch when England gave up thought and took to ration- alism, nearly always has been the prevailing note of our oldest university. Matthew Arnold was a dreamer, he was eager to defend lost causes — such as the reputation of Napoleon ; he was chivalrous to the verge of Quixotry in fighting for impossible loyalties, such as the ethical- emotional view of religion — and so he gave these qualities to the city on the Isis, to whom he was bound by so many and so powerful bands of love and devotion. And if a great poet and a great artist, like Matthew Arnold, went wrong, through personal prejudice, in describing a city he knew and loved so well, how much more danger is there that I shall go astray in attempting to catch the spirit of the Campagna ? So I admit beforehand that my feeling about the character of the Campagna may be woefully wrong : but it is too definite and certain for me not to put it down. I love Rome so much that I may do her mother some injustice. I feel about the Campagna what I definitely denied about Rome, that she is like the Boyg in Peer Gynt. I remember wondering how Ibsen could have written a poem so full of Northern colouring and feeling, in spite of a few beautiful glimpses of desert and sun and warmth, in such a city as Rome. How was it that the greatest city in the world had so little effect on a young man of so gorgeous a capacity for fancy, so striking and prodigal an imagination ? Then when I saw the Cam- pagna — or rather when I thought over the Campagna — I realized that Ibsen had not left the Rome of his sojourn out of the play that he wrote there. The Boyg is that force with which Peer Gynt fights, the force that refuses to fight, that wins by waiting and yielding, by never 128 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE striking back, by nothing save a grim, uncanny, ghastly inertia. And that is the secret of the Campagna. She does not strive ; her volcanic powers are asleep and quiet. Long centuries ago the sea swayed quietly through her coves and inlets, the whole of her kingdom looked much as the Greek Archipelago looks to-day ; then there came some hostile force, and the slow, enormous body of her moved and shook, and the sea was swallowed, beaten, baffled ; and then rose up Monte Cimino, and all the craters by Lago Bracciano, and the smiling, fertile mountains of Lago Alba. That was the beginning of the Campagna. Since then she has swallowed up cities and civilizations, Etruscan and Latin, and still she waits. Outside the gates of the city she lies, quiet, at times vaguely threatening, more often vaguely bland and amiable, but always expectant, certain, secure, knowing that her day will come, that Rome will be hers as Veii was hers, and the dear soil of Latium. And it is this, is it not, which excuses and explains Rome's aggressive and arrogant pride of place and position. Before such an enemy the strongest character, unless weak- ness and torpor be allowed to supervene, must keep up a bold front, a high and haughty courage. While that is preserved, Rome is still safe. And I will not say that the Campagna is right. I will not say that Rome must for certain be hers. But I am sure that the Campagna is enormously positive as to her ultimate victory ; that she dreams of many things, of the long lines of the dead, of the shattered houses, the broken columbaria, the flying feet of beaten Etruscans, the splendid rush of Caesar, the chariots of Imperial Rome, the flight and return of Peter — that she dreamis of and smiles at the small towns and villages which presume to be happy surrounded by her wonder, and forgetful upon her breast, but that she never dreams of defeat. Yet — yet — even so fought the Boyg, and at the end the Boyg was vanquished. In that last gasp of life the great unresisting, conquering force shrivelled up, OUTSIDE ROME 129 when the bells rang out, and the prayers of Solveig and Ase rose to heaven, shrivelled up, with the whispered, choking confession : " He was too strong. There were women behind him." So may it be with Rome ! May the ringing bells, and the prayers of Mary, and Francesca and Catherine, and all the saints avail against that creeping, damping, slimy, horrible death which comes out of the Campagna and threatens not only Rome material but Rome religious and spiritual. The enemy of the Church is not the open and avowed foe, but the contemptuous and indifferent, the calmly secure, the folk who do not take the trouble to fight, who seem so harmless, and who spread the numbing paralysis of death. It was late one evening in January that we felt — at least I am not sure that Dominic felt it so strongly — this astonishing grasp, this hold, unstraining, definite, perman- ent, that the Campagna has upon Rome. We had been for a walk outside the walls. First we went into that amazing basilica where the body of S. Paul lies. I know nothing in Rome that shows her strength so much as this huge building : here, on the site of the old church, burnt down in 1823, Rome of the nineteenth century has put up a temple that will compare well with the greatest efforts of her past. We entered the cathedral by a door on the north side, and as we looked across the huge space of the transept it seemed as though we were already in the main body of the building. Then we walked on, and found ourselves behind the High Altar, gazing at the beautiful Paschal Candlestick which is one of the things saved from the fire, and one of the most precious treasures left us from the Rome that had begun to assimilate the Gothic. The nave with its clean severity, its unbroken continuity of 130 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE line, is to my mind one of the grandest in Rome. It curi- ously suits, not, perhaps, so much the character of S. Paul as what S. Paul has stood for in Christian theology. It has all the intellectual rigidity, the beautiful line of Pauline theology ; and when you get into the cloisters, with their charming curled columns, you are in the atmosphere of those Pauline epistles, which combine so amazingly ingenuity and strength, argument and truth, plausibility and reality. We had an introduction to one of the brothers of the Benedictine convent which serves San Paolo. He had just come out from Nones when we rang the bell, and was quick in his welcome. He took us along the corridors where is preserved the fine series of papal portraits from S. Peter to Innocent I. He took us into his cell, not very severe, more indeed like a room in a college than a cell in a con- vent ; a modification in which, we must remember, the present-day monks are only following the spirit of Bene- dict's rule, which was an attempt to secure a religious life less austere than that of the Fathers of the Desert or the anchorites of the Pillar. He asked us questions about English life and religion, shrewd and sensible questions ; and we signed our names in a little visitors' book that he had. Then came a curious experience. We were parti- cularly anxious to see the library, one of the finest in Rome. Could he manage it for us ? Oh yes ; there would be no difficulty about that. So off we went in search of the librarian. We found him seated in a chair in the ante-room of the library. We were introduced, and received with great ceremony and courtesy. We con- gratulated him on being the guardian of so many and so beautiful books : it would be a privilege if we could see them. Would it be possible ? " But yes, you may see the books any time. They are beautiful — beautiful illuminations; when the sun strikes on them they are wonderful." OUTSIDE ROME 131 He made, however, no motion to rise, and our friend said something to him in ItaHan that I did not catch. Risking all my reputation for politeness, I charged in. " Could we see the books now ? " *' Oh, of course, it is possible ! But they are more beautiful in the morning, when the sun shines. If you will come in the morning " I explain that we have only a short time in Rome, and that it is not likely we can get out so far again. '* Ah ! but the morning is the best time. You will see them better." " We would rather " — at this moment a lay-brother walked into the room and stood waiting in a corner — " see them now, if you could show them to us." " You had better come on a morning ; yes, you will come in the morning." It was evidenth^ hopeless, and we turned to go ; our friend was obviously furious and kept silence with diffi- culty. We paid our adieux with the greatest respect, and began to leave the room. As we left I turned round. The lay-brother had already got a napkin tucked under the librarian's chin, and was beginning to lather him. So that was the secret. It was the librarian's hour for shaving, and he would not let it pass for any forestieri who wanted to see his books. " Ye-e-es, you will come in the morning. Good-a-bye." Well, perhaps one day we will There was another little incident in that monastery which was rather pathetic. We were taken into the chapter-house where the brothers met ; beyond that was the chapel of the convent. Would we like to see it ? " Please," we answered. So Dom Anselmo — we will call him — went on, and paused at the door of the chapel. Then with ever so hesitant and affecting a gesture^-a gesture that said, " You are English ; I have not asked your religion ; but most English have a strange religion and 132 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE do not seem to understand Christian habits " — he offered me holy water. I took it with a " grazias/' and he turned with great swiftness to Dominic, who received it hkewise ; and as the three of us genuflected to the Presence over the altar Dom Anselmo looked, and, I believe, felt, a quite genuine happiness. He must have been rebuffed, or seen others rebuffed so often, that he had begun to consider whether it was worth while to go on with that beautiful act of initiation, the use of lustral water. I have never understood the lines of the objection to holy water. Its use is so eminently scriptural, so thoroughly in accord with the sacramental principle, so remarkably consonant with the sacrament of baptism, that I always wonder that any Christian body should have abandoned it. It is a small thing, of course, but so is uncovering the head on entering a place of worship. And the idea of water as a purifying symbol is more universal than uncovering the head as a sign of reverence. After all, the Jews and Mohammedans worship covered ; in the Catholic Church the bishop and abbot wear the mitre ; during Divine worship some sit, some stand, some kneel, some lie pros- trate : but in all ages, among all peoples, water is the sign of cleansing. And surely to any Christian to have holy water at the entrance to the church is a very simple and beautiful symbol. Just as baptism is the means and symbol of our reception into the Church of God ; by it our sins are removed and our uncleanness purged ; so at our going into the material church we sign ourselves with holy water in recollection of our baptism, and as a pledge to keep ourselves clean from sin. Of course I don't believe that the people who had rebuffed Dom Anselmo in the past had done it from any reason of bigotry or bitterness, but simply from ignorance of what his appeal meant ; but it is odd, isn't it, that the memory of so simple a custom should have deserted those of the English who are not Catholics ? OUTSIDE ROME 133 When we left S. Paolo we went along the Via delle Sette Chiese — the old pilgrim road — to S. Sebastiano, where we descended ad catacumbas ; then we looked at the church, not one of great interest apart from the associations of its patron and of the Apostles. It was in this church that the most debonair of saints, Philip Neri, used to spend the night in prayer. It was here that, on the eve of Pentecost, he received that strange mark of Divine favour, when the globe of fire came down from heaven and appeared to enter his body, by the heart. Rising after his trance Philip found a swelling on his left side, and was troubled with a curious palpitation of his heart. No doubt science can explain this, as it can explain the sweet savour of S. Theresa's corpse, and the further fact that, after S. Philip's death, two of his ribs were found to have been forced apart. But we believe that, whatever physical explana- tion can be given, the happenings in S. Sebastiano were symbolic of the fervour of that heart of his which was so sorry for sinners, so stern with sin, and so full of consolation for the penitent. When we left the church we went along the Appian Way towards the tomb of Cae cilia Metella. What is it that charms us about the Roman roads ? It is not their directness, their straightness, their determination of aspect, for you have these qualities in the roads that run through the land of France, and they do not move me to any feeling save that of cold admiration of their skill, and of horror at the ideal which is so determined to neglect the incidental, and make straight for — what ? A city to be conquered, a people to be enslaved, a town to be oppressed. The Roman road seems to have more purpose, more loftiness of character : it is more decently subordi- nated to the towns and villages which it connects. In France one has a feeling that the hamlets belong to the road, are but kept alive to feed the monstrous stream of modern traffic that flies along the flint way : the Roman 134 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE road is the servant of the people, the servant even of the shepherd and his dog, of the beggar and his sores — the courteous, dignified servant of even such foreign pilgrims as were Dominic and I. And about the Via Appia there is an especial atmosphere of service. After we had looked at the great tomb, it was getting towards sunset. We had each, I rather scoffingly, brought overcoats, which had been a great nuisance to us in the warm January sun : we put them on now, grumbling a little at the tradition, and started to walk back. Quite suddenly the sun fell. In Italy the sun does not leave the earth with that lingering benediction we are used to in England; it does not set, sink- ing slowly, reluctantly, into the warm, rose-coloured clouds, faintly tinged with green, the green of jade, as you may see it setting on the Cornish coast ; it does not glow, red, hazy, beautiful, and then gradually withdraw, a massy ball of fire. Instead of that, at the time of the Angelus, when the bell rings out over the city, some unseen and unavoidable hand plucks the sun out of the sky and drops it behind the swell of the Campagna. The sun is removed. And on that evening, when the sun was taken away, the Campagna began to rise. With a hideous, unhasting celerity, strange smells and strange whispers, and faint, distinct, scarcely visible wraiths of mist flew up all around us. Then it was I felt the special atmosphere of the Via Appia. The edge of the great road — the greatest road in Europe — was a kind of rampart against the maleficent power of the Cam- pagna. For a time it seemed as though we could watch, without being hurt by, the gradual growth from the plains ; then, as we walked ever quicker and quicker, the Campagna began to win. Its influence crept round our feet : chilly, ever so languidly apprehending fingers, smoothed and fumbled at our hearts : damp, evasive, fluttering kisses lingered on our cheeks. Had I been alone I should have run. As it was, we hastened and hastened. I bitterly repented of and withdrew all the mockery I had THE TOMB OF CECILIA MKTELLA OUTSIDE ROME 135 ever uttered about the Roman evening and the dangers of malaria. I had malaria. I could feel it in my bones and marrow ; every sinew and muscle was subtly affected, one's spirits were indescribably depressed. As we neared the Porta San Sebastiano the terror grew worse and worse. All the devils were out and eager for victims. Flittings, soft, decadent, like the tremulous approaches of bats, swayed all round us ; and steadily and strongly the whole soul of the Campagna, the strength, the obscene age and power of it beat against the city walls in the war that is repeated every evening : the war that may be ended one day, but shows no sign of cessation at present. We got back to our hotel just in time for dinner. " It does get chilly in the evening, doesn't it ? " I said to Dominic. " Yes ; let's go and wash." And we washed and changed and were clean from the horror of the Campagna. CHAPTER VII THE ROAD TO GENZANO THE picture I have just attempted to give of the Campagna is a one-sided one. Nothing perpetually and unchangeably presents its essential self to the specta- tor : the gloomiest and the grimmest things and persons have aspects that are positively enlivening and sunny. This is eminently true of the Campagna. If you go abroad on it, unthinking, a little heedless, a little tired of the stupendous strength of Rome, a little inclined to grumble at the fortress-like aspect of the Mother of the West, forget- ful that she who is the Rose of Sharon must also be terrible as an army with banners — you may be caught by the allure of the Campagna. That allure made me feel more than ever that the whole of the volcanic area was really still definitely sealike : that it was an element which natural man never approaches unguarded by charms and defences and wards, never ventures upon save when sufficiently embattled behind the safety of ships and canvas and rigging. Yet, like the sea, it has moods and moments when you can do nothing but play with it. With the sea these moments occur only, I think, when the ocean is perfectly still or triumphantly boisterous : on a long, hot day in July when the tiniest ripple just purls and purrs over the shallow sand and the polished pebbles, when the whole force of the Atlantic breaks on the beach with scarcely more sound than the ripple of a stream in some inland valley, and when the turn of tide is full of a quiet, sensuous peace — then one can play with the sea. And 136 THE ROAD TO GENZANO 137 what else can one do but play on one of those gorgeous autumnal days, when the wind from the north-west — that friendly, quickening wind — overtakes the swiftly-running water and blows and thunders on its surface until the huge masses on top, released from the great weight below, break loose and dash against the grey rocks and the green grass, glad to meet earth, glad to lessen that eternal bond which binds together the huge body of Oceanus. Why, on such a day the sea plays with itself ! High up on the beach are left, not only little pools of water, but great swell- ing, bubbling, golden heaps of the froth that has danced on to land on the top of the waves : and the wind catches them and blows them about like drifted snow, or the flying feathers of some lost, enormous bird. That froth reminds me of the villages and cities that perch on the Campagna, ever so lightly. With them, on a day of sun and wind, one can play ; can forget the tragic background of disease and death and terror ; and live gaily, glad-heartedly, just on the surface of light life — towns like drifted foam ! — and one day the wind will come and beat and beat, and every stone and pillar of them will drop down into the ancient, rugged bosom of the Campagna, who made them in her playtime and in her playtime will destroy. We had two journeys in the Campagna on days when the Campagna smiled, and we went with a friend who seemed to use up all his spare time in being kind to English visitors at our hotel. He was not one of those tiresome people who know exactly what you want to do, and how you want to do it ; who remove from you your own wills and minds and plans and purposes and give you in exchange something infinitely more tiring and less amusing. No ; he had real ideas. He had lived in Rome for years. He did know what one ought to do — it was he who sent us to San Anselmo, and it was he who said, " You must have at least two excursions into the country." I know he wouldn't 138 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE like to be thanked by name here, so I will just thank him, and call him Hislop, a name that has quite suddenly and for no evident purpose sprung into my mind. When he said to Dominic and me that we must go a country walk we wondered where. We discussed possibilities, among them Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. But I had had enough of Hadrian ; so we decided against Tivoli. We were still uncertain when one morning Hislop came and asked us : " Would you like to go to Nemi and Genzano, and drink the good red wine ? " It seemed an excellent plan, for my slight readings in anthropology and folklore made me keen to see Nemi ; and also Dominic and I were both anxious to drink the Campagna wine, the wine so gracious and so subtle and delicate that it will not bear transferring from the hills to Rome. We started off by tram. What an astonishing thing a Roman tram is ! Dominic, who had a positive genius for getting his bearings quickly and correctly in foreign places, was all right on foot in Rome after a day or two — but the trams ! Even I noticed that their sense of direction seemed rather perverted. You could, for instance, when you left the hotel in the Via Tritone, go to S. Peter's in the Vatican by two entirely different tram-routes. This perhaps is not so odd ; but when one has said that these two routes went in exactly opposite directions, the stranger to Rome may begin to grasp the complexities of the Roman tram system. Dominic would always have it that neither of the trams which boasted, in large letters, of having San Pietro and its " fields " as a destination, ever aimed for the goal : that each tram started in a totally wrong way, and was not going towards San Pietro at all. The fact that they ever got there was an amazement to him : he used, as we sat in the creatures, to look anxiously at the landmarks and notice nervously how many entirely unnecessary streets the tram would wander down before it came near turning in the right direction. THE ROAD TO GENZANO 139 Then when we met and passed a tram that was also going to San Pietro he would give the affair up as hopeless, and murmur no gentle words about the Syndic and his myr- midons. I like to think myself that the tramway system in Rome was inaugurated, planned, built and blessed by the cabdrivers ; I noticed that scarcely any forestieri used the trams but ourselves. Occasionally we met an American woman, rather vaguely determined about her destination, and possibly dreaming that she was on the Inner Circle in London, or on the District — lines of which the Roman tramways faintly remind me. But the trams, on the whole, are used by the populace — used for chatting purposes, and to encourage the conductor, who is a family friend, or to enrage the clericals, or to keep warm, and incidentally to get from one street to another. The trams are called in the guide-book " electric," and it is true there is no other visible method of propulsion : but they do not swagger about electric power in Rome. They use it, and I daresay like it — in moderation. The trams are small, jumpy little fellows not unlike those antiquarian toys that bump and sway from Carfax to Summertown : and they are meant to hold, as a rule, about thirty odd people. They rarely started, so far as I noticed, till they had about fifty on board. We learnt in time not to get in early if we were mounting a tram at a terminus. That would mean we should ^tt a seat, which is pleasant ; but it would also mean that, unless we expected supernatural inter- ference, we should remain in the seat until the next ter- minus. They hate wasting space, do the Roman tram authorities. When a tram has got its full complement of travellers seated inside, and also its full number of smokers standing round the driver and conductor, in the charming Contin- ental way, the driver begins to think that he is going to have a good morning of it. He pats his car and consults with the conductor : it is not more than ten minutes after the 140 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE advertised time of starting, and both ridicule the idea of going yet. Besides, there are hardly any people in the tram. More come : some are wedged in, squeezing into seats, on people and baskets and little dogs — which are not allowed ; then a few more men come, going presumably to some kind of business. They stand on the smokers' plat- form. Gradually the platform at the conductor's end is holding about twice as many men as it should : so the new arrivals squeeze in somehow, wade and push through the tram, open the door at the end, and join the little company who are keeping the driver warm. Of course they might have gone straight to his platform ; but this would have shown an uninquiring spirit, a dull, methodical temper. The conductor looks round and smiles happily. Then he pushes and wades through the tram and has another little conference with the driver. Then there is a groaning, and a squeaking, and a swaying, and the tram prepares ever so cautiously to start. Suddenly a cry is heard ; the driver gladly applies his brakes, while the tram is going at the pace of about one mile in four hours, and allows a fat Franciscan friar, and a stout old woman with a large basket, to add themselves to the company. At last a serious start is made ; the pace quickens to a mile an hour, and from a discreet corner where we have been watching the preliminaries Dominic and I come out, and, to the enormous admiration of the other travellers, board the tram while it is in motion and stand securely on the foot- board, the only place from which egress is comparatively simple. For the latter part of our journey to Nemi, however, we went — from the gates of the city — up to Rocca di Papa in one of the new trainlike trams. Thence we started to walk to Nemi, where are the sunken galleys of Tiberius ; and in whose grove, of old days, was the Temple of Diana. It was a glorious day ; a cool wind blew and just tem- pered the rays of the sun that was driving down and ITALIAN SOLDIER THE ROAD TO GENZANO 141 melting the ice that was still caked on the roads. We took off our coats, and paced along the road, which even in Hislop's memory was supposed to be dangerous from brigands — the name by which custom and courtesy dignify the Italian footpad. We met nothing more alarm- ing than three little girls, the eldest of whom was sucking an enormous icicle that she had broken off from under the overhanging cliff. It is a good broad road up to Monte Cavo, and on the way we passed a little church. Hislop, who is a good, though rather — what shall I say ? — " familiar " Catholic, was for passing it, but Dominic and I reminded him that we were strangers, and persuaded him to go in. It was a dark, ugly little building, and on the walls were pictures more reminiscent of transpontine melodrama than of anything religious. One represented a child being saved from imminent death — I forget whether it was from fire or from a runaway horse — but the artist had contrived to cram into the picture a general atmosphere of tragic disaster, of universal destruction, red death, and sudden terror. It was a votive picture and was put up in thanks- giving for a child's life by two grateful parents. The chapel was dedicated in the name of Our Lady of the Tufa in honour of a miraculous image which was found in the tufa at an uncertain date. The story is characteristic of a certain kind of legend, and is worth giving : One day a man was travelling along the road above the Lago Albano, looking at the clear beauties of the water and happily singing on his way into Rome. Suddenly he heard a threatening sound, and, turning round, he saw a huge mass of rock lava which had broken away from the grey sides of Monte Cavo, tearing and rolling and bouncing down to the exact spot where he was. It was scarcely twelve yards away. The traveller stood, horror-struck : he could go neither backwards nor forwards. Death seemed certain. Then breathlessly, swiftly, he appealed to Our Lady. The rock rolled on, unrelenting, and then. 142 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE with a quickness that was as sudden as the stroke of death, stopped, imminent, huge — but stopped, and the man was saved. He went on his way rejoicing and told of the miraculous escape he had had. As usual people doubted, scoffed, explained. " The wine of Albano was heady," *' The sun was strong," ** Yes, and we suppose you had a vision too," " Are you sure it was not the whole of Monte Cavo that came down on you ? " " Come and see, see where," cried the enraged man, " Mary helped me." A few began to follow him. Then more. He leads them up the road, and stands at the spot, and points triumph- antly at the new configuration of the hillside, at the naked ground, the rent grass, and, afar off, the wound on Monte Cavo. " Ecco ! " Doubt gives way to surprise. It is curious : very curious. Certainly something has happened. They pry about in the ground ; a few, greatly daring, begin to poke at the vast rock that lies sullen, thwarted, half buried in the mountain side. There is a cry of warning. A slow, grating, grinding noise follows. The people rush away, affrighted, chattering, full of prayers and penitence : doubts fly to the wind. Still the noise goes on, a great rending crash follows, and the rock splits asunder. What is this new miracle ? What can it mean ? They push the traveller forward. It is his hour : it is his miracle. He must investigate. He goes forward, humbly, anxiously, overwrought. A wild cry, of rapture, of amazement, of anguished joy, burst from him. *' Ah ! see, see ! Our Dear Lady herself ! " There in the middle of the rock, plainly to be seen on one of the fragments, is a picture of the Blessed Mother of God. Cries and hymns of praise greet the new miracle, and the traveller thanks Mary for thus attesting the truth of his story. Soon a church is built on the spot — now served by the Mercedarii, the Religious of the Order of Ransom, who came here from Rocca di Papa THE ROAD TO GENZANO 143 — and as a modern Jesuit puts it : " Whatever be the origin of the picture, it is very miraculous as the numerous ex- votos hanging in the church attest." Is it wrong to be rather tender towards legends of that kind ? There are people whom the whole atmosphere of the miraculous annoys terribly ; they cannot away with the least thing that smacks of superstition, if the super- stition be connected with religion. They will obey the ordinary superstitions of ordinary life, but despise the gentle, less rational side of popular religion. I think they are wrong. I have no patience with relics frankly false, of which there are far too many, and none with feigned miracles; but with the ancient mentality — to use a disgust- ing word — that clothes natural events and incidents with a personal character, I am thoroughly in sympathy. I believe in intervention. I believe in interference. I know I can interfere ; and I do not see why the saints should not interfere. Life only progresses by interferences. Machin- ery is useful — but generally only becomes really valuable in helping life when it breaks down and we are forced to remember that there is a power behind the machine, that there is a god in the car. " The law of the uniformity of nature " is a grand phrase, and very little else : it ignores the men who made the phrase, and the personality of the people who use it ; it should belong only to the deter- minist who uses his will to deny will and condones the opinions he condemns by the mere fact of utterance. I don't knovv^ where the picture in the Church of Madonna del Tufa comes from ; nor does anyone else. But this I know, that whatever of false or foolish may be mixed in the legend, to this truth at least it testifies : that there is a bond greater than law, a unity higher than nature's, a force too real to be impersonal. It testifies that above and beyond appearance there is the real, helpful, eternal relationship between the departed and the living, between 144 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE men and angels, between Mary and her children, between Jesus and His disciples, between God and His creatures. Every ugly little ex-voto — and most of them are hideous — witnesses to this, that the ultimate truth is not force, but love — not uniformity, but personality — not law, but character. And that truth is the key to the Kingdom of God, which, if we find, all the rest shall be added unto us. So in the little chapel, looking at the ugly pictures, and peering at the miraculous image over the altar, I was swept away into thoughts of the great Communion of the Sanctified, the immense commonalty of love which is the treasure of the Christian Church. In a non-Catholic country you might have had the traveller's escape baldly commemorated on a slab or an obelisk, and would have passed with a faint interest, possibly murmuring some phrase about Providence. Here the whole thing is more concrete. I remembered that passage in the Book of the Kings where the prophet displayed the wonders of the supernatural to his halting disciple. ** And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold an host encompassed the city, both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master ! how shall we do ? And he answered. Fear not ; for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man ; and he saw ; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." Every little miraculous chapel or shrine, every crucifix or image is one of the ways of opening our eyes " that we may see." They are windows into heaven, peepholes of the Eternal Kingdom ; and though dust and spiders' webs and dirt may gather round them, nay, and over them, we can still glimpse through the windows the flash of angels' wings, the blue of Mary's robe, or the royal red of the 9?$c THE FRUIT OF THE CAMPAGiNA THE ROAD TO GENZANO 145 wounds of Jesus, all splendidly glowing in the benignant light that beats from the throne of the Eternal. In going towards Nemi we soon struck off the road and took to a path across the green-clad mountains. It was like a warm English summer. The sky was a perfect blue, the sun hot and yet not oppressive, and the turf underfoot, luxuriant from the tufa soil, seemed another thing than the grass that had threatened so dankly when we rushed along the Appian Way. The field-path to Nemi is not too easy to find ; but Hislop knew it well, and we went along merrily and quickly. About a mile or so from the spot where we could look down on the lake, we caught up two Englishmen in perplexity. They were chaffering — or rather one of them was — in poor Italian with a farm- labourer whom they wanted to act as guide. Then he spied us ; he dismissed the Italian, gesticulating and pro- testing, and turned hastily on Hislop. " Do you know the way to Nemi ? " he barked. " Yes." " Well, will you kindly show us ? This man is asking the most extortionate sum for his services." We could not refuse, and so our party was increased by these two men. One was harmless, fairly dumb, and at times, I think, a little ashamed of his companion. The companion was quite one of the most offensive specimens of an offensive type of Englishman it has ever been my misfortune to meet. He was educated ; he was obstinate ; he was rude ; he wore a tweed suit, a bowler hat and a bright green tie ; he was about sixty years of age, and had spectacles. His politics, I should say, were hard-shell Liberal ; his religion may have been Calvinist or Agnostic, and his liver was in a rotten condition. For all the rest of the way he argued and disputed and dogmatized about the way to the lake, and what the lake was, and where 146 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the galleys were, until my patience and Dominic's were exhausted. We told him that Hislop had lived in Rome for years and knew the country round rather better than Green-Tie knew the wretched suburb he should never have been permitted to leave ; but this produced no effect. One might have thought that a man who had lost his way twice, had tried to capture the services of a casual labourer, and was too mean to pay for them, and had then appealed for help to Hislop, might have been content to follow. Not he. This path must be better. That one led to Albano and not to Nemi. And so on, to distraction. I was surprised at the calmness with which Hislop listened to and answered him ; but I think he was just pleased to have so odd and disagreeable a type to study, and ready to submit to a good deal of rudeness in order not to miss the opportunity. When we came in full view of the lake of Nemi even Green-Tie for a moment stayed his babble. We gazed down on the clear, deep water in its crater-like bed, un- touched by wind, undisturbed, now, by anything save dreams of a volcanic past. We could just see the village of Nemi on the other side, and below us was the '' Casa dei Pescatori," near which are the remains of the state barges. More than three times attempts have been made to reach these barges, but have resulted in failure alleviated by the discovery of some charming ornaments. It is not difficult to reconstruct the scenes of rather vulgar splendour when this grove and village and lake of Nemi were the favourite pleasure-places of Imperial courts. The galleys, which sunk some time in Caligula's reign, were possibly not unconnected with the worship of Diana, whose great temple stood in the grove adjoining ; but it is more likely that they belong not to the religion of primitive cruelty so much as to the religion of elaborate and cultured vice and greed, the sublimated selfishness which was the mark of Imperial Rome. Still over the picture of extravagance THE ROAD TO GENZANO 147 and splendour come the redder tones and the more starthng hues of that other picture which I associate with Nemi. Here it was that the priest dwelt who came into his office by death, and yielded it by death ; he who slayed the slayer, and must himself be slain, was the servant of the goddess who ruled here. And I wondered whether the succession was ever accomplished in the sunshine, on such an afternoon as this ; when some gay, triumphant, lithe youth, full of devotion to Diana, fired by the lust of blood and pride, so much greater than all other lusts, swung singing through the grove to where the old priest sat, hugging his privileges, and challenged him, insolently, to the unavoidable combat. That may have happened, sometimes. But too often, I suspect, the one who desired the office was a mean, shifty man with a crooked mouth, and hard eyes, and a foolish mind : and he descended by night into the sacred grove, and crept and crept, and then with one blow let out his predecessor's life in a bubbling, choking stream. As I looked at the grove and the lake, I could see the picture plainly ; and suddenly the figure of the creeping man became like the figure of Green-Tie, and I felt that he had been driven, by who knows what obscure fate, back to the scene where years ago he had slunk into glory and honour through the narrow, dirty by-lanes of mean and secret murder. There were the hard eyes, and the crooked mouth, and the shallow mind ; and I felt that the place was bewitched, that here we were still in the sway of the Campagna, under the shadow of old religions and false faiths — demoniacal powers that were still prevailing. All the modern atmosphere passed away and we were back in the early days when the stern goddess Diana had just been securely enthroned in her new temple ; and I knew I had been at Nemi in days long dead, and had witnessed, from some comer in the temple, the deed that gave Diana a new priest and the grove a new guardian. The place gave me the impression, vivid, inalienable, that 148 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE I had been there before ; that centuries ago, as a temple servant, I had seen the murder ; that I knew the old priest and hated, hated so desperately to serve this new creature with the crooked mouth and agate eyes, who had slain my master. I was roused from my imaginings by the voice of Green- Tie : and his voice effectually broke the spell of the place. He ceased to be actively malignant, the very impersonation of the mean slayer, and became once more the fidgety, argumentative, stupid Englishman that he was. I wish I knew why the English are so often disgusting in their manners abroad. Many English and Americans have no idea of that international courtesy which alone renders travelling possible and pleasant. This creature, for instance, was helpless, lost, definitely out of his way — and yet he browbeat and grumbled and complained of Hislop's guidance, as if he had come with us to oblige us, not himself. And if he behaved so to his fellow-country- men, what would he do with the people whom he would probably call " natives " or " foreigners." I remember an English priest — a man, it is true, of rather stupid character — but a man who was genuinely keen on mission- ary work ; he managed to secure for a special meeting the services of rather a distinguished Indian priest, who was then resident at Cuddesdon : he made a great deal of this. He urged people to come. He besought people not to miss the opportunit}^. And he asked them to come and hear " a native priest." And I don't believe he saw his mistake when it was pointed out to him. Well, it is that tendency of mind which becomes exaggerated on the Continent. The English are — well, God knows what they are, the bene- ficent, bounteous, god-gifted rulers of the Continent — and the rest are " natives," the cooking is *' native," the customs are '* native," and everything is indescribably inferior to what is found in England. And if some English are bad, most Americans are worse. They treat " Yurrup " THE ROAD TO GENZANO 149 frankly as a museum, and the inhabitants as so many exhibits. One day at our hotel Dom Anselmo came to luncheon with us. An American girl, who had been in Rome a week at least, gave a glance at him as he passed and cried out, " My ! Mommer, look at that man in petti- coats ! " It seems incredible. The remark was stupid, so meaningless, so much the kind of remark that a London urchin with any taste for badinage would carefully refrain from making, that I could hardly believe my ears when it proceeded from a woman who had, presumably, enough education to desire to see Rome. But to her Dom An- selmo was just an exhibit : I daresay she thought he ought to be labelled. But I am keeping Green-Tie waiting. He had made a discovery. " I can see the sunken galleys quite plainly." " Really? " said Hislop. '' Yes ; I don't suppose you can see them. They are over there," and he pointed to the far end of the lake. " Ah ! You know," said Hislop, *' I think that is a reflection of the trees. I can see what you mean ; but this water reflects very clearly." Green-Tie became wordy and wordier in his assevera- tion that it was the barges : I fancy he would have sworn he could see the marble and the benches had not Dominic suddenly intervened. " I see the guide-books say that the galleys are sunk at the other end of the lake, just under us. Is that right, Hislop ? " " Well, I believe it is : when I saw the excavations they were working there." " Oh, nonsense, nonsense : I can see them ; guide- books are always wrong. How do you know, either ? " turning sharply to Hislop. ''Oh, I have only walked round the lake about a dozen times ; and can only be certain that there was nothing 150 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE where you are looking at this time last year ; but of course there may be now. Perhaps you had better go and look." At last, I thought, we shall get rid of him ; and we did. His companion drew Green-Tie aside, thanked Hislop, and we parted not amicably (on my part, at least), but without actual blows. We went on from Nemi to Genzano, and there we entered the Trattoria Stocchi della Grotta Azzurra. Of Genzano Baedeker says in his blunt, Teutonic way : " Offici- ally known as Genzano di Roma, the poverty-stricken village presents no attraction beyond its fine situation, high above the S.W. bank of the Lago di Nemi." That is not true. I'm afraid that the representative of Karl Baedeker was, on that trip, a teetotaller. Genzano produces one of the most seductive and pleasing wines that it has ever been my good fortune to meet. I am, I hope, a fairly eclectic drinker ; and I have only one rule. If possible, drink in each country the country's drink. Cider or perry in England — beer is far too chemi- calized for me ; Rhine wine or lager in Germany ; the gay clarets of France — I am happy with any of these ; and I confess that I was looking forward to my experience of Itahan wine in Rome. Alas ! Rome is a terribly poor place for wine. All the wine grown in the neighbourhood — at such places as Genzano — will not bear descending into the valley ; and the other wines, Chianti or Asti, are not much cheaper nor much better than what one can get in England. Still our comparative abstinence from wine in Rome made me the keener for meeting the hill wine in the hill country ; and with the first draught Green-Tie and all his little attendant devils flew away. The wine of Genzano is sweet ; it is sticky ; it is rather heavy — that is, it has all the qualities that I abhor in wine. And yet, as I sit writing this in Cornwall, I feel that the price of a railway ticket to Rome is not too dear THE ROAD TO GENZANO 151 for a litre of it. It is a troll-wine, a wine bewitched, a wine enchanted and enchanting. It is wine. It is what poets sang of, and compared to blood ; and it is the wine for which strong men have bartered lands and money and honour. It is wine, the symbol : the wine that maketh glad man's heart. It is the wine of which the wise man said, " Look not on the wine when it is red," but drink it. Behind its sweetness and stickiness there is a subtle, elective something, a curious yet definite thrill, a volcanic quality which makes it a drink worth walking and waiting for. Hislop was cautious about it. He warned us that it was a deceitful wine ; but it held no traps for Dominic and me. We drank it confidently, with the same assur- ance of being at one with natural things that one can feel when bathing in the sea, or taking deep breaths of an Atlantic nor'-wester down into the very marrow of the body. The wine of Genzano was still reminiscent of the grape ; each litre was a crushed vine, a vineyard in essence. It was full of ruddy life, and glow, and warm memories and natural lives : it had nothing in common with the evil, swinging doors of gin palaces, or the noisy tables of fashionable restaurants. I felt I was drinking the drink of the Georgics, the drink of Horace, and that Lucretius might have wandered out on such a day and not despised a litre of the wine of Genzano. " Sunt Thasiae vites, sunt et Mareotides albae, Pinguibus hae terris habiles, levioribus illae ; Et passo Psithia utilior, tenuisque Lageos, Temptatura pedes olim vincturaque linguam ; Purpureae, preciaeque ; '-' So sang Virgil ; but better than all other wines is the wine of Genzano, the wine of Albano. I know how I would have answered Nasidienus' remark : **• Albanum, Maecenas, sive Falernum Te magis appositis delectat : habemus utrumque. '^ 152 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE * He would have to have brought out his Albano ; and while I have no doubt Horace was always a charming host, and a good fellow, and popular with all — except, perhaps, some few fiery poets — yet I am sure that he knew what he was about when, in sending out his invitation to Phyllis, he put in the forefront of the advantages to be had : *' Est mihi nonum superantis annum Plenus Albani cadus ! -' Our other walk took us more into the heart of the low- lying parts of the Campagna. We left the city by the gate of San Giovanni, and went along the old Via Latina that runs from Rome to Capua. We struck off the Via Latina, not far from where it intersects with the Via Appia Nuova, and proceeded to walk across the plains to the Via Appia. We ought, of course, to have gone along the Strada Militare; but this Hislop would have nothing of. He struck across the country, and before we had been off the road for ten minutes it seemed as though we were miles away from any human dwellings, from any friendly people. Quite suddenly I heard singing ; before I could speak, Dominic said : " Look there, Ellis, how absurdly like the drop-curtain at the Oxford Theatre." Some of my readers may remember that old drop- scene. It portrayed an Italian peasant — always to our mind grossly theatrical, with one foot so out of drawing as to look diseased, playing on a pipe to some damsels ; behind him rose a broken aqueduct, and the whole painting was intended to give you a feeling of sunlight. Well, there w^as the aqueduct — one of those insolent aggressions on the Campagna's pride which she has broken and whose ruins she preserves — and there was the shepherd, absurdly and grotesquely like the shepherds in popular pictures. He had no damsels, it is true ; but he had a dog like a wolf, and a sheepskin flung over his shoulders ; and though iiAl.iAX i'KA.^AM i W U.MAN THE ROAD TO GENZANO 153 he was not playing on his pipe, I am sure he had one some- where : at the moment he preferred to sing, His singing, too, had an abrupt theatrical appropriateness ; it was neither good nor bad — but high, monotonous and suitable to the tone of the great plain where he lived. The Cam- pagna had conquered him : he was her slave, and he sang dreary songs in praise of the mistress who had chosen him. As we approached he made no sign of greeting ; and a low growl, followed by a fusillade of snappy barks, from his white dog, met with no comment or rebuke. Hislop shouted out a " good-day " but the shepherd did not cease from his singing. He who was slave to the Campagna had no words for the stranger from the rebel city who still holds out against the dull, persistent force that surrounds and would swamp her. *' Long avenues of aqueducts sweep grey across the broken green Where nought of Man is ever seen save the great tombs that love constructs To stay awhile the feet of Death, hold back the great and heavy hand That not a Caesar can withstand, that no King ever conquereth. But here amid the fetid grass, when the low vapours rise and swirl And phantom figures lightly curl around the steps of those that pass, We feel the Mother-God of Hell, the Queen of death and bright decay Here holds upon her horrid way, and here alone elects to dwell. Here is the ancient, royal house, the Great Campagna, slow and sure Whose loves for evermore endure, whose bays are deathless on her brows. Cities of old and citizens have sunk into her greedy mouth ; From east and west and north and south her winds blow doom, gods' doom, and men's ; 154 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Yet beyond all abides a home ; from column, shrine and colonnade Jesus and Mary to our aid offer the kingly walls of Rome. Offer the haughty walls of Rome, where above tow'r and pinnacle The buoyant hues serenely swell of Buonarroti's perfect dome." One came out on the Appian Way with a sigh of relief. It was not that I felt the same heavy oppression that had pressed me down to the city gates, and beyond, on the evening I have written of ; but still even in the sunshine — for it wanted an hour or two to Ave Maria — the Cam- pagna held enough of hidden power, enough of that curious, careless strength to make the great road a harbour of refuge. There is one relic on the Appian Way that I have not mentioned ; that I have wondered whether I can refrain from mentioning. I would rather say nothing at all about the Domine quo Vadis, because, of all the things that I wanted to see, none disappointed me so much, none seemed so inconsistent with the story it enshrines. That story everyone knows ; and for our generation it has been retold most beautifully by a living poet, this legend of how " Peter turned and rushed on Rome and death." Nothing is more likely than that the Christian community, terrified and harassed by the Neronian persecution, should urge, nay, compel their bishop to seek a refuge somewhere out- side the city. The story as we have it is no older than S. Ambrose : but we can well believe that Peter did flee from Rome, and that he was met by Our Lord, walking for the second time the Way of Sorrows, turning the great road into the path from Jerusalem to Golgotha, going to Rome to exalt His Holy Cross : and Peter, when he received as answer to his cry, " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " the im- mortal words, " To Rome, to be crucified again," returned to his bishopric and martyrdom. But I did not feel the story any more acutely after seeing the little chapel that marks the traditional place of that THE ROAD TO GENZANO 155 meeting ; and one's emotions are not aroused by the copy of the stone in which Our Lord is said to have left the impress of His foot. The " original " stone is at San Sebastiano, and is no more impressive ; the Jesuit whom I quoted about the picture of Madonna del Tufa says of it : " There is some uncertainty about the authenticity of this relic " — of course there is really scarcely any doubt at all that the relic is as unauthentic as it can well be, and for me, I do not know why, it and the chapel hindered instead of helping the Divine pathos of the incident they com- memorate. CHAPTER VIII ART AND ARTISTS IT is not to Rome among Italian cities that one goes to see pictures. Florence and Venice must always remain the two queens for the art-lover : our awe and love for Michael Angelo, whom to see fully you must visit Rome, is largely mixed with other than artistic feeling, and there is no other artist, save perhaps Pinturicchio and Raphael, whose work cannot be properly appreciated by one who has never been in Rome. Yet Dominic and I got a great deal of pleasure from the Roman picture galleries. There is a lot of rubbish ; there is much which, while far from rubbish, is disappointing ; but there is much which is full of an interest, a charm that nothing elsewhere quite equals. Often enough the charm is that of contrast. Of that we experienced several instances. I remember one in parti- cular. In the Doria Gallery you have one of the choicest of the small collections in Rome. It is choice not only by reason of one or two pictures ; for the rooms contain a fair if never very startling selection of good pictures of different schools. In one room you can see a good Flemish picture, ascribed to Matsys, four representative paintings of Brueghel, a Teniers and some others of the Dutch cabinet masters. None of these pictures is, however, so arresting that we would stay before it in one of the great galleries of Europe : they are minor examples of minor masters. Nor are the Italian pictures, though they include an early Titian and a Raphael, anything out of the ordinary. We 156 ART AND ARTISTS 157 walked through the rooms, not exactly disappointed, but rather unmoved by the regular collection of moderate, sound work, unrelieved by any indubitable work of genius. And then I remembered : this is the home of the Roman Velasquez. We turn down, out of the first gallery, and there, in a smiting and terrible loneliness, is Pope Inno- cent X., Giambattista Pamfili, who reigned in Rome at the same time as Oliver Cromwell was ruling in England. There are two things obviously noticeable about the portrait : one is that Velasquez has, far more than is usual with him, allowed his own character to sweep across the face of his sitter. It is the only noteworthy portrait of Velasquez of a non-Spaniard ; and he has not been able to avoid putting in a quality which reminds the spectator of the dry heights of the Sierras, and the proud blood of the Castilian. Something in Velasquez revolted against the smooth perfection of Italian art, the sleek completeness of Italian masters, and he has made his paint protest, in colour, in mass, in line, against all the cherished conventions of the country in which he was sojourning. And yet there is in the painting another note. I can fancy that Velasquez, not perhaps very consciously, but still quite definitely, approached his subject determined to do him, as subject, no more reverence and attention than he would give to any other man. For him, Velasquez, the Holy Father should be, as so many peasants and kings and idiots were, simply material for paint : and then the character of the Pope accomplished what his office would never have done, and the result is that the Innocent X. is Velasquez's only ** subjective " portrait. It really gives you not only what the painter saw, but what the painter thought. In the curve of the hand, in the steel-blue of that fixing and piercing eye you can read not only Innocent, but Velasquez ; as the great Spaniard went on painting, he became gradually and more uneasily aware that here was a man whom he could not deal with as he dealt with his Spanish kings, and 158 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE princesses and their playthings, that here was a subject with which the veracity of genius was not able to cope by itself, and in a swift, imaginative moment, the painter gave us more of a portrait of a soul than he ever did before or since. As a rule I never feel with Velasquez the troubled horror that overcomes me when gazing at canvas after glowing canvas of a master like Rubens. In Rubens' painting everything is there, except the soul : Blake rightly put the great Fleming in hell. It is not that a man may not, as Sargent does to-day, content himself with externals : it is a legitimate form of art ; and nothing can be more beautiful than, say, Rubens' sketch in oils of a lion-cub at play . But when we find, in this same style, pictures which glow with life, which throb and sway with colour, and yet in the painter's utter failure to catch any- thing of the soul of his subject, are dead — might be so many carpet-patterns — I can never disguise my disgust. A sacred picture by Rubens is like a prayer-book written by Dumas pere. If he were frankly pagan it would not matter so much : but that he cannot be. He has the Christian atmosphere, the Christian bias, and it spoils about half his work. Now Velasquez, who as a master of brushwork can alone be named with Rubens, never gives me that feeling of disgust. It is, I think, because he is more serious. There is about a Rubens a kind of flippant air. " You want a Crucifixion, an Assumption ? Oh yes ! Three weeks ? Very well — my pupils must do a little — but it shall be done.'' When Velasquez was asked to paint a dwarf, I'm sure he answered, " I will try : I can promise nothing." Velasquez treated subjects almost beneath our notice with a high seriousness that Rubens could not give to subjects ineffable and consecrated by centuries of tradition. There is more real religion in the little Infanta at the Louvre, nay, in the series of dwarfs at Madrid, than in all Rubens' altar-pieces and sacred pictures. For in all Velasquez's work there is the determined purpose. ART AND ARTISTS 159 not to be effective, but as far as is possible to speak the truth. And this purpose served him well when he had to paint Innocent. Here his devotion to external truth has opened for him the door to a higher truth, and he gives us a clear vision not only of Innocent X., not only of Giambattista Pamfih, but of the soul of a man. Ever since I had cared at all for Italian art, I had wanted to see that picture of Titian's which, whether it be called *' Sacred and Profane Love," or connected with Venus and Medea, remains one of the most wonderful compositions, one of the most beautiful arrangements in paint that can be found in Europe. I must confess that, apart from the composition, the picture rather disappointed me. It has been painted over, and the colour has nothing like the glow and passion, harmonious and thrilling, which char- acterize the " Bacchus and Ariadne." It has some of the mysteriousness of those beautiful Giorgiones which as a rule the catalogue is forced to describe as " figures in a landscape," but it has, at the same time, a certa '.1 enhance- ment of actuality, a more definite feeling for truth than the best of Giorgione. Giorgione, I feel, is generally painting people in a land that no one ever saw, and painting them with a difference, very slight and yet perceptible enough, from the people of real life : I mean his work passes from poetry into fiction, from imagination into fantasy — there is a quality in it that might almost be called " insincerity " if the painter were not dealing with things on a plane of which it would be absurd to predicate semi-ethical categories. With Titian, and particularly with the ** Amor sagro e profano," I do not feel this ; he is, however indefinitely, yet quite avowedly, trying to express an idea, and he probably had in his mind some quite definite idea. What that was, is unknown, but I am sure that, if he did take as his peg a scene from Ariosto, or i6o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE a passage from the Argonautica, he had an ideal behind that scene of which the mythological idea was but the veil. The title "Sacred and Profane Love" has almost caught the note of the picture, but not quite. It implies that the two loves are separate, are inimical : what I believe is that the picture represents a similar truth to that which Browning afterwards put into verse : " God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Has two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her ! " So the two women in the picture are the two sides of Love : Love clothed, and draped, and fashionable and restrained. Love as he walks in the world : and Love naked, and glori- ous and ardent and personal, Love as he comes in the secret meeting and the silent vow. It is the same woman who sits on each side of the fountain, the fountain which holds the water of life ; and the two women, who are one woman, represent the two modes — of which there are many and so different varieties — with which most of us commonly meet life. All of us, even the simplest and most candid, must at times walk in the trappings and wear the livery of society and the world ; and when we do so it is as well that we should do it with as gracious and courtly an air as possible. Nothing is more wearisome than the person who is so unconventional that he can never submit to the con- ventions of others. But while all of us must pay our tribute to the gods of the majority, of the things-in- common, all of us should try to have some moments in life, heady, breathless, delightful moments when we strip ourselves of every encumbering rag, and bathe gladly and freely and gratefully in the water of the Fountain of Life. Love, as he faces the world, may rightly wear trinkets and be clad upon with gorgeous garments; jewels and gold may be upon him, and in his disguise he will pass safely for one of the minor gods ; but Love when he meets the beloved ART AND ARTISTS i6i must do so naked and proud, bringing with him nothing but the beauty of his own body and soul. When we were at the Borghese Villa part of it was shut up, and we saw only the principal things, arranged together in the larger rooms on the ground floor. One of the pictures that everyone is expected to admire, a picture that is, in its way, a characteristic example of the master, is the " Danae " of Correggio. I have never seen any frank discus- sion of how far such a subject is justifiable in painting. It is generally considered sufficient to state that the motive of such and such a picture is mythological, and the painter has treated it in his usual sensuous style — and then to leave the matter. It scarcely seems a question that can be left there. I have no doubt in my own mind that there is no subject which may not be treated by an artist ; and no subject that is not susceptible of dignified treatment. I mean that to a Rembrandt a woman bathing or a beggar squatting in the sun may give an inspiration that raises his pictures to a reality and a dignity denied to Carlo Dolci or Michael Angelo da Caravaggio. Again there can be little doubt in the minds of people who are really interested in art that there is a vulgarity in Frith and his paintings, nay, in Cruikshank or Rowlandson, which is absent from Degas. I would premise this, then, that all subjects are legitimate material for an artist ; and that a great artist can make a beautiful thing out of the most unpromising or even displeasing subjects. Slight consideration will show that this is true. How often, for instance, do we say before a picture, or after reading a book, " Well, I never thought such a theme could have been matter for artistic treatment ; I should have said the man must have failed." And we feel that it is only success which justifies anyone attempting such subjects. Frequently if one were asked whether a man could portray certain things or in- cidents in paint, one would answer, *' No " ; but frequently i62 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE also, when we find the thing done, and done successfully, one is glad and ready to admit the exception. Now to me the range of mythological subjects which Correggio loved are mainly disgusting and distasteful. I cannot regard the lo, the Dana^, the Leda, or the Gany- mede story as so many pretty myths invented idly by a tired people : they represent only too truly that hideous background of perverse lust and cruelty and horror which lurks behind the beautiful marbles of Athens, and grins at one through the lines of Greek comedy. The horror of the hill, the terror of Pan, the unclean, furtive stories of strange metamorphoses are not idle tales ; they are temble survivals, kept in the lurid memory of the people, of things which once were on this earth, which, God knows, still hide in obscure and ghastly corners. The Middle Ages rightly shrank from them. They put them aside as things of the devil : they could at times treat them with hearty laughter such as they measured out to Satan and his imps ; but they laughed through the certainty of victory, through the assurance that these things were banished, that Pan no longer lurked in the brake, and no Apollo hid in the bushes for the downfall of their maidens. With the Renascence comes the change. We find even Michael Angelo, unless we disbeheve the ascription, meddling with the thing in his picture of " Leda and the Swan " ; and Correggio's graceful, beautiful art recurs more than once to the myths of gods and women. I believe there is a reason for this. The Renascence was insatiably curious ; it was not going to leave any corner of life unex- plored, and its artists were unwilling to leave any part of man's life unrepresented. Now even for the Renascence artists it did not seem possible to represent the most intimate relation between men and women ; and so they had recourse to the myths of Greece and Rome. For it is no use in trying to disguise the fact that such pictures as this " Danae," or the " lo," are attempts to represent what ART AND ARTISTS 163 most people would say emphatically has no business to be represented in plastic, popular art. Now is there any difference between Correggio's *'Danae" and some frankly pornographic picture ? There is, of course, the difference made by the degree of idealization that Correggio cannot help giving his subject ; and there is in this picture an absence of any direct appeal to the lower things of life. But all the same the picture annoyed me more than Michael Angelo's " Leda," more than a frank presentation would have done ; the invasion of the shower of gold only accentuates what the painter has been trying to do, and you have the sin of cowardice added to the original offence of attempting something which should have been left alone. The real reason, of course, is that the passion of love is so far grander than its physical mani- festations ; that, in a way, its physical side is so ridiculous, so inadequate that it is not in the least fit for pictorial representation. Or rather, it is impossible to represent it, because, however wonderful the representation was, it must fall immensely short of the Divine truth which love symbolizes. The act of love is symbolic, and you cannot portray a symbol by repeating the formula in another medium ; to give a picture of a symbol you must use symbolic means, means that are universal in their appeal, where mere actual portrayings fail through being particular and limited. Coleridge years ago said the final word about Bernini : " Bernini, in whom a great genius was bewildered and lost by excess of fancy over imagination." How great a genius it was can be seen in the Borghese, where we have two early works of the sculptor's, the " David " and the " Apollo and Daphne." Even in the '* David " one can see that the artist has not got that high unifying faculty which alone will preserve the taste, without which the most con- summate craftsmanship is useless. In the '' Apollo and i64 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Daphne," done when he was eighteen years old, we can see the clever boy producing with something like rapture a work that at any rate has vivacity and a certain charm. It does not suffer so much from its subject as other works, and we can quite easily forget for the moment the signifi- cance of the fatal laurel, and regard the statue as a joyous and, on the whole, pleasant attempt to breathe into stone the fragrance of spring love. It may be an error in taste, but, apart from these early works, Bernini really inspired me with least disgust when I saw his astonishing and tumbling fancies that are scrawled over San Pietro. I cannot sec that anything has shaken the dignity oi that building : the immensity of it is to me untroubled by the sprawling giants and the hot, unrestful baldachino. Bramante and Michael Angelo survive triumphantly through all the false ornament, and bad accessories, just as Hamlet will persist in remaining poetry even when given us as little more than the libretto of an elaborate pantomime, with an actor manager combining the parts of principal boy and the Widow Twankey. The thing I can least forgive Bernini for, the thing which, were I Pope, I would have smashed and ground into atoms and swallowed by the Jesuits, is the statue of S. Teresa. It is in the Church of Our Lady of Victory, which belongs to Teresa's children, and attempts to represent the saint in the moment of ecstasy. It is quite the worst statue I have ever seen ; it is insolently familiar in its efforts to give a picture of what is unutterable ; and when I remembered that the subject of this piece of hysterical sculpture was the grave vSpanish lady who had the brains of S. Thomas and the love of S. Francis, it was difficult to restrain my anger. It is an insult not only to one of the greatest friends of God, but to one of the most remarkable and sufficient women, one of the sanest and most reasonable creatures that ever adorned this earth and the Catholic religion. Would that the Discalced Carmelites could produce a new Teresa of ART AND ARTISTS 165 Jesus ! She would make short work of Bernini's image of her predecessor. There is one other work that no visitor to the Borghese can overlook, and that is Canova's statue of Pauline Borghese, nee Buonaparte. This stupid, pretty, con- ceited woman makes a dull statue ; but it interested me, as the art of that period always does. Why is it that at a time when life was voluptuous, vulgar, exuberant, exces- sive, violent and subversive, the arts of painting and sculpture should be so generally tame, classical and calm ? Anything less like the shallow little strumpet that Pauline was than this half-draped figure of Canova's can scarcely be imagined ; the statue has neither character nor soul, and Pauline had the one to lose and the other to neglect. The statue has no feelings, no emotion, nothing but a certain calm indifference, eminently unsuited to the family to which she belonged. It is a curious thing that when life was as its wildest art should have been at its correctest : that we have no adequate picture, except in the wild creations of Goya, of the horrible, beautiful, bloody period of revolution and reformation. I expect the explanation of this can be found in the fact that the arts of painting and sculpture had in the eighteenth century ceased to be popular and become an appanage of wealth and rank : also they had suffered, inevitably, from the general false valuation of the rationalistic age, a valuation that made obedience to rules of more import- ance than life, and regularity the only key to greatness. When in the revolutionary period amazing reversals of fortune occurred, their effect was considerably lessened because of one fatal fallacy. The real motive, the real idea behind " Liber te, Egalite, Fraternite " was not that wealth and position were things accidental and indifferent, but that they were things to which the peasant had as much right as the prince. Of course they are not things to which anyone has any right. They are gifts, responsi- i66 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE bilities, toys, pleasures — anything but rights. So when you had the peasant sitting in the place of the prince he behaved neither as peasant nor as prince, nor as " the ideal man " ', he behaved like a peasant who had envied in the prince precisely those things which made the difference that the revolution sought to obliterate : and his envy soon issued in desire, and desire brought forth possession. This is why you get the heroes of revolution, not founding a new art or a new ethic, but encouraging the old art and the old ethic, not in the careless way of habit as did the aristocrat, but in the fierce way of assertion, of defiance, and an arrogant fear. Goya, as I have said, was an excep- tion ; but then Goya was a man of such strong personal genius, of so overbearing a character that he ignored the rules of society as well as the rules of art ; his paint was the reflex of his pride, and his familiarity with courts taught him nothing but contempt and anger. We have to wait, surrounded by a little army of Canovas, Thorwald- sens, Chantreys and Bankses, for nearly a century until, with Meunier and Rodin, we have the new sculpture, as vital and invigorating as was the following of the Goya revolt in painting by the French naturalists. In the Vatican Galleries we had very little idea of what we wanted to see. Dominic was anxious to see the Raphael " Transfiguration," because for years he had looked on a large photograph of the three figures at the top of the picture, the only part which can be given to Raphael. I had no wishes beyond seeking for beautiful things, so we went first to the room that contains the Raphaels and the Domenichino. Directly I saw the ''Transfiguration" I realized for the first time why I disliked that master's larger compositions. In his exquisite easel pictures of Our Lady, and in his portraits, he is following a tradition, and although he introduces an element of naturalism it does not affect the general devotional aspect of the picture : ART AND ARTISTS 167 no treatment, if it retains any dignity at all, can com- pletely mar the idea of the Divine Child and His Mother. Directly, however, Raphael, in his later pictures, works on a larger scale, he fails because of his facility : he was master of many methods, but he never identified himself closely enough with any method in order to make that the natural embodiment of his character and his art. He was essenti- ally an experimentalist, a Stevenson of painting, too inter- ested in style and effect to rid himself of thinking over- much upon effect and style. Of course the lower part of the "Transfiguration" is not his own work, but the design and composition are his, and it is precisely there that Raphael really fails. I do not mean that he is not a master of composition : but he was ignorant of the truth that for a certain type of picture a certain kind of com- position was inadmissible. His one idea of getting motion into a composition~you can see it in the '' Burning of the Borgo " just as well — is by a theatrical method of emphasis. The result in the "Transfiguration" is disastrous. What Raphael intended was, undoubtedly, to have a strong contrast between the sublimity of the scene on the summit of the Mount and the confusion and distress below : what you have is a desperately theatrical crowd below, whose disturbing influence affects the upper scene. The postures of the three chosen Apostles carry on in the most unfortunate manner the gestures of the crowd, and even the figures of Moses, Elijah, and Our Lord are not quite released from the atmosphere that prevails over the greater part of the picture. Another great fault is the master's attempt to mix the realism of the crowd with the fancy that inspired the floating figures on the mountain top. The whole treat- ment might have been conventional, or the whole treat- ment realistic, or fanciful: but the mixing of two styles has resulted in failure. The other Raphael, a picture painted seven or eight i68 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE years before the " Transfiguration," is more pleasing, and yet spoiled rather by too great an emphasis. It is curious how the great men of this period began to forget the truth that you don't want more than one emphatic note in a picture ; that a series of emphases, all on the same point, necessarily lessens the desired effect. The pose of the Divine Infant is, in itself, unnatural and unchildlike, and when we notice the strained effect of S. Jerome to keep his face turned towards his client (and incidentally the public) and his eyes upon Madonna, and then find the attitude repeated in the gaze of S. Francis, in the look of Sigis- mondo Conto, the finger of the Baptist, and the upturned glance of the cherub with the little board, it is impossible to retain a feeling of simplicity that should be inspired by the motif. Of the minor masters, whose work I saw in Rome, I was most attracted by Niccolo di Liberatore, a native of Foligno, who flourished between 1430 and 1500. He is still largely governed by the rather stiff conventions of early painting ; fiis colour, while quiet and beautiful, is not as harmonious as in the later Italian masters, and his composition is on purely traditional lines. Yet there is about his work an individuality of devotion, a sincerity of touch that makes them stand out in any gallery. In the Vatican there are two altar-pieces, one of the Crucifixion of Our Lord, the other of the Coronation of Mary. The former, in its elaborate frame, remains with me as one of the most suitable " liturgical " pictures I have ever seen. It is this, I suppose, which makes one a little impatient with the later pictures. Whatever may have been the faults of the primitive people, they did at any rate grasp one truth supremely well : they knew that no art can stand, or ever does stand, by itself and for itself ; that art has a purpose. So whether you have a Memling, or a Fra Angelico, or a Ghirlandaio, decorating church or grave- yard or palace — you have a man '* doing his job '' with a ART AND ARTISTS 169 definite aim in view. He does not paint an " easel picture " and then give it to a church for an altar-piece — he paints an altar-piece. He remembers the surroundings, the environment in which his picture has got to be seen, and he renders his picture subordinate to its purpose, and by this very subordination achieves a prominence all the more effective for being natural and proper. With the increase in naturalism, and in naturalistic ideas, with the greater desire for veracity and accuracy, artists lose the large truth that used to be their inheritance : they seek independence, and what they gain in that way is lost in purposefulness, in motive and in reality. So I turn gladly to this large, elaborate and yet simple altar-piece, a triptych, framed reredos-wise, of Niccolo's, with its stern lines, its almost grotesque attitudes, and yet a general graciousness, a calm that is lacking in later and more admired masters. There is in the Colonna Gallery another picture of this painter's, a cheerful little votive picture. Dominic and I christened it '* Our Lady of the Poker." In the foreground of the painting is a mother, wrestling with a demon for the body of her child. Her hands clasp the child, which the demon, one of those shaggy, rough, Pan-like beasts, is pulling away by an arm. The demon is snarling and spitting and swearing ; the poor child is howling ; and the mother is crying out to Mary. Up above, unseen by the demon and scarcely realized by the mother, is Our Lady, astonishingly calm ; and in her right hand is her sceptre — so like a modern poker — which with a kind of grave ease she is ready to bring down upon the demon's head. The fuss down below and the serenity above are really amazingly well contrasted : Madonna is dealing with the devil as a good housewife deals with a noxious insect. It is one of the most dramatic little pictures in Rome. We always found that after looking at comparatively 170 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE modern work in Rome we turned not so much with rehef as with a kind of certain expectation to the older things. It is partly that the best side of the Renascence, except for Michael Angelo's works, is not represented at Rome ; and partly because the spirit of the great Christian city breathed more truly and purely in the early days of the Church. A day or two after we had gazed at the Vatican pictures we went to the Christian museum at the Lateran. If the Catacombs, with all their signs of love and rever- ence for the dead, are remarkable, what can we say of that great collection of sarcophagi which is to be seen at the Lateran ? No one who has any interest in the growth of symbolism in art can do otherwise than rejoice in the treasures here collected. The whole of the Old Testament, it would seem, from Adam and Noah to Jonah and Malachi, is ransacked to find in it symbols of Christ and Christianity. It must strike the most casual observer how astonishingly dissimilar was early Christian treatment of the Bible from that familiar in England since the Reformation. Here is no attempt to press literal details, and no effort to insist upon the actual truth of the narrative, but a violent and wholesale seizing of the Old Testament for allegorical and symbolic purposes. I don't mean to suggest that the early Christian, of average education, dis- believed in the story of Noah : but simply that for him the existing and thrilling thing was not that a Jewish patriarch had escaped from drowning, but that he himself, or his son, or his grandfather had escaped from the bonds of sin by the waters of baptism. Or again, no doubt the Roman Christian of the fourth century beheved firmly all the Pentateuchal story of Moses ; hut he believed it in the same way that he believed similar stones in pagan history. The Old Testament was not for him an exceptional record of exceptional stories ; it was no more and no less full of the marvellous than his own secular history. It never occurred to him that a belief in Moses was a part of the ART AND ARTISTS 171 creed : it was not a matter of faith. Where Moses enters the region of faith it is as a symbol, and in the pillar of fire the early Christian saw the bitter way of penance by which sins were forgiven ; and, in the same spirit, Adam and Eve, on another sarcophagi, are represented with Our Lord, who gives to Adam a loaf and to Eve a lamb, in token of the broken bread in the upper room and the crucified Saviour on Calvary. Another feature, that I have mentioned earlier in this book, which deserves the attention of modern Christians, is the bold mixture of '* pagan " and Christian subjects. On one sarcophagus you find a marriage scene represented in the middle panel. The bride and bridegroom join hands, and Juno, with embracing arms, urges them to cherish one another ; at their feet Eros and Psyche are put, as the symbol of perfect love. Then on the right you have Our Lord calling Lazarus from the dead, and opposite is Moses striking the rock, s3'mbol of the hopefulness of Christianity. Such a combination of subjects shows clearly enough what was the early Christian view about the use of classical mythology : the golden rule evidently was to keep everything that was harmless and gracious, and to win it for Christ, just as they tried to win the graci- ous personalities of men and women. " The Harrowing of Hell," on which our ancestors loved to dwell, did not fetch from the infernal regions none but patriarchs and prophets and pious Jews : it rescued once and for all the good " pagan," the poor, defeated deities, and harmless beautiful gods which did exist, though in scarceness, among the revel and riot of the Greek and Roman Olympus. Here, on these sarcophagi, we found not only witness to the truth that Christ came to save the beautiful and the good wherever it might be found among gods or men ; but also that other truth, so peculiar to Christianity, that the whole creation was waiting for the Redemption. The canonical Gospels make no mention of the ox and the ass 172 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE who shared the stable with Joseph, Mary and the Babe ; but in one of the apocryphal Gospels, with a great deal of rubbish, there is the tale of how Mary presented the child for the adoration of the animals : " And when Our Lord Jesus Christ was three dsLVs old, the most blessed Mary went forth from the cave, and entered a stable ; there she placed her boy in the manger, and the ox and the ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib. For those very animals, the ox and the ass, never ceased from adoring him who was placed between them. Then too was accomplished that which was spoken by the pro- phet Habakkuk, saying, Between two beasts thou art manifested." ^ And on slabs, preserved in this museum, you will find the scene in the stable rendered with loving care. '* The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib," and the Lord of all does not disdain, when He receives the homage of theMagi and the shepherds, of His Motherand the angels, to receive too the adoration paid by the animal world. It is a fitting development from that superb sentence in Jonah, where the Almighty refuses to destroy Nineveh because there are in it many ignorant men and women " and also much cattle." In these galleries we had an astonishing shock. After poring over the sarcophagi we left to glance at the few pictures. There is a very attractive Crivelli, fragrant with all that painter's beautiful, individual personality ; and there is a Gozzoli which alone would have made the gallery worth looking at. There did not seem, however, to be much besides these two. Still we went on, and without the slightest warning we were suddenly confronted by an enormous picture of George IV., by Thomas Lawrence. ^ Pseudo-Matthew, chapter xiv., from Tischendorf's text. ART AND ARTISTS 173 Anything more entirely incongruous than this slim, sleek portrait of the " fourth of the fools and the oppressors called George " can hardly be imagined. There was nothing to do but to flee : and we fled. But camiot some- one of influence approach the Holy Father and beseech him to remove this ridiculous creature from such absurdly uncomfortable surroundings ? It is not fair to the visitors : it is contrast with no significance, it is like a filthy oath used in the middle of Mass, or a drunken ditty warbled in the middle of the Ring. It is an offence : it is the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not ; it should be taken away. In the pagan museum there are many beautiful things, but there is one thing which, above all, stands for a system of thought, an ideal of life which, though it has not definitely passed away — for our age has had Goethe — has yet become impossible in the calm dignity and aloofness that were possible by the Ilissus or in the Agora. Sophocles is not the typical Athenian : he is not the typical artist of Greece ; he is not the most characteristic dramatist. But Sophocles does remain the ideal Athenian far more than Pericles or Plato. The Sophoclean calm, the self- possession, the supreme dignity bitten ever so slightly with frost, is just what the heady, chattering, inquisitive, ardent Athenian longed and strained for. He was a man of great physical beauty — as a boy he had led the dancers naked through the streets of his city ; chosen he was from all, for his wonder and youth — he was impassioned, but not passionate ; poetical, yet sane ; religious, yet unenthusi- astic ; an artist, but a soldier and a partisan. He had none of the gaiety or insolence of Alcibiades, the Fox and Sheridan of Athenian politics ; he had none of the impracticable idealism of Socrates ; none of the heart- aching, revolutionary fervour of Euripides ; none of the massive, almost overwhelming devotion of ^schylus. He was avrdpKtjg — a servant of the Golden Mean, of the 174 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE — dare I say it ? — the commonplace. He is chiefest and must remain chiefest of that small band of poets of whom Horace is the other most stately exemplar ; the poets who are on the side of order and law and convention, the poets who range themselves not with the prophet, but with the priest. " He saw life steadily and saw it whole " — it is a daring and amazing claim ; but I am not going to say it is not true. What I will say is this, if Sophocles saw life steadily and saw it whole he did more than a man should do ; anyone who sees life whole ought not to be able to rise from the vision with anything but blinded eyes and a broken heart. Something was lacking in that superb, calm, immaculate figure, and that something was love. Not so many years after Sophocles, there was born the one Man who saw life whole, and the vision led, not to a self- possessed serenity, but to Calvary. It is this Sophocles, the Sophocles whose calm is in- finitely dangerous to religion, that the sculptor has given us. It is Sophocles, the self-possessed, the secure, the great artist ; Sophocles with the mild eye, and the set mouth, that is portrayed for us in the Lateran museum. It is a wonderfully attractive figure : and yet — and yet I would give it for one glance at the troubled, brooding mask of Euripides, or the anxious, human expression of Socrates, or the clouded grace of Plato. I seem to see behind the figure of the most wonderful classic poet that ever lived the gangs of slaves, the cries of the oppressed, whose sufferings alone supported the civilization which made the Sophoclean ideal one that could be realized. It is fitting that we should see this statue in Rome : for it stands, as Imperial Rome stood, for selfishness ; selfishness of afar higher type, no doubt, than Rome's, but selfishness no less inimical to the claims of the Crucifix, to the Cross which was to the Greeks foolishness. To-day there are prophets who offer us Nietzsche and his gospel of Get On or Get Out — I wonder if Nietzsche ever realized that he was preaching ART AND ARTISTS 175 what the American man of business had practised for years — and there are others who affirm that the reHgion of the Goth will supersede the religion of the Cross, and there are yet others who sigh after the Greek ideal. Let them remember two things. First, that Christianity has already met and conquered their favourite panaceas ; there is nothing new in their heresies ; secondly, that the Greek ideal, at any rate, is founded on a lie, and can only exist by a pretence. The suffering of man can never be ignored again, and any religion whose strength lies in ignoring it can never have any success outside a small circle of selected and cultured pagans. I turn from the *' Sophocles," " the type of perfect man- hood," the statue that portrays *' the self-reliance of genius and the unruffled dignity of manly beauty," back to the Man of Sorrows, with His visage marred more than the sons of men, back to Him in whom is no beauty nor comeliness, but who is yet the Desire of all the Nations. CHAPTER IX THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS IT was a hot Sunday afternoon. Dominic and I had no plans, and there was a certain danger of the rest of the day till dinner-time slipping past without anything definite being done. That is not an event which would ordinarily alarm me ; but it was our last Sunday in Rome, and I knew there was something that I wanted to see, something that occurred on Sundays, which I had hitherto missed. I suddenly remembered. *' The Disputa at the Santi Apostoli." " Of course," answered Dominic ; and we got up and made straight for the church. The present building is not, in itself, of much interest : the restorer and the rebuilder have had their way with the temple of S. Philip and S. James pretty thoroughly since the days of Julius I. There is a beautiful tomb to a scandalous cardinal, Pietro Riario, nephew to Sixtus IV., and those curious in ecclesiastical history will linger for a moment by the tomb of Clement XIV., that ill-starred Pope who abolished the Company of Jesus, and shortly afterwards succumbed to a mysterious disease. I wonder when it will occur to a Pope that what is really the matter with the Jesuits is just this : they, externally the most cultured, the best educated, the most civilized of the great orders, are by their discipline and training only fit (and what an exception it is ! ) to deal with savage peoples and backward races. They are the only order who have made an effort to keep the people of Christ in leading-strings ; to administer milk and nothing but milk to the adult 176 THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 177 Christian. Their taste in art, their taste in music, their taste in devotion, their taste in theology, their taste in ethics are all characteristic of the savage or the boy : they are quite unfit to deal with the world and worldly people, because they deal with those difficult problems by dallying with them, by compromise, by every method most disas- trous to the Church and most fatal for the poor sinners they would rescue. The simplicity, the honesty, the direct- ness, the stupidity of the Jesuits are what has made them the greatest missionary geniuses in the world, and one of the greatest failures in dealing with civilized and complex people : in the savage they have material which they recognize as inferior to themselves in moral and spiritual calibre, and so they treat it humbly and Christianly ; in the men of courts and camps they have had material which they suspect of being superior to themselves, and have treated it with pride and haughtiness mixed with that occasional deference which has made their name a byword for deceit. The dear, stupid people, with their rather low view of sarcamental life — even Xavier used baptism as if it were a charm — need hardship, and poverty, and misery to make them thoroughly happy and successful. They are the schoolmasters of the world ; and they have never yet learnt that most of Europe no longer needs a schoolmaster. So, if I were Pope, I would bid my black colleague keep his children on the mission field, and among simple people, who will be impressed and pleased by the jolly little exhibitions of mundane knowledge in which the society has always loved to indulge. That is where their real work lies, and not among highly educated and weary nations who want teachers that have not learning, but wisdom, and a theology springing not from law, but from love. In this church in 1766 there was a scene that has its own pathetic interest for English and Scots. James III., M 178 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE King of England, Scotland and Ireland, had lived in Rome, feebly, and in exile, had died in the Palazzo Savorelli, and after his death the body was clad in royal robes, the crown was put upon his head, the orb in one hand, and the sceptre in the other, and the King of England lay in state for five days before the High Altar of the Santi Apostoli. In England itself George III. had been saying, " What ? What ? " from the royal throne for six years, and was to continue king de facto for another fifty-four ; it was twenty-one years since the year of Prince Charlie and the battle of Preston Pans, the entry into Carlisle, and the triumphant march on London ; twenty years since the victory of the Butcher and the soaked field of Culloden. Yet in spite of the decisions of Parliament and the army, for a brief five days James III. reigns as king ; king in death, and that reign may be taken as significant of the end of the Stewart dynasty, a dead d3masty : and much as we may dislike the Germans who strutted in the palaces of the Tudors and the Stewarts, the Plantagenets and the Normans, yet — a live dog is better than a dead lion, and we cannot leave the destinies of England in the cold hands of the crowned corpse in the Church of S. Philip and S. James. And I cannot think that, of the Scotch and Irish and English students from their various colleges, who passed before the body of their sovran, there were many who had any definite or vivid hope that the future would place upon the throne of England that " bonnie Prince," Charles Edward Lewis Casimir Stuart, who was saved from the English by Flora Macdonald, only to die in Rome in 1788 as Count of Albany ; nor did they hope, I think, that Henry, Cardinal Duke of York, Henry IX., as the inscription on the tomb, erected at the expense of George IV., calls him, should ever reign save as titular sovran of his people. Yet there is still in Rome one living link with the Stewart family. Every Saturday, in the Church of S. THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 179 Maria in Campitelli, or Our Lady of the Portico — as it is also called — at eleven o'clock prayers are said for the conversion of England ; this devotion was founded by James III. in the year of his death, and since then " a perpetual intercession " has arisen here every week that England may be converted. When we wonder at the revival of Catholicism in this country, and discuss its causes, do not let us forget the little prayer guild founded by the Old Pretender. There are not many of his actions for which we can claim virtue or beauty ; but this surely is memorable, this which occurred to him just as his own feet were pressing towards the river of death — it is pleasant, is it not, that he should remember his country, the country of which he was bom King, and should ask that prayers should be made for ever, not for the return of the Stewarts to England, but for the return of England to the faith ? In the cloister of the church there is a memorial of a great attempt in the history of the church. You can see a tomb inscribed with the name of Bessarion, Archbishop of Nicea, Cardinal. He was one of the orthodox bishops who came to attend that council, first meeting at Ferrara and afterwards at Florence, that sought to heal the rent in the robe of Christ. As we know, the success of Eugenius, celebrated on the bronze doors of San Pietro in Vaticano, was neither a solid nor a lasting success ; Bessarion was too hopeful, Eugenius was too optimistic, and the tomb of the Greek archbishop remains as the witness to a fine effort nobly made, but made in circum- stances that almost ensured its failure. There is another name connected with this church which overshadows all the rest : the name of Michael Angelo. He had lived, while in Rome, in the parish of the Santi Apostoli, and when he died, on i8th February 1564, his body was taken there and buried. But on his deathbed he had turned from the Rome of his triumphs to the i8o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Florence of his affection. *' Take my body," he besought his friends, " take my body to my own most noble country, to Florence, to which I have always had the most tender of love." So his nephew demanded the body back, and did it up in a bale " such as merchants are wont to use," and so conveyed it to the city on the Arno. There it was received by all the painters, and sculptors and architects ; masters of all the arts greeted their master in every art, and they carried his body to the Church of the Holy Cross, and buried it there. And all that the Santi Apostoli retains of his memory is a tablet by Jacopo del Dorea, to testify that here was once put the corpse of the man whose genius is for ever knitted with the city and churches of Rome. Dominic and I looked at these memorials, and at the ugly baroque ceiling of the tribune by Giovanni Odassi, while we were waiting for the Dispute to begin. We had arrived just after two, and saw no signs of any service ; nor could we discover any notices from which we might glean the hours of the offices. However, just as we were wondering if we should have to give it up a priest appeared out of a vestry ; I asked him in the best Latin I could muster whether there would be a disputation this after- noon, and if so, " when." He answered, obviously pleased at being accosted in Latin, that it was at 2.45, and so we prepared to wait. It was well worth waiting for. Exact to the minute there came two priests, and approached the platform which stood on the north side of the nave, towards the chancel. One was large, imposing, imperial, solemn in appearance — a man of presence and dignity, about fifty years old or so ; the other was short, sparrow-like, full of innumerable wrinkles, feeble, and very old in appearance at any rate, yet incredibly lively. There was a good congregation in the church by now ; and there was a movement of pleasurable expectation when it was seen who the two protagonists were. They THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS i8i sat side by side on the little platform ; and the big man started off with a rotund, serious delivery of an orthodox sermon. He was going to speak, he said, about mysteries. There were many mysteries in the Christian religion. There was the mystery of the Holy Incarnation ; there was the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and so on. His voice poured out just such a sermon as I have frequently heard at home, only rather more oratorically delivered, and rather more neatly thought out. All the time he was talking his companion was not idle. The first five minutes or so were not interrupted by speech, but by the most inimitable face play. The little, old, wizened man winked at us ; he screwed his face up ; he shrugged his shoulders ; he put out his tongue ; he jerked contemptuous thumb and frivolous shoulder at his large colleague, who ignored all these impertinences and went gravely on. Suddenly he was interrupted verbally. " And chese mysteries of which you babble so much — what are they ? What is a mystery, eh ? " Then, while the big man was fumbling for an answer, his opponent darted eager hands and expostulating words at us. ** A mystery ! Phew ! A mystery, what is a mystery ? Isn't it just like these religious people ? If you ask them what an}^ thing means they say, * Oh, it's a mystery.' Why can't you be like the men of science ? " Here the big man interrupted. ** Science, too, has her mysteries. Not alone in the heart of religion is God revealed ; there are things which science knows but cannot explain. Who can explain the electric telegraph, the telephone. Who can explain ? " " Bah ! who wants to explain the telegraph or the telephone ? " (with a ridiculous imitation of the other's sonorous boom). " They work. We know we can trust them. They are good. We use them. Can you say that for your religious mysteries ? Do they work ? What earthly good are they to anyone, anyhow ? Tell me." i82 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE " I will tell you. I will tell all these people whom you are trying to mislead. Take one of our Catholic mysteries. Take the mystery of the communion of saints. Many of you in this church can testify willingly and gladly how often you have been helped and assisted when you have called upon the aid of God's most blessed saints. How powerful and availing is the intercession of the Holy Mother of God ! How many wonderful blessings have been given us at the prayers of S. Philip and S. James, and at the request of S. Augustine ! Oh ! how thankful " " Phut ! Wait till later ! Then you will see how much use the saints are ! When you're down in hell, hot, burning, and you're crying out, ' Acqua ! acqua ! ' plucky lot of use S. Augustine will be then ! And I don't suppose that it'd be water that you'd be crying after, either ! " This last attack, so irrelevant, so unscrupulous, is too much for the gravity of the big man, who breaks into a slow smile before answering his opponent. Unfortunately Dominic and I had to go, as we had some friends to meet about half-past three. As we strolled away, Dominic, who had followed the dispute more accur- ately and even more attentively than I, began to eulogize the custom. " How I wish we could do that in England ! You can't think how tired we get of the ordinary sermons." " I can," I intervened, governed, I suppose, by the spirit of the wasplike little creature we had left on the platform. " Oh, listening, that's nothing ! You can sleep — or say your prayers, or even try to get some good out of a bad sermon. What's your favourite quotation to prove the proper pronunciation of patience ? " " ' The worst speak something good ; if all want sense, God takes a text and preaches patience,' '•* I murmured. " Exactly. But what about the preacher ? Do you THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 183 imagine that he never longs for interruption, for argu- ments, for interest ? Can't you see how bored we get of the sea of dull, blank faces, and gaping mouths, over which our words — rotten as they are sometimes — swirl hope- lessly ? Fm sure it would be good for everyone if we could have the disputation in England. Why, look at the congregation. The audience this afternoon was as pleased, as lively, as entertained as if they were at a theatre. They followed the discussion eagerly, keenly. I don't say that there was any very exalted argument to follow : a good deal was just fooling, but what good fooling ! " " Yes ; but do you think they get any religious good ? " " Of course they do. They learn for one thing that religion and theology are not things which can be swallowed whole ; that they have no value until they are assimi- lated and to some extent understood. Most of our people at home— you'd know if you'd ever prepared anyone for Confirmation — are only anxious to be stuffed : they don't want to think or to argue. They just want to be told." " That, I suppose, is why we have so many Dissenters and Protestants." " Oh ! there's no use your trying to be sarcastic ! As it happens, I think you've hit the right nail on the head. The essence of modern Protestantism is lack of thought, combined with plethora of feeling. That horrible heresy that a man was saved * by faith ' if he ' felt ' he was, has corrupted English religion most terribly. You have all the people, people like Henson or Clifford or Campbell, who talk beautiful and vague things about the evils of denominationalism ; all they mean is that they hate to be forced to think clearly, definitely. They are the counterpart of the old impressionist school of painting, that insisted on seeing all things in a haze, and free from outline. They are the advocates of myopia, the adher- ents of astigmatism in theology. Bless you ! Do you i84 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE think Henson would ever sit up on a platform and have his Protestant platitudes ridiculed to pieces in front of his con- gregation by the sharp wit of some Christian whose Catholi- cism had sprung from a healthy scepticism ? Of course he wouldn't. He doesn't want to think : he wants to preach. All the English do. You at least ought to be able to appre- ciate that, for the Welsh and Irish at any rate can fight." " But you've just given me the objection I wanted. * Scepticism,' you said : don't you think for a priest to mock the facts of religion in pubhc is a very dangerous thing. Isn't he likely to sow the seeds of doubt ? " " I hope so. It's just what we want. We don't doubt enough. I don't mean I'm advocating the kind of bosh which you can hear based on Tennyson's -- ' There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. '- That kind of doubt isn't doubt at all. Those doubters are merely the people who are sure that Catholicism is wrong, and hope vaguely that Our Lord is God : very certain that you must not teach dogma except their own dogma that none is necessary. When I say we want more doubt I mean real, humble, inquiring doubt. After all, we do know precious little about the things that hit us most. We have a revelation about the main truths of religion and we believe it. But * What is death ? ' * Why is pain ? ' ' Whence is evil ? ' — those are the questions which plague us still, and which we probably shall not answer, though we shall always try. If a man starts with real modest doubt he will go on and inquire, and pray and seek — and then we know he will find. From the seeds of doubt springs the fruit of faith. Are there any names in modern Christian theology more uplifting than Pascal and New- man : and was not each of them naturally sceptical ? " " You may be right ; but all the same I can't picture you on a platform ! " THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 185 " I ! I should be no earthly good ; but there are lots of priests I can think of who would be splendid. And as for congregations ? I hardly know one which wouldn't be benefited." The Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, or in Capitolio, is full of small, pleasant interests. I am glad that it belongs to the Franciscans, because it seems suitable that the order whose founder started the devotion of the Holy Crib should have charge of the church which has the most famous and miraculous image of the Bambino in the world. I am a heretic, I'm sorry to say, about the Ara Coeli Bambino. I don't like it. It is not nearly so beau- tiful as that which Prince Porlonia gave to the Church of S. Andrea, and before which pass all the rites of the strange East. Still I would not venture to doubt the affection which this little image evokes in the hearts of the Roman people, and more particularly of the Roman children. And the story of the Bambino has its own interest. It is not old, as many fancy it to be. Early in the seventeenth century a Franciscan, visiting the Holy Land, took some wood from the Garden of Olives, and from it carved the image of the Holy Child. On his way back to Rome his boat was wrecked at Livorno ; but the Bambino was kept safely, and brought to Ara Coeli in 1647. Since then it has been one of the greatest objects of devotion in Rome, and has been carried to innumerable sick-beds, and consoled countless mourners : so, plain and ugly as we may think the little image to be, we can hardly fail to venerate it, sanctified as it is by so many tears of gratitude, the recipient of so many cries of sorrow. We saw two ceremonies connected with the Bambino. One afternoon, during the Octave of the Epiphany, we went into the church, and heard there the shrill voice of a girl, preaching, or rather declaiming, on a little platform. In the Chapel of the Epiphany lay the Bambino, with the 186 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE ordinary scenery that may be seen in any church at Christmastide : opposite this shrine was the platform, and there, with an abundance of gesture and a great free- dom of speech, was a Uttle girl addressing herself fervently to the Holy Child. She had just finished when we entered, and she slipped down to give place to another. The new-comer was evidently a rich little girl. About twelve years old, she was dressed entirely in white, silk and fur, she wore white stockings and white silk shoes ; had white gloves, and a large white hat with a white feather curled round the brim. She had no nervousness, and delivered her little sermon as if she were " speaking a piece " at the annual school treat. There was just the slightest effort at acting, but while she was not stiff, her manner could not be called natural. Towards the end of her speech she made a pretty little gesture, half- genuflexion, half-curtsy, to the Holy Child and stepped off the platform. The next little child — another girl — was in a great hurry to get up. And here we saw one of the pleasantest things of the whole ceremony. The new-comer was a poor girl, dressed neatly in black, but with holes in her stockings and a genuine air of real poverty. As she was running up the steps to the platform she stumbled, and the Little White Girl, ever so prettily, took hold of her hand and steadied her, and then, with hardly a moment's hesitation, instead of going off the platform, the White Girl brought forward her poorer sister, still holding her hand, and, as it were, with a little happy, friendly gesture, introduced her to us — and so disappeared. I had been grumbling a little to Dominic about the White Girl : I thought she was ** bossy " and too " swagger," but this pretty act of kindness made me feel very ashamed of my criticism. The act was done without a suspicion of patronage, and it was plain that the poor girl was pleased by it. Her speech was wonderful : full of natural dramatic fire and THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 187 concentrated devotion. She addressed the Bambino with tears in her voice and eyes ; she had one of those exquisite silver voices of youth which, while passionless, have in them something deeper and higher than passion, some- thing stronger and more intense than the high and deep notes of maturity. She exclaimed to the Bambino her love for His birth, and the joy she and all children had in the story of the starlit night, of the wondering shepherds, and the attendant angels. She besought Him to help them to be good, to help them to be to their mothers something of what He was to His : and then with a final, beautiful groping gesture — ripae uUerioris amove — she stopped and left the platform. The next and last speaker was a boy — such a nice boy of about ten, or even less. He had the bright alertness of the clever boy, and something I thought of the boy's natural feeling about girls. His attitude, the first minute or two of his speech, was as if he said to the Bambino : " Of course they weren't bad, those girls : but it takes a boy to understand, really, doesn't it ? I know what you must have felt like — I've got a young brother of my own." There was the most delightful mixture of freedom and reverence, of devotion and dependence : the boy seemed unconsciously to have solved that most mysterious of all theological problems — the double nature of Our Lord. He could worship him as God, and speak to Him as one boy to another. So I imagined might the young John the Baptist have spoken, and the son of Zebedee, who afterwards laid his head on the Master's bosom. As we left Ara Coeli Dominic and I agreed that it was such a scene as we had just witnessed which explained in some degree the power of the Catholic Church over children — when the Holy Family and the Holy Child are left in the foreground of children's religion, you do encourage a spirit of natural and loving devotion which is much harder to encourage in a cult where the early life of Our Lord is i88 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE mainly a matter of the past, a pale record of Palestinian days. It is easier for the children of Rome to see as the poet saw : " I saw a stable, low and very bare, A little child on a manger. The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care, To men He was a stranger. The safety of the world was lying there And the world's danger." On another day — the Octave of the Epiphany — Dominic and I went again to the Ara Coeli. It was a brilliant afternoon, and the crowd was beginning to fill the streets for the great procession, which would end with the blessing of the city by the Holy Child. We went into the church by the south door, up near the High Altar, then we walked there and paused for a moment before the stable where the Bambino still lay, waiting for His procession. Then Hislop, who was with us, warned us that if we wished to see the procession outside the church we had better go out now. So we went out of the west door and found our- selves on the top of that giddy flight of marble steps which were moved here from the Temple of the Sun on the Quirinal. The space at the top was already nearly filled. People were pushing and scrambling to get into good positions : Americans, with sharp accents and tiny Kodaks, were setting themselves firmly against the advancing streams of people who were still scaling the steps. There was a minute or two when things might have become awkward : some stout, rough students from the Scotch College came rushing up the steps, and met a small body of people who were coming out of the church : in the end, room was found for all, and we waited for the first notes of the hymn. In a moment the procession began to emerge from the front door, incense pots, banners, candles, crucifixes, a long double row of Franciscan brethren, then a row of THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 189 Franciscan tertiaries, and then the priests — and one of them, in a stiff, rather handsome cope, carrying the Bambino. Somehow a way was forced through the crowd, and at last the small group of priests in their vestments was securely gathered at the far corner, looking out over the city straight down the steps. There was a moment's silence : even the Americans stayed from talking, and the priest raised the image of the Baby on high and solemnly blessed the city. The poor little image was glittering with stones — which rumour whispers are false — and swaddled in silk and satin ; and the strange, hard face had none of the mystical depth of childhood : yet as I stood there, and received the blessing, it was not difficult for me to get back to that time when Mary lifted the Child in her arms that He might bless the Magi and the shepherds ; or that other day, beneath the hard sky of Egypt, when the Holy Infant cured Dismas under the shadow of the nameless Sphinx. It was not difficult to remember that here at any rate was a mystery of my religion boldly and definitely set forth, a mystery defiantly and persistently contrary to human knowledge and learning — that the hands of a babe held the universe, and that a woman suckled the Creator and Saviour of the race. So long as Rome upholds to her children the mystery of the cradle and the shame of the cross, so long will she win sinners to Christ ; and the religion that tries to minimize the meaning of Bethlehem and ethicize the significance of Calvary may live for a while in the airless study, but will never survive in the world of pain and suffering and cruelty. Rome does not undervalue the pomp and the power of life, but in reality she knows that, far more important than all her power, far more true than all her pomp is just that blessing of the Child, just that stretch of the arms of the cross, which spread from eternity to eternity, and yet have no other source than the heart of Jesus. She does swaddle the Bambino in ungainly igo A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE garments and cover Him with jewels and gold and tinsel, yet she never forgets that it is the Bambino which she is decking, and that He alone is worthy to receive all of riches that the world can produce ; and I confess to have listened with very little patience to a woman who turned after the blessing to her friend, and said, " How disgraceful, how absurd to cover a little doll like that with such expensive things, and to put all those jewels there too ! " I looked at her hands, on which shone opals and diamonds ; I looked at her clothes, expensive and fashionable — and I mur- mured to myself, ** How wasteful to deck that collection of dust with so many beautiful things ! " I hasten to say that I do not object to either image being decked ; and indeed I rather prefer, as a matter of taste, to see the human image of God covered with gorgeous garments and jewels — but the thoughtlessness of her objection was too much for me at the moment — at any rate the Bambino of Ara Coeli will outlast her poor body, and when all of us who were there are scattered dust the little image of olive wood will still be blessing the capital and the city, from the top of those steep marble steps that once led to the Temple of the Sun, and now lead to the shrine of the Altar of Heaven. Unfortunately the Franciscan convent that used to be near the church has been pulled down to make way for that glorification of Victor Emmanuel which, I suppose, nothing can now prevent, though Roman carelessness postpones it. It was notable for having the room of S. Bernardino of Siena, that friar whose fuliginous sermons furnish so much awful material to the modern decrier of mediae valism. S. Bernardino is commemorated in a chapel which has frescoes by Pinturicchio ; but they are not by any means the best work of that master, and have also been a good deal restored. In spite of this, however, they do suit the character of the church, and the life of the THREE ROMAN FUNCTIONS 191 saint ; there is evidenced that singular childlike charm of which I shall speak again when we come to Pintu- ricchio's other work in Rome. For English people and lovers of literature the church has the peculiar interest of being the place where Gibbon first conceived the idea of writing the " Decline and Fall." It is curious to think that the cynical historian evolved his scheme here in a church which flaunts triumphantly all that he most disliked in Christianity, all that he was most eager and least able to explain. The name of the church covers a disappointing legend, just as the altar in the transept chapel (the chapel of S. Helena's tomb) encloses an ancient altar — the Ara Primo- geniti Dei. The legend that Augustus had a vision in which Our Lord appeared and disclosed His claim is obvi- ously a story, invented probably to explain some historical difficulty. It seems likeliest that some genuine Roman altar was found with a half-legible inscription (say, " Fidei Aug. Sacr ") which the discoverers misunderstood and read " Filio Dei Aug. Sacra." ^ Augustus would have in his favour his connexion with Virgil, whom the Christian mind early identified with the inner truth of its religion ; and the emperor who honoured the writer of the Pollio eclogue might reasonably be supposed to have Christian leanings himself. But one would not have the name altered. We may interpret afresh. For all modern Christians it may stand for the truth that the altar of heaven stood in the stable of Bethlehem, that we have no need to go further than to the Mother and the Child if we want to cry out, " How dreadful is this place, this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." ^ See The TahUt, 26th March 1904. CHAPTER X THE LATERAN AND S. MARIA MAGGIORE IT was S. Francis who founded and fostered the devotion to Our Lord's infancy, by the dehghtful custom of building cribs in the churches at Christmastide ; and it was the order of the Poverello which founded and encour- aged that other devotion to Our Lord's humanity, the Way of the Cross. The stations can be vulgarized by bad pictures, and made commonplace by too mechanical a repetition ; but there are few common devotions which have, in so high a degree, the power of rousing personal feeling and awakening individual sorrow and repentance. The danger about any form of revival, the over-eloquent sermon, the almost too poignant appeal, the sensational excitement of emotional hymns is that the feeling aroused may not be individualized at all : it may remain vague, floating, something shared with the crowd of which one is a part, something that we catch in the atmosphere of the church, keep for the glow of half-an-hour afterwards, and then lose promptly in the round of daily life. To use the ordinary terms, these modern devotions and revivals and awakenings are too subjective : the worshipper's mind is forced back upon his own sins and misdeeds, upon his own necessities and hardships, upon his own griefs and troubles ; in the devotion of the Way of the Cross self is incidental. The mind and heart are both dwelling on the agony of the Divine Victim ; repentance for the suffering caused to Him is the only personal feeling that is allowed to supervene ; there is none of that comfortable and conscious self- 192 THE LATERAN 193 condemnation which is so common a feature of the revival- ist crowd ; none of that curious interest in sin which encourages morbid introspection. One of the greatest safeguards that the Middle Ages possessed against undue subjectivity in religion was the worship of relics, and the devotions to particular aspects of Our Lord's human life, and even to particular parts of His body, as the devotion of the Holy Face, or of the Five Sacred Wounds. For it is clear that when you have the mind dwelling vigorously and fruitfully on a mystery that so far transcends any ordinary human experience the risk of exaggerating the importance of one's own spiritual life, one's own spiritual troubles, one's own petty doubts and despondencies becomes infinitesimal. How often to-day does one meet religious people whose religion is a source, apparently, of worry rather than of consolation. That means, as a rule, that they have the temperament — by far the most usual temperament among men and women — that demands some very definite object for religious faith, and for feeding the religious idea, unless their devotion is to sink back upon itself, poor and wretched, perpetually rebreathing the old air, while the soul dwells on the problem of its existence rather than on the beauty and mystery of the experience of God, His Mother, and the saints. Such people are not given enough to do. They think overmuch. They worry overmuch. Instead of taking their worries into religion they take their religion into their worries and lose it there ; they never achieve the happiness which is the Christian's right, the calm which is the Christian's true heritage. Of course, there are some others who are satisfied without objective religion — or rather who have sufficient strength of imagination and character, a strong and lively faith enough to feed upon a directer vision of God than is possible for most mortals : but these are the exceptions, and it is not for the excep- tional that a church should regulate. 194 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE I was led into this train of thought when I went through the devotion of the Scala Santa. This rehc is one that causes a good deal of heart-burning to the historian. For myself I do not think there is any reasonable doubt that the steps were never nearer Pilate's palace than they are now ; and I would suggest that when the devotion began, probably at the time of the Crusades, no one thought they were the original stairs up which Our Lord went. It was a common mediaeval habit to bring back from the Holy Land little memorials of the sacred places ; a bit of earth from the Garden of Gethsemane, for instance. Now, although it is difficult to trace exactly when first the Scala Santa was erected, it is unlikely that it was before the eleventh or twelfth century : what more natural to suppose than that a pious Roman brought back from Jerusalem four or five chips of stone from the staircase of what was shown as Pilate's palace, and that these were then enshrined in the steps put up in the Lateran ? The rest would follow easily enough. Endless confusion and a good deal of mockery has followed from the habit of calling a head-reliquary (which frequently contains a tiny splinter of bone) Caput Joannis Baptistae, or Laurentii or Thomae : the original title is just " De Capite Sancti ." In the same way these stairs, containing the relics of the stairs at Jerusalem, gradually became identified with the steps themselves. But why put up a staircase at all ? Simply because someone, possibly the Pope, saw here an opportunity for a new devotion. Just as the Franciscans had popu- larized the Way of the Cross, so here was a chance of impressing on people's minds the dragging of Jesus up to the palace of Pilate, and giving the faithful a method of following every detail of that day of sorrow. When Dominic and I went up the stairs there were no others save a mother with her four children. We were THE LATERAN 195 glad to go up with the children, for if one had had any doubts as to the beauty of the devotion they would have been dissipated by the sight of how the children took it, gladly and gravely, with an evident understanding of what they were doing, and why : it was a suitable pendant to the gay little scene at Ara Coeli. There the Bambino was holding, as it were. His Court, and the children were making birthday speeches in His honour : here, at the Scala Santa, was the way of a Passion : voices were hushed, the children were on their knees, prayers were just murmured, and over all hung the hand of Death. Yet there was one great fact in common between the two scenes, a fact that is peculiar to Christianity : it was the fact of God's need. No other religion sets up for adoration a God that asks for men's help ; no other faith has proclaimed before the universe, as its Heart and its Source, a heart that is human in its aching for sympathy and love. Inspiring our action on the day of the Epi- phany, encouraging our fumbled progress up the stairs was the great, almost incredible thought, " God wants me." Often enough the sceptic will say, " Do you think that those prayers and elaborate services, and your kissings and kneelings, your genuflexions and devotions, make any difference to the blessed and immutable God ? " And generally some theologian is summoned ; and it is carefully explained that really, of course, they do not make any difference ; that their value is not entirely subjective, nor yet absolutely objective ; that popular religion must have popular manifestations, and — ^but the evasions tire me. The core of Christianity is that what we do does affect God. " How " we cannot understand, nor does the " how " matter, but we know that God wants us, and our prayers and our devotions ; that the nature of God is most truly shown to us in the character of Jesus, and the character of Jesus stands out in every word and every action reported, and, above all, in those two sen- 196 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE tences : " Jesus beheld the city, and wept over it," and " Jesus beholding him, loved him." At the top of the stairs is the Sancta Sanctorum, the only portion left of the old Lateran. Here are many great and famous relics, and not long ago a good few were removed and placed in the Vatican, with duly authorized seals and attestations — among those taken away was what is probably the head of S. Agnes, It was here too that for a long time the heads of SS. Peter and Paul were kept, and exposed to the veneration of Christians. Mon- taigne, who cannot be dismissed as unobservant or un- critical, gives an account of what he saw : " On Easter Eve I went to see, at S. John Lateran, the heads of S. Paul and S. Peter, which are exhibited here on that day. The heads are entire, with the hair, flesh, colour and beard, as though they still lived ; S. Peter has a long, pale face, with a brilliant complexion approach- ing the sanguine, with grey peaked beard, and a papal mitre on his head ; S. Paul is of a dark complexion, with a broader, fuller face, a large head, and thick grey beard. These heads stand in a recess some way above you. When they are shown, the people are called together by the ringing of a bell, and a curtain is then slowly pulled down, behind which you see the heads, placed side by side. The time allowed for viewing them is that in which you can repeat an Ave Maria, and then the curtain is again raised ; shortly after, the curtain descends, and once more ascends, and this is repeated thrice, so as to afford everyone present an opportunity of seeing. This exhibi- tion takes place four or five times in the course of the day. The recess is about a pike's length above you, and there is a thick iron grating before the heads. Several lighted tapers are placed in front of them, outside the recess, but still you cannot very well distinguish the particular features. At least I could not, and I saw them THE LATERAN 197 two or three times. There was a bright poHsh over the faces which make them look something Hke our masks." ^ Here also is preserved one of those pictures which tradition ascribes to S. Luke. All that is known certainly about it is that it is as old as the eighth century, and may be a fellow of that mysterious portrait supposed to have been owned by King Abgar of Edessa, a contemporary of Our Lord : but the historian is a little chary of putting trust in anything relating to that somewhat fabulous monarch. As to when and why this little chapel got its name and was allowed to boast " Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus " it is difficult to determine : it sounds suspiciously as though its early guardians were anxious to put it on a seeming equality \\dth shrines which had greater and more arresting associations for the pilgrim ; for while it has been exceptionally favoured in the possession of relics that have no connexion with it, it would need a somewhat violent bias for anyone to agree with the inscribed state- ment on the cornice : leaving out of count Jerusalem, there are in Rome itself many places with equal claims to sanctity. I believe there is something in the air about the Lateran which makes for bragging, else how explain that legend that runs round the fagade of the Church of the Baptist in the Lateran, ** Omnium urbis etorbis ecclesiarum mater et caput " — " Mother and Head of all the churches in the city and in the world " ? In the city, true : for this, Constantine's basilica, and not San Pietro in Vaticano, is the church of the See and Bishop of Rome. S. Giovanni in Laterano is the official church of the Episcopal See : San Pietro in Vaticano is the church of the Holy Father, or the Pope ; it belongs, as it were, to a later order of things. The chapter of San Giovanni has precedence over that of San Pietro ; and it was in San Giovanni, up to * Montaigne, '* Travels in Italy." 198 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the time of the stupid quarrel with the State, that the Pope had to be enthroned and crowned. But Mother and Head of all the churches in the world, or Queen, as it is called in some papal bulls — that it emphatically is not. That is an honour that might perhaps be given to Jerusa- lem, where the Lord's brother ruled ; otherwise it might fall equally to Antioch and Rome, but certainly the See of Antioch — where we were first called Christians — cannot yield its pride of place to the See of Rome — and none but a Roman bishop would ever have thought it could. Still, as the metropolitan church of the patriarchal See of the West, it is rightly called Mother and Head of all churches in Rome, and we may add in Europe : it is here where the Holy Father should every year solemnly pontificate on the First Sunday in Lent, on Palm Sunday, on the Thursday in Holy Week, on Holy Saturday, on Easter Monday, on Whit Sunday, on the feast of the patron, S. John Baptist, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the feast of the dedication, and the anniversary of his election. At present the Pope never goes near the Lateran ; if he did, it would break that curious legend of the Prisoner of the Vatican which the Roman Curia loves to keep up, long after it has ceased to amuse or mystify the rest of Christendom. There is, however, a grave danger of Catholics getting so used to the idea of the Pope in the Vatican, of connecting him always with San Pietro and the cardinals, as to forget altogether that Pius X. is also a bishop. Bishop of Rome, and successor in the chair of Peter. When shall we have a Pope who will see, or whose advisers will allow him to see, that by far the best blow would be struck against the assailants of the Holy See if the Pope calmly accepted the position thrust upon him by the State, definitely abandoned the disgusting theory that the Church has any right to use material force, and came to the Lateran for his enthronement, not merely over Rome, but over Christendom, which, under a Pope THE LATERAN 199 who could say " soldiers and swords have I none " might come to be reunited ? Our view of the Basilica Salvatoris, now known as S. John Lateran, was not a very good one : at the time we were in Rome repairs of some kind were in progress at the Lateran, and the whole nave was blocked with gigantic scaffolding. The result is that I have no impression of the dignity, of the size of the mother-church of Rome. Nor did the details compensate for this piece of ill-luck. The Gothic tabernacle is fine, no doubt, and is a beautiful example of careful workmanship ; but it lacks the imagina- tive warmth of northern Gothic, and has not the charm of S. Maria sopra Minerva, or the subtle feeling of the great Paschal Candlestick at San Paolo. The mosaics in the apse, while astonishingly true in colour, miss something of that character which distinguishes those in San Clemente. I felt about the whole surroundings of the Lateran as though it was a place deserted ; the building was desolate, the singing — we got in for a little of Vespers — far more perfunctory than the rendering of the Choir Office at San Pietro, and about the whole church there was an indescribable air of the museum, of the show-place, and of a rather huffed dignity. It is in this last, I believe, that the real secret of the Lateran lies hid ; Dominic insists that I am too fantastic, that I must not, after having given a soul to the Campagna, invest the Lateran with personal pride — but I cannot think I am far out. For so many centuries now the Papa Orbis Terrarum has been gradually displacing the Bishop of Rome : the great breach came, in the days of Pio Nono, when Giovanni Maria Mastai-Feretti definitely decided that the claims of Rome must yield to the claims of the Papacy. All his heart, all his conviction were on the side of the patriots and the rising ; but were not the Austrians also his sub- jects, and good Catholics too ? And so the legend of the 200 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Liberal Pope came to an abrupt and untimely end. We hardly realize now how firmly Liberals believed in the Papacy in those days, when the glorious revolution was yet young, when the leaders of the people were priests and friars, and when the Mass was the password for the children of democracy. Robert Browning, Dissenter and Radical and poet, could write to Monckton Milnes, when the question of an embassy from England to the Vatican was thought of in 1847, " that he would be glad and proud to be secretary to such an embassy and to work like a horse " for it : but Pio Nono soon abandoned the Liberal cause, and years afterguards, when he was definitely and irrevocably on the side of the oppressor, he began what Ultramontanes called his *' passion," by ascending the Scala Santa. That last visit of Pio Nono to the Holy Staircase marks the final victory of the Vatican over the Lateran, of the Pope over the Bishop. Since that fatal year we have had the legend of the imprisoned Pope ; the girding, childish, hysterical quarrels between Black and White ; the un- christian hatred of the King and the State officials. This has affected the ancient basilica of Constantine ; it mourns, robbed of its ruler, and will not be comforted, nor recover its old pride of place and dignity of life until some free Pope, with free ideas, proceeds in solemn order from the Vatican to San Giovanni in Laterano, to be crowned Bishop of Rome and enthroned as chief pastor in the church which is, of all churches in the city. Mother and Head. Even although it can scarcely be true that Constantine was baptized in the baptistery of the Lateran, the building is in origin of the fifth century, and possibly of the fourth. I love the great buildings with which the early Christians paid homage to the first great sacrament. To-day we are too used to baptism and its consequences ; it needs a THE LATERAN 201 residence in a non-Christian country to realize exactly what is given in baptism, and what an enormous dif- ference the grace of God does make. We, ignoring or forgetting all this, make but little of the Sacrament of the New Birth. A few recent churches and cathedrals have large baptistery chapels — but how rare is the grave- like font, in which even an adult can be immersed, how frequent is the contemptuous dismissal of the font — some poor, cheap little basin — to a dim corner of an obscure transept ! S. Giovanni in Fonte is a great and agreeable contrast to the policy that neglects baptism : here you have a beautiful building set apart entirely for the re- ception of people into the Church of God. At one time it was the only baptistery in Rome, and here Csedwalla must have been baptized in 689. At present it is still used, and on the afternoon we were there a baptism occurred, a most slovenly and irreverent ceremony, I am sorry to say, the only thing we saw in a place of worship that really disgusted us. Why is it that people are so fond of insisting on the irreverent character of the services in Rome ? Either my friends must have been very particular, or Dominic and I were very lucky ; for we practically, save for this one service, saw nothing in Rome that could shock or wound. I remember that one friend of mine, rather an ardent '* black," urged me not to go and hear the Divine office at San Pietro : he assured me that when he went the canons talked and laughed and spat and behaved disgracefully. Well, Dominic and I did go — on the eve of the Circumcision — and heard Vespers : there were six rulers of the choir, I think ; a very fair number of canons, and a good congregation. I won't pretend to assert that no one's attention ever wandered during the recitation of the Psalter : but I will say that I have seen many services in England rendered with infinitely less ease and reverence. *' Ease " is perhaps the thing which disturbs some English people ; the 202 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Italian may not be terribly at ease in Zion ; but he is amazingly at ease in the courts of the temple. I mean he is not so positive, as are many English, about the extent and the quality of the Padre Eterno's interest in his own peculiar concerns ; but he has a very conscious and certain feeling that he has a right to his place in the sanctuary, and that there is no use in pretending before Domeniddio to be any better than he is. Therein, I suppose, lies the real quarrel between the English and other nations on such a question as " Sunday clothes." No sensible Christian objects to the sound idea that a man (ay, and a woman, too) should put on his best things when he goes to visit God — but it is an objectionable thing to put on garments so unusual for you that they practically disguise your personality, and cause your neighbour, if he be sensible, amazement and amusement, and, if he be stupid, envy and black hatred. In England too often the one prevailing reason against going to church is the absence of ** best clothes " : and that is mere idolatry of a very low description. It is possible to overdo the attitude of ease ; indeed directly it becomes an attitude it will become a fault, but the baptism at San Giovanni betrayed not so much ease as indifference, insolence and careless- ness. There was none of that tender affection of the child so often shown at English baptism which makes the service so beautiful a one to watch : of course the Roman service, with its numerous exorcisms, does not tend to dignity — for nothing is more wearisome than a perfunctory exorcism ; if you are really going to expel a devil, you should do it with some pomp and show of magnificence. Still, the little man who was chosen as the minister of holy baptism that afternoon was exceptional in his power of belittling and spoiling a service that is in itself capable of being one of the most beautiful in the Christian religion. Of the oratories of the baptistery by far the most attractive is that of S. Giovanni Evangelista (who, by the THE LATERAN 203 way, was added to the patrons of the basilica), with its doors of bronze, and its glorious glow of mosaic. Other- wise the thing that attracted us most was the actual font of green basalt. It has witnessed many historic baptisms ; but certainly nothing stranger than the mystical prepara- tion of Cola di Rienzo on ist August 1347. On the night before he summoned the Electors of Germany to come before him for judgment the last of the tribunes bathed in Constantine's basalt basin ; and then on the next day pro- ceeded to the basilica to issue his citation, and on the day after be crowned with the seven crowns.^ 1 Surely prouder words never sounded through the great cathedral: "Be it known that in virtue of that authority, power, and jurisdiction which the Roman people, in general parliament, have assigned to us, and which the Sovereign Pontiff hath confirmed, that we, not ungrateful of the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit — whose soldier we now are — nor of the favour of the Roman people, declare that Rome, capital of the world, and base of the Christian Church ; and that every City, State and People of Italy, are henceforth free. By that freedom, and in that same consecrated authority, we proclaim that the election, jurisdiction, and monarchy of the Roman Empire appertain to Rome and Rome's people, and the whole of Italy. We cite, then, and summon personally, the illustrious prince, Ludwig Duke of Bavaria, and Karl King of Bohemia, who would style themselves Emperors of Italy, to appear before us, or the other magistrates of Rome, to plead and to prove their claim between this day and the day of Pentecost. We cite also, and within the same term, the Duke of Saxony, the Prince of Brandenburg, and whosoever else, potentate, or prelate, asserts the right of Elector to the Imperial Throne — a right that, we find it chronicled from ancient and immemorial time, appertaineth only to the Roman people — and this in vindi- cation of our civil liberties, without derogation of the spiritual power of the Church, the Pontiff and the Sacred College."' After this formal act Rienzi, dizzy with power and prosperity, turned his sword to the three quarters of the known world and said, amid the hush of the great concourse : " In the name of the people of Rome this too is mine ! ** For this ceremony see Gibbon ; and for a picturesque account (I have taken Rienzi's speech thence), Lord Lytton's " Rienzi." 204 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE The Church of Our Lady of the Snow, commonly known as Santa Maria Maggiore, has one of the prettiest and most baseless of sacred fairy stories connected with its foundations. Somewhere about 352 there lived in Rome a patrician named Johannes. He and his wife were devout Christians, and childless. John was a man of some wealth, and owned a good deal of property on the Esquiline Hill. The pious couple had given up any hope of having children ; and apparently had no other near relatives to whom they felt inclined to leave their goods. So they decided to present all their property to Our Blessed Lady, and were anxious in endeavouring to discover what form Mary would like the gift to take. On 5th August the pair had retired to bed discussing the momentous question as to how they should make this gift ; and no doubt gently arguing with each other, husband and wife each urging particular and favourite schemes. During their sleep Our Lady appeared in a vision. She said that she wished to settle their friendly disputes, and so gave them the following directions : — "Go to-morrow morning to the Esquiline Hill, and there you will find a portion of the ground marked out in snow. Build me a church thereon." Snow, of course, is unusual in Rome at any time, and very rare during the month of August ; and so, as a modern Jesuit ingenuously remarks, ** a fall of snow at that season could only happen by a miracle." I regret to say that, according to the legend, John and his wife did not go straight to the Esquiline. I am sure his wife wanted to — ^but no doubt she was overruled, and very likely her husband insisted that Our Lady had not expressly said they were to go first thing to the hill. Any- way, before doing anything, they went to Pope Liberius and informed him of their dream. By a curious chance, the Holy Father had received on the same night informa- tion from Our Lady that he was to help John and his wife in the pious work that she had instructed them to do. So THE LATERAN 205 the Pope and his clergy, and the people, and John the patrician and his wife went to the Esquiline on 6th August 352, and there found the snow even as they had been told. And on the snow was clearly marked in outline a plan of the church. The basiHca was started straight away, and completed in 360. Such is the story, dating from about the thirteenth century, of the foundation of the largest church in Rome, which is dedicated in the name of the Mother of God. While the story bears all the marks of being unhistorical, it is very curious to explain why anyone should invent a tale of August snow in Rome in order to account for the building of a church that certainly had existed from the time of the Council at Ephesus. It is just possible that the story was invented to explain the popular name, S. Maria ad Nives. But how did the church get this name ? The original pre-Sixtine basilica (if there was one) was called Basilica Liberiana after Pope Liberius, whose dream so conveniently agreed with that of the donors. Sixtus III., who built a church here in 431 or 432, called it Sancta Maria Mater Dei, in commemoration of the title of Theo- tokos, recently secured to Our Lady by the Council of Ephesus : another title is Sancta Maria ad Praesepe (Mary of the Manger), from the fact that it contains the holy manger of Bethlehem ; and yet another, now the commonest, S. Maria Maggiore, because it is the principal church of Our Lady, excepting the one at Loretto. Whence then the title of S. Maria ad Nives ? I have had it suggested to me that the name is a simple mistake. It will be remem- bered that after the condemnation of Nestorianism at Ephesus there was a great scene of rejoicing in Constanti- nople. The decree was read in the Church of the Holy Wisdom ; and on hearing it the people exclaimed : " Nestorius has fallen ; the Holy Council and she who is Mother of God according to the flesh have overthrown Nestorius ! Mary the Holy Virgin has excommunicated 2o6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Nestorius ! Mary is Mother of God after the flesh ; she has rent Nestorius in pieces." ^ This is one of the eariiest signs that the conception of Mary as terrible, Mary as an army arrayed, was gaining ground among Christians : it is not impossible that the Pope heard of these events of July 431, and called his church not only Sancta Maria Mater Dei, but Sancta Maria ad vires — Our Lady of Strength. I doubt myself if this suggestion is more than plausible ; for one thing the Latin is of rather more than doubtful quality. You would expect " de viribus," as in *' S. Maria de bono consilio." Still it is just possible that " ad vires " was a popular name for the basilica, and that it afterwards, when people had forgotten this title and used Maggiore or ad Praesepe, got altered in some manuscript to ad nives, and so brought forth the legend of the August snow. The church with its gay, bright interior is the most beautiful, in some ways, of the five great churches which, with S. Croce in Gerusalemme and San Sebastiano, formed the special objects of pilgrimage. We went straight to look at the mosaics on the great arch. Whether they are of the time of Sixtus IIL, or earlier, of the days to which Dr Richter and Miss Taylor have assigned them, together with the magnificent series in the nave, I do not much care. There is only one point I should like to urge against the earlier date. Dr Richter argues that the artistic tone of the nave mosaics is akin to the times of Marcus Aurelius and Septimus Severus ; and that the ideas expressed in them belong to the thought we connect with Justin Martyr, Irenseus and S. Clement of Alexandria, not to the theo- logians of the fifth century. I cannot myself see that any case has been made out of the subjects of the nave mosaics ; ^Church Quarterly Review, October 1891. The Council of Ephesus. THE LATERAN 207 they are biblical and belong to the old dispensation ; now it cannot be asseverated that the fifth-century doctors abandoned the use of the Old Testament, or that their allegorical system is noticeably different from that of the earlier fathers. Also I am afraid I suspect a theory which can find one line of thought running through such different writers as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and S. Clement of Alexandria. Nevertheless it is not easy to disprove Dr Richter's suggestion about the nave mosaics : but when we reach those of the arch he has a much harder task to make good his contention. One of the most remarkable things about early Christian art is the lateness of Madonna's appearance in it : with the exception of one or two representations in the Catacombs there is nothing before the fourth century, and very little till the fifth and sixth. On the arch of S. Maria there is the Annunciation, with Mary and Joseph ; and there is the Adoration of the Magi, with the traditional three, not four, as in the Catacombs. Of course these points are not conclusive ; but, considering that the tradition of the church's foundation puts it so much later than the second century, it strikes me that this early date, much as one would like to accept it, is not historically probable. However, the mosaics, these old ones, and also the gorgeous thirteenth-century ones in the semidome, alone give S. Maria Maggiore a peculiar splendour. Before these the mosaics of San Clemente must bow ; and the only thing I know to compare to them is the modern work of an English artist, the mosaic by Burne- Jones (spoiled though it is by another's additions) in the Church of the American Embassy. The mosaics help infinitely in the air of joy fulness with which the whole church is full : this basilica partakes of the May-like, festive character which Cardinal Newman notes as the mark of Catholic devotion to Mary. And the true significance of the mosaics and of 2o8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the church is struck by the two inscriptions in the semi- dome : " Maria Virgo assupta ad ethereu thalamo in quo Rex Regu stellato sedet solio," and *' Exaltata est Sancta Dei Genetrix super choros angelorum ad coelestia regna." The spirit of the great church is continued in the chapels, especially the Paoline, or Borghese, Chapel, where every 5th August a shower of white rose leaves reminds the sceptical people of the story of the snow. Here is kept one of those Byzantine pictures of Mary which tradition ascribes to S. Luke. There is the Sistine Chapel, beneath whose altar is the relic of the Holy Crib, and where is a horrid statue of S. Cajetan by Bernini : it was at the altar of this chapel that Ignatius Loyola, soldier of Jesus and Mary, said his first Mass at the midnight of Christmas 1538. Here is preserved, uncorrupt, the body of Pius V., whom English- men can scarcely remember with reverence ; no doubt he was a saint, but alas ! he was a grievously tactless one. And here, too, but in an unknown spot, lies the body of the great S. Jerome, translated thither from Bethlehem in 640 : it is only Rome who can thus afford to forget the resting-place of so great a saint, after having secured his relics, and I think that even Rome has to pay the penalty for thus neglecting the man who gave her her Bible. There are two rather charming legends connected with this church and S. Gregory. Somehow these stories that gather round S. Maria Maggiore are not so annoying as many apocryphal tales. During the great plague of 590 the Romans were dying by their hundreds, calling in vain on the saints and on their bishop for help. Pope Gregory determined that the disaster was an occasion for a proces- sion of penance : that God was angry with His people. THE LATERAN 209 So seven great processions were organized. From the Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian came the clergy of Rome ; from SS. Gervase and Protasius came the monks ; the nuns left the old Church of SS. Marcellinus and Peter ; the widows came from S. Euphemia; the laymen from S. Stephen ; the matrons from S. Clement, and the children from S. Vitalis. With the first procession walked the Holy Father, carrying in his hands the picture of Our Lady that now rests in the Borghese Chapel. Through the streets of the city, the city full of dead and dying, went the companies of men and women and children. " De profundis " and " Miserere " swelled out over the housetops in the gorgeous rhythm that S. Gregory himself perfected. As the procession approached the Church of Ara Coeli the Pope heard from above — the angels' song, the legend calls it — the beginning of the Paschal anthem, ** Regina coeli, laetare ! Alleluia ! Quia, quem meruisti port are, Alleluia ! Resurrexit, sicut dixit. Alleluia ! " The angels ceased and the Pope, grieving over the sins and sorrows of his people, raised the holy picture to heaven and cried out, " Ora pro nobis Deum. Alleluia ! " So that is why the rhythm of the "Regina Coeli," which at Eastertide is substituted for the Angelus, has become rather halting. The answer to the Pope's prayer came later on. The procession went its way towards the Vatican. As it was crossing the bridge that leads to Hadrian's Mausoleum Gregory looked up and saw Michael the Archangel on the summit of the Moles sheathing his sword : and to this day Michael stands upon the top, as he stood to announce to Gregory the cessation of the plague. The other story is also a tale of the angels. S. Gregory was singing Mass on Easter Day (Christmas, Easter and the Assumption are (or rather were) the days on which the Holy Father came to S. Maria Maggiore) and his first ** Pax vobiscum " was answered, not by the 210 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE deacons — perhaps they were inattentive, or missed their note — ^but by a choir of angels, who sang in reply, " Et cum spirit u tuo." I have heard that while the Pope still visited S. Maria the pretty custom was observed, when he sang Mass, of leaving the response, " Et cum spiritu tuo," to be sung by the angels. How many churches there are where that might be done with advantage ! And indeed one would willingly leave rather more than those four words to the angelic choir ; I am sure it would be a com- fort to many an English congregation, but organists and the rulers of places where they sing would be likely to oppose the introduction of a body of singers over whom even they could scarcely claim control. PIAZZA BARHKKIM CHAPTER XI TWO ROMAN MARTYRS THERE were three reasons that impelled us to go to San Lorenzo. First, it was one of the five great churches; secondly, S. Lawrence and his story attract one even more than most of the early martyrologies ; and thirdly, I wanted to see the tomb of Pius IX., who, with all his faults, remains the most lovable of the nineteenth-century pontiffs. I am afraid my S. Lawrence is very unlike the quiet, tender, youthful figure of the average hagiographer. I do not think it likely that the Archdeacon of Rome in the middle of the third century was an unfledged boy who went gaily and piously down to his terrible death. Let us recall the circumstances. Sixtus XL, Bishop of Rome, was presented with a large sum of mone^^ by Philip, son of the Emperor Philip : the Pope was brought before Decius, who had murdered the Emperor and put young Philip to flight, and ordered to surrender the treasure. Sixtus got wind of Decius' intention to im- prison him and so decided to hand over the treasure to Lawrence. The Archdeacon was then a man in the prime of his youth ; strong, bearded, fearless. No doubt in times of peace he had occasionally been thought a little boisterous, a little too hearty for the weaker Christians. The Pope, however, seeing his strength of character, had insisted on making him his Archdeacon, and now, with persecution imminent, handed into his keeping the treasure of the Church. The transfer was only just effected ; 211 212 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE then before Sixtus had time to give any instructions, the Roman guard thundered on the door, and Lawrence, with the treasure, evaded at the back, while Sixtus was haled away to prison. With his master imprisoned, Lawrence was in a quandary. He was not a man of great power of thought ; he had no particular aptitude for anything but business and the control of people — he was embarrassed by the money with which he was left. He did what many others placed in a similar position might well do : he knew that he, as Archdeacon, was responsible for the Church during the Bishop's imprisonment, so he prayed, and consulted the Holy Gospels. He found there : *' Give to him that asketh thee," and " The poor ye have always with you." Of course ! the poor ! Immediately he began to distribute the wealth of Philip to the poor among the community ; and he discovered, as he was occupied in almsgiving, that he had the gift of healing, and so he cured many of their diseases, and washed their feet, in imitation of his Blessed Lord. The great, rough, strong man gave no thought to the attraction his behaviour was certain to excite. By this time Decius had discovered that Sixtus had not got the treasure — and suddenly reports reached him of the actions of the Archdeacon. Still it seemed unlikely that Sixtus would leave the treasure — no doubt meant to be carefully guarded — to a man who had no better use for it than to squander it on a horde of beggars : so Decius did not immediately attack Lawrence. It does not seem certain that Lawrence would ever have suffered martyrdom if it had not been for his own action. Decius determined to try what he could do by playing on Lawrence's affection for his bishop. Sixtus knew nothing of the treasure, did he not ? Very well, let him be executed ! And the Pope was taken away to be beheaded. The rumour of it reached Lawrence ; his plans for the poor, his difficultly acquired quietness, his charge of the Church were forgotten : he TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 213 came running up to the gaoler, as they were marching Sixtus to death, crying " Take me too ! Take me too ! I have had the wealth ; and I have given it all away ! Let me die with my bishop ! " The guard had been told what they were to do in the case of Lawrence's interference ; he was immediately arrested, and put into prison, under the charge of Hip- politus. Hippolitus and a fellow-prisoner, Lucillius, were both converted and baptized in a spring which Lawrence discovered in the cell : the Church of S. Lorenzo in Fonte now marks the spot. Two days later, after Decius had made fruitless in- quiries among the terrified Christians and satisfied himself that the treasure, if it was hidden, was very well hidden, he called Lawrence before him. No doubt the Archdeacon was a little abashed when he first appeared in the court, and Decius thought it would be easy to get out of this boorish-looking fellow informa- tion as to the whereabouts of the treasure. It was no use beating about the bush, so he had the question put directly to Lawrence : *' Where is the treasure ? " " And what treasure is that, O Mightiness ? " " The treasure which that son of a bitch, Philip, gave to your bishop, Sixtus." ** Ah ! that treasure has been distributed to the poor among us Christians." Decius gave a movement of impatience. He had heard that story before ; he had never quite believed it, and now he saw Lawrence he was less inclined to believe it than ever. No doubt the fellow had hidden the treasure for his own use, somewhere. He nodded to his officer : and then began himself to question Lawrence. " It will be better for you, Lawrence, to let me know immediately where the treasure is. It was clever of you to start giving alms directly I had imprisoned Sixtus ; it might have deceived some — but it does not deceive me. 214 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Now let one of my men, or let one of your own people, fetch the treasure here to me now, and you shall not only be forgiven, but rewarded." When he had finished Decius noticed that Lawrence was perceptibly hesitating. " Nay," he went on, " if you care for it, you shall have an ofhce about our person. Sixtus knew a proper man when he saw one." *' If my lord will allow me, I will send one of my own people, and the treasure of the Church shall be brought to my Lord." Decius sank back, smiling a satisfied assent. Lawrence looked round, and saw in the crowd a fellow-Christian whose courage and faithfulness he could trust. He called the man, who came forward. The guards stood cautiously by, while Lawrence whispered instructions in his friend's ear. The man nodded rapid comprehension and scampered away, grinning joyfully. " The Church's treasure will be here in five minutes," he said to Decius. In almost exactly five minutes a great noise was heard outside the court ; people scuffling and laughing and pro- testing, and, piping above the roar, the shrill cry of the blind and the strange hoarse sounds of the dumb. Then a lane was made in the great crush, and the tap of a cripple's crutch was heard as he swung himself forward towards the bema. " Where is Lawrence our friend, Lawrence the benefactor of the poor ? " And the lame man came boldly up and stood beside the Archdeacon. He was followed by a small tumult of poverty-stricken and diseased people, who with various cries of greeting and pleasure remained in front of Decius, who glanced angrily at them, and then stuttered out to Lawrence : " What the devil do you mean by this damned joke ? Don't you know that I have power to let you go, and power to bum you, ay, and torture you first ? " " Thou would' St have no power," murmured Lawrence, before answering, " except it was given thee from above. TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 215 My Lord," he went on in a louder voice, " asked for the treasures of the Church. Ecce ! " Bafifled and furious, Decius, his little pig's eyes blood- shot and blinking, rose from his chair. " The sacrifice," he ordered hoarsely. Then Lawrence was brought before the image of Caesar, and ordered to burn incense. He refused. Then came forward stout men with whips of hide, and he was trussed up to a pillar, and flogged until the whips were sticky with blood, and his back was clad in purple, like the purple that clothed his Divine Master. Still he refused to burn incense, or to speak a word about the treasure. At the back of the court the poor, and the other Christians stood, speaking only in breathless whispers as they watched that great muscular body being flayed and flung into pieces by the Roman soldiers. Decius, gloating over the tortures, was yet still fuller of greed than of cruelty ; will nothing, he thought, induce this brute, coarse and insensitive as he is, to speak about the treasure ? " Fire," he demanded from the attendants. Then a brazier was brought in, and while Lawrence's wounds were slowly ceasing to bleed, and the gore was congealing on the raw flesh, irons were heated in the brazier. Then the slaves put them against his flesh. A low sob rose from the Christians, but never a sound from the tortured man. Decius, after a few moments, saw that this too would avail nothing. He hastily called a dozen of his guard and sent them to the spot on the slope of the Esquiline, where S. Lorenzo in Panisperna now stands. They went off, and there prepared the great gridiron on which the saint was to meet his death. Lawrence was then released from his pillar, and dragged along to the place selected. There his body, already broken and maimed, was bound with chains on the gridiron ; and the fire was lit under him. As he felt death, certain and cruel, inevitably approaching, 2i6 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE the great-hearted Archdeacon had a desire to speak again ; he could not resist the opportunity of a last gibe at the devil and his works, and his poor human minister. His body was now little more than a blackened and smoking coal — a coal from which the Christians around discerned a sweet fragrance to arise — but he turned his scorched countenance towards Decius, and the greedy judge saw that his victim wished to speak. Decius' head swam with joy. Could it be that at last the man's spirit had failed him ? He approached as near as he dared to the glowing mass, and put an avid ear to catch the burning man's hoarse, cracked words — and this is what he heard : " Decius, turn me over, will you ? I'm done enough on this side." And then, with a smile at his little joke, Lawrence fell asleep in Jesus, murmuring a brief prayer for the conversion of his native city. When Sixtus had appointed Lawrence his Archdeacon there had been a little trouble with some of the more cultured Christians ; and, in particular, Cyriaca, whose steward Lawrence was, rather resented losing a good ser- vant, and also having a menial put into such a position. Of course she knew that all Christians were equal in the Lord ; but still it was useless completely to ignore social distinctions, or how would society get on ? Sixtus talked to her like a father ; and Cyriaca had nearly become reconciled to seeing Lawrence chief assistant at the Solemn Eucharists. Then came the poor dear Bishop's arrest, and that stupid Lawrence, instead of j&ghting, which he could do, ran away with all the money. No doubt he did give it away again to the poor : but how improvident that was ! Still what else could one expect from a person of that class ? Then Cyriaca was told about Lawrence's capture. " Big, silly man," she exclaimed, *' why couldn't he keep out of the soldiers' way ? It was really almost suicide, TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 217 to go throwing oneself into danger like that ! " But in her heart, her really converted heart — for there are lots of people who have converted hearts and yet find it very difficult to convert their externals — she was lost in admiration of her ex-steward ; and she kept herself acquainted with every detail of the horrible tortures. At last she could stand it no longer, and, disguised, she flipped round to Decius' court : as she approached she heard the marching of many feet, and there came out of the palace the grisly procession, with Lawrence dragged, bleeding, helpless in the middle of it. Cyriaca followed, agonized in prayer. She halted with the rest of the crowd outside the gates : she saw the murder ; she heard the taunt to Decius — and no sooner was the breath out of Lawrence's body than she turned and disclosed herself to the mean and cruel judge. " My lady, you here ! Ah ! I forgot " " Yes, Decius, I am a Christian. Do you want to serve me as you have served that hero ? " " The gods forbid, lady ! I had forgotten for a moment your interest in this strange cult. Still I have executed Lawrence simply for contumely and insolence, and also for blaspheming against the genius of Caesar. As you know, I am the most tolerant of men, and " " Decius, may I have this body taken to my estate for burial ? " " On the Celian, dear lady ? It would be rather irregular " *' No ! God forbid that he should lie within your cursed city. I mean my estate outside the walls. Do you give permission ? " '* But certainly ! And if I can do anything else " " Nothing," and Cyriaca turned away from Decius, who went back and told his companions that the beautiful matron Cyriaca cherished a curious affection for her 2i8 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE ex-steward. " And he too," the beast hiccoughed, as the wine went round, " he too was rather enflamed." Over that tomb has sprung the Basihca of San Lorenzo. Its first interest is the mosaic-work in the portico, which tells the story of the saint's torture and martyrdom. Within the church the chief beauty is the way in which different styles are assimilated without any feeling of lack of harmony ; it is a church in which one has the distinct impression of a unity gained through diversity. The columns, even when they are of the same period, are not uniform, and yet they never clash. Nor does the sixth-century mosaic quarrel with the beautiful mediaeval ciborium and ambones. The church has always kept up its reputation of being the church of the poor, and it was for this reason that Pio Nono, most democratic of popes in sentiment, desired to be buried here. He gave orders that his tomb should be simple ; and so it is — but the walls of the chapel where he lies buried are covered with mosaics and gorgeous with coats-of-arms. He is guarded by a rather curious com- pany of saints — Peter and Lawrence, Agnes and Cyriaca, Francis of Sales and Alfonso Liguori, Catherine of Siena, Joseph, and Francis of Assisi, and Stephen and Paul. It is significant of modem Romanism that among the chosen guardians of the Pope of the Vatican Council there should be only two mediaeval saints, and neither of those theo- logians. The religion of modem Rome has plenty in common, on its practical side, with the religion of the primitive Church ; and its theology and devotion are at home with Liguori and Sales — but Benedict, Thomas, Anselmo, somehow^ the historical sense does not get them and their compeers fitted into the Ultramontane system. That gentle and beautiful saint, Caecilia, died some years before Lawrence, in the pontificate of Urban (it is a pleasant coincidence that two such wonderful women as Caecilia and TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 219 Catherine should each be connected with a Pope Urban) ; her story has been told supremely in English by Chaucer, but yet still suffers from the ready pen of the hagiographer. Caecilia is a saint who always appeals even to the non- Catholic. Ruskin says in his fine, careless way — that holds so much of kindly truth and sincerity : " With much more clearness and historic comfort we may approach the shrine of S. Caecilia ; and even on the most prosaic and realistic minds — such as my own — a visit to the house in Rome has a comforting and establishing effect, which reminds one of the carter in 'Harry and Lucy' who is con- vinced of the truth of a plaustral catastrophe at first incredible to him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill on which it happened." ^ Caecilia, who was a patrician, was born in the early years of the third century. At this time the power of virginity was beginning to make itself felt in the early Church. The example of Our Blessed Lady was causing a great many Christian girls to prefer a virgin life — forgetting that Mary was mother as well as maiden — and the belief in the imminence of the Second Advent, not yet wholly abandoned, gave an added impetus against the state of holy matrimony. Ideas of this kind were agitating the house of Caecilia' s parents when the girl was getting on towards fifteen years of age. Her mother, a devout woman but rather stupid, was determined that Caecilia should remain a virgin, and the maiden in her youthful eagerness and zeal for Christ agreed : however, her father was opposed to this plan. The family was one of senatorial rank and he had a good match in his eye for his little Caecilia. He too was stupid, but in a different way. Whether Caecilia' s father was a Christian or not seems to be uncertain, but at any rate he persuaded Caecilia to become betrothed to a pagan named Valerian. Now Caecilia' s mother had not abandoned her plan for ^ '* Pleasures of England," iv. 220 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE her daughter, and so, as a thoroughly good woman sometimes will, she conceived the wicked idea of letting Caecilia marry Valerian, but being his wife in nothing but name. I cannot but think that the mother also invented the story to be told Valerian. Here is Chaucer's account of the marriage : " And when this mayde schuld unto a man Y- wedded be, that was ful yong of age. Which that y-cleped was Valerian, And day was comen of hir marriage, Sche ful devout and humble in hir currage. Under hir robe of gold, that sat ful faire, Hadde next hir fieissh i-clad hir in an heire. And whil the organs made melodie, To God alone in herte thus sang sche ; * O Lord, my soule and eek my body gye Unwemmed, lest that I confounded be,' ^ And for his love that deyde upon a tre. Every secounde or thridde day sche faste. Ay bidding in hire orisouns ful faste. The nyght cam, and to bedde moste sche goon With hir housbond, as oft is the manere. And prively to him sche sayde anoon ; * O sweet and wel biloved spouse deere. There is a counseil, and ye wold it heere, Which that right fayn I wold unto you saye. So that ye swere ye schuld it not bywraye.' Valerian gan fast unto hir swere. That for no cas ne thing that mighte be, He scholde never-mo bywraye hir ; And thanne at erst thus to him sayde sche ; ' I have an Aungel which that loveth me, That with gret love, wher so I wake or slepe, Is redy ay my body for to kepe ; And yif that he may felen, oute of drede That ye me touche or love in vilonye, 1 Cantantibus organis, CagciUa virgo in corde suo soH Domino decantabat, dicens, - Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum immaculatum, ut non confundar.'* — Breviary, Ofl&ce for S. Caecilia's Day. TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 221 He right anoun will sle you with the dede, And in your youthe thus schulde ye dye. And if that ye in clene love me gye, He wul you love as me, for your clennesse, And schewe to you his joye and his brightnesse.' Valerian, corrected as God wolde, Answerde agayn : * If I schal truste thee, Let me that Aungel se, and him biholde ; And if that it a verray aungel be, Then wol I doon as thou hast prayed me ; And if thou love another man forsothe Right with this sword than wol I slee you bo the.' " Valerian, although he was a pagan, was a gentleman. He realized, no doubt, the trick that had been played upon him, and he never for a moment, I fancy, suspected this quiet girl of fifteen, who chattered such divine non- sense about angels, to have had any hand in cheating him out of a wife. Something in her way of telling her story must have impressed him, or else he hoped that by investi- gating the tale he could find out some of the disgraceful secrets of the cult his wife and her people had got mixed up in : so when Caecilia, in answer to his humorous threat, " Show me the angel," told him to go along the Appian Way and there ask for Urban ^ from some cripples and poor people by the third milestone, he started off. At the third milestone he saw a group of dirty, poor- looking people, who shrank away from his martial bearing and rather insolent appearance. He approached them and spoke as his wife had bidden him. ** Caecilia has sent me to you : lead me to the holy old man Urban ; for I have a secret message from her to him." The Christians knew that Caecilia had been recently married and guessed that this was her husband, and he was taken to Urban. He went to him, hoping to bring back some disgraceful secret, some scandal that would give him power to open * Not the Pope, but another bishop who was then in hiding in the Catacombs. 222 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE his wife's eyes ; he left the bishop a baptized and con- verted man, and hastened to his wife, to tell her the good news. It was only in ignorance, we may be sure, that Caecilia had lent herself to her mother's plot ; and it was natural that she should rejoice over the chance of her husband's conversion. That conversion was now to be confirmed by a miracle that no one, I trust, would choose to disbelieve. Valerian, full of his new-found faith, clad in the robe of his baptism, is checked on the entrance to Caecilia' s room by a light that streamed under the curtain that cut off her own chamber. He looked through in amazement, and saw his v/ife kneeling in prayer, and at her side an angel, radiant and glorious. He went and knelt beside his wife and " This Aungel hadde of roses and of lilie Corounes tuo, the which he bar in honde. And first to Cecihe, as I understonde, He gyf that oon, and after gan he take That other to Valerian her make. • With body clene, and with unwemmed thought Kepeth ay well these corounes,' quoth he. • Fro paradys to you I have them brought, Ne never moo he schul they roten be, Ne lesse her soote savour, trusteth me, Ne never wight schal seen hem with his ye. But he be chast, and hate vilonye. And thou. Valerian, for thou so soone Assentedist to good counseil, also Say what the list, and thou schalt have thy boone.' ' I have a brother,' quod Valerian tho • That in this world I love no man so, I pray you that my brother may have grace To knowe the truthe, as I doo in this place.' -' Valerian's brother Tibertius is converted, and subse- quently both the brothers are led out to execution, where their constancy and courage convert Maximus, the officer who conducted the martyrdom, and he courted and received death on the same day at the same spot. TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 223 No doubt the authorities believed and hoped that this wholesale slaughter would terrify Caecilia into abandoning her faith. The girl-bride, however, remained steadfast, and resisted all efforts to make her submit to the Imperial decrees, and sacrifice to Caesar. Her attitude angered the Emperor so much, or someone — very likely a woman — in his entourage that it was determined to murder Caecilia as well. Not unnaturally it was desired to do this quietly ; so the judge, one Almachius, gave orders that she should be shut up in the caldarium of her own palace, and suffocated to death. He thought, of course, that the prospect of this slow and undignified death would rouse her patrician blood, and that the girl would open her veins, and go to the shades in the approved Roman fashion. His orders were carried out. Caecilia was forced into the warm-bath chamber, and the pipes that led to it were heated. The chamber remained shut for twenty-four hours, and then they opened it to take out her body. ** The longe night, and eek a day also, For al the fyr, and eek the bathes hete, Sche sat al cold, and felte of it no woo, Hit naade hir not oon drope for to swete. But in that bathe hir life sche moste lete ; For he Almachius, with ful wikke entente To sleen hir in the bath his sondes sente." The end of her agony approached. The lictors descended into the room and bade the girl kneel. This she did gladly, putting her hair back from her neck, and waiting for the stroke. The man was either unused to the ghastly business, or was overcome by the heat of the room, and the calm, proud bearing of the girl. He hit at her wildly once, twice — each time the axe went home, but the young head remained unsevered ; he gathered himself up for the last stroke (the law allowed only three) and again bungled 224 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE his aim. The man rushed out of the bathroom, leaving CaeciHa ahve, but bleeding slowly to death. For three days she remained thus : her friends and relations, and the whole Christian community that could come, streamed past her room, beseeching her blessing. On the third day Urban,^ leaving his hiding-place in the Catacombs, came to say farewell to his daughter in the faith, and on the evening of that day Caecilia died. '' Saynt Urban, with his dekenes prively The body fette, and buried it by nighte Among his other seyntes honestely. Hir hous the chirch of seynt Cecily yit highte ; Seynt Urban halwed it, as he wel mighte ; In wich into this day in noble wyse Men doon to Crist and to his seint servise." Caecilia lay amid " the other saints " until 821, when Pope Paschal I. found her body near the crypts where the popes were buried. Her body was still fresh and un- corrupt, clad in rich garments, heavy with gold and embroidery, with the linen cloths, blood-stained, of her martyrdom, lying at her feet, in a great coffin of carved cypress wood. Paschal, as he himself says, lined the coffin anew with silk, placed it in a sarcophagus of white marble, and had it put under the High Altar of S. Caecilia in Trestevere, the house of her death. Paschal's story of his discovery and his action was confirmed in a striking manner in 1599, when the marble sarcophagus was opened by Cardinal Sfondrati, and disclosed the coffin of cypress. There Csecilia's body, still uncorrupt, was seen to be lying in the attitude commemorated by the statue by Madema, which now stands before her grave. Pope Clement VHI. had careful examination made of the holy relics by Bar- onius and Bosio, and their reports are still extant. The * Some traditions say that it was Pope Urban who paid this visit. TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 225 body was exposed for veneration during the space of four or five weeks, and then replaced beneath the High Altar. I have no explanation to offer as to the preservation of Caecilia's body : it is not impossible, though unlikely, that it was embalmed in the first instance ; but even so, it is an astonishing fact that it should have survived its two exposures to the air, and even more surprising that the clothes should not have fallen to pieces. The house of Caecilia is underground, and there we first went, to pray in the original church which Pope Urban hallowed in 230. The actual chapel of S. Caecilia and her coevals. Valerian, Tibertius and Maximus, has been gorgeously restored by Cardinal Rampolla in a really successful if rather over-ornate style. There is also down here a Christian museum of no great interest, and there are other relics, notably an altar of Minerva, said to be of Republican times ; it is curious that the only two pagan goddesses here represented should be the maiden Athene, and, on a sarcophagus in the museum, Diana. The upper church is really the more beautiful and fuller of interest. It is true the first appearance of the church, whose columns have been bricked up by some barbarian, is uninviting ; but there are many other things of great beauty. There is an exquisite tomb, clean in feeling and serene in execution, by Mino da Fiesole, and the same master is represented by a charming Madonna and Child. The mosaics, of the early ninth century, are not remark- able for their gracefulness, but they have considerable strength and candour of colour. There is about the church something of the atmosphere of a house, which is intensified when one steps into the chapel which was built on the site of the caldarium, and whose altar formed the stone of execution. 226 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE I like to thinkof these two saints, Lawrence and Cae cilia, together. They belong to the same Rome, and to the same order of civilization — although Lawrence was plebeian and Caecilia an aristocrat. It is a pity that their characters should have been so merged in their miracles by the later compilers of the Acts of the Martyrs. They are both of them usual enough people — though Lawrence, I am afraid, is not often a Christian nowadays, and Caecilia has her namesake's faults without her namesake's beautiful, childlike tact and wonderful spirit of endurance. I find it a little harder to recover Caecilia than Lawrence. He, with his downright, abrupt manners, his jolly, country sense of fun, his pleasure in ** pulling the leg " of the mean judge, Decius, is a character we all know and like — unless we are too dignified to like him. But Caecilia is rather less human. I suppose religious girls of fifteen — or boys, for that matter — are apt to be a little inhuman ; she had been brought up to so ascetic and one-sided a view of the Christian life that she must have had an astonishing sweetness and force of character to bring her husband and his brother to see her point of view, and go to death for it. In some ways she reminds me of S. Catherine of Siena, and again, just a little, of S. Francis : she is one of those beings whos© characters are so sunny, so full of the joy of life, so untainted with the slightest touch of selfishness, that men will go anywhere and do anything for her. Ah ! she is surely most like Joan of Arc — the peasant and the patrician must be close friends now ; and I rather believe it must have been Caecilia, and not Catherine, who appeared to Joan in the fields. And her sweetness of disposition, her astonishing, '* charming" power, has made the Christian world give her the patronage of music, the art which is least reasonable — least explicable — the art which more than any other is wrought of pure and unalloyed beauty. " Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints for ever the greatest ; and the child in the nurse's arms, and every TWO ROMAN MARTYRS 227 tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify in itself, — as the eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing — may still, whether behind the Temple veil, or at the fireside, and by the wayside, hear Caecilia sing. . . ." ^ ^ Ruskin, op. ciU CHAPTER XII A SORCERER AND A SAINT ON a particularly fine afternoon in May, the year of Our Lord fifty-five, there was a great concourse of people in the Forum. The Vestal Virgins were there, prominent in their white robes and with their filleted brows ; the senators and equites were ranged on either side of the Imperial throne, and all around were the people, expectant, eager, half afraid and half amused. In a specially erected box, leaning on the marble balcony, his face already beginning to show the lines of excess and glutted lust, yet with something of beauty in the eager lines of the mouth and the curious, restless glance of his eye, sat the Lord Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, with his wife Octavia and his mother Agrippina. Now and again he would raise to his eye the emerald, through which he was to gaze on so much spilt blood, and so many dishonoured bodies ; his arms were crossed on the balcony ; on his forefinger there glittered a huge amethyst, and on the thumb of his left hand was a ring set with a large black pearl. Suddenly he gives a signal, at the request of a slim, keen-looking Jew who is standing at the back of the box. Before the Imperial throne steps a man of handsome presence ; he has a hawk-like nose, a grave and reverend beard, a mouth whose lines are the least bit flabby and imcertain, and an eye of singular, transparent blue, an eye that seems glazed and fixed, an eye that would appear to tell everything, and yet, when you look into its depths, baffles and deceives the watcher. The man 228 A SORCERER AND A SAINT 229 approaches nearer to the throne and bows low : in his hand is a long black staff, the end of which is shaped like the claw of a phoenix — the talons are of matrix of topaz and in the claw is set a large and splendid opal. The man, after he has saluted the Emperor, stands for a few minutes, leaning on his staff, which he holds curiously between the palms of his hands, which are placed just below the phoenix's claw ; he gazes intently on the opal, and then lifts up his head, and turns ceremonially, always holding the staff, to north, and south, and east, and west. Having completed the circuit he begins to walk, rather hesitatingly, like a man in a dream ; his eyes, blue and china-like, are apparently fixed on the Capitol. Before he has walked twenty yards the staff in his hands is suddenly agitated, and the magician stands still, and again faces the Imperial throne. He draws himself to his full height — ^he is about five feet eleven — and speaks : " The signs, my Lord, are auspicious. By the help of heaven and by this my art I, Simon Magus, will now ascend before you, O Princeliness, and before the assem- bled Senate and people of great Rome. I will ascend through the air up to the height of the Capitol, then turn round and come back to this spot where I will leave my staff. So shall you, O great Lord and all the people of Rome know that the Jew Christus, whom some Hebrews and alas ! some Romans are fools enough to worship, was no god ; but a magician no mightier nor stronger than am I." Simon Magus then took his staff and, munnuring a cabalistic word, bade it stand upright and await his return : and the staff stood on the stone pavement, with its huge opal changing from colour to colour in the rays of the sun. Then the sorcerer took off the great green chlamys that flowed down to his heels, and stood before tlie people in a plain white tunic that came well below his knees ; on his feet he had black sandals, and at the 230 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE heel of each sandal a small silver wing, like the wings of Hermes, the guide of souls. Then he stretched out his arms in the form of a cross, and with his eyes turned towards heaven began the incantation. All the people were following his proceedings with breathless interest. Over his marble balustrade the Emperor was leaning out, flushed with excitement ; by his side was the young Octavia, her weak little mouth half open in pleased anticipation of this new way of passing her empty day ; there was Seneca too, already preparing some moral apophthegm on ambition and flight, and the rest of the court as genuinely roused as Roman nobles were capable of being. Nor were the people less excited, and the whole Forum was heavy with that wonderful hush that sometimes possesses a large crowd ; no one was speaking, no one moving, and all eyes were directed at Simon Magus, who still stood by his ebony staff, with his arms stretched out to the north and south. There was one little group which, even in that expectant crowd, was noticeably more moved than the rest : they were looking at Simon Magus, but looking at him not so much in expectation as with horror. They were standing outside the Temple of Venus and Apollo, and they seemed to have some greater purpose than the curiosity that inspired the rest of the multitude. In the middle of them was a stout, gnarled old man, with grizzled hair and beard, and that look in his eyes that tells of the water and of fishing. His great hands, with their forceful, business-like thumbs, were clutching and unclutching as he stood, apparently rapt in some deep mental agony. The rest of the little company kept looking at him, whenever they could tear their gaze away from the sinister figure with its white robe and black sandals that was still standing by the Staff of the Phcenix. Suddenly a low cry swayed the crowd. Simon Magus was rising. Steadily he went up, keeping his body rigid. A SORCERER AND A SAINT 231 but with ever so slight a movement of the feet, and with his hands drooping from the wrist instead of straight out. Right up he rose, and then turned — or rather was turned in the air — and began to float towards the Capitol. Slowly he approached the northern summit, rising high above the Arx and the Temple of Juno, the Warner, and then above the shrine of the ancient Queen of Heaven — where now stands the Church of Ara Coeli — he stayed for a moment, hovering, like a gull, on his outstretched arms. Everyone was following the flight with eager and amazed eyes : but tears, of anger and disappointment, were in the eyes of many of the group in front of the Temple of Venus and Apollo. They turned, anxiously, beseechingly, to the figure in their midst. Simon Peter, for it was the bishop of the little Christian community, was now far more at his ease. He no longer looked disturbed; his eyes had a glad, confident certainty in them : at the moment when the magician slowly began to float away from Juno Moneta, Simon Peter fell on his knees and cried out : " Anathema, anathema sit. Maranatha. Domine, extrude brachiam pot est at is tuae." Then turn- ing and looking up at the sorcerer, who still hung in the air, the Apostle slowly and deliberately made the Sign of the Cross towards the figure who was parodying, by the aid of hell, the Ascension of the Lord. As he com- pleted the sacred symbol Simon Magus, without a cry, fell sheer down, at first as a bird drops to her nest, and then crumpled, tossing, a mere flying whirl of distracted limbs : as his rigidity was relaxed, as his support was removed — who can say what hosts of hell were keeping him up ? — his body was thrown away from the Capitol, over towards the Imperial throne, where it fell down and lay, broken, smashed, unrecognizable, at the base of the Emperor's balcony, and the blood, which stained the white robe and was spattered on the black sandals with 232 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE their silver wings, splashed up over the edge of the balcony and fell on the hands of Nero. At the same moment with a startling clang the Staff of the Phoenix, which had re- mained upright on the pavement, fell : the claw relaxed, and the great opal danced away, ghttering, flashing in the rays of the sun. The stone on which S. Peter knelt, on that day when he saw the devils holding up his old opponent, and prayed, in the power of the keys, to the Master who had given him that sacred charge, is preserved in the Church of Santa Francesca Romana — once the Temple of Venus and Apollo, afterwards S. Maria Nuova — taking the place of S. Maria Antica, which lay beneath the ruins of the Palatine until eleven years ago — and later still called after that sweetest of Roman saints, the noble mother, Francesca di Ponziano, who was buried here in 1440, and canonized in 1608. It is strange that the shrine of so gentle a saint should be connected with so terrible an incident as the death of Simon Magus. There are people who find the story of the destruction of the sorcerer too savage for their taste ; they will have it that such a punishment is alien to the spirit of Christianity, and that the story which is found, without the name of the magician, in Suetonius and Dio Chrysostom, is far too horrible to be true. I cannot in the least understand how Christians have come to acquire this exaggerated sense of the value of life. The whole of the argument against the righteousness of such punish- ments as the wiping out of the Canaanitish tribes, the death of Ananias and Sapphira, and this tragedy of Simon Magus rests on a single assumption — namely, that death is always the worst thing that can happen to a man. This is quite un-Christian : according to the Christian view of life any mortal sin is worse than death, and who are we, who daily condemn men to death through our A SORCERER AND A SAINT 233 methods of justice, through our carelessness of trade conditions, through our international quarrels, through our system of medicine, through our callous ignorance about food and drink — to object to death as a Divine punishment on sinners whose subsequent fates are in the providence of the Eternal ? If Simon had lived — but why speculate ? Most of us know many Simons who in God's stern justice have been allowed to live on, and the earth is sick and sorry with the stink of their arts and trickeries. We must clear our minds of that desperate piece of humbug that this mortal life is the one thing which we must not be severed from — so strange is man in refusing a cheerful welcome to the one guest whom he can neither invite nor refuse. For suicide is not death : it is the last cowardly resort of the man who is afraid of dying. Just as the drunkard will, to forget the remorse of his drunkenness, get drunk again, so the suicide, in fear of dying, will pursue death, and finding, as he thinks, the great deliverer, with his immortal anodyne, wakes only to discover that he is gazing, with how great a terror, into the terrible eyes of the New Life, whose issue no man can tell. Ther<-; is nothing un~Christian about the end of Simon Maguo : but we love to dwell more on the life of such a woman as Frances of Rome. Too often, in the lives of the later saints, there are characteristics which seem definitely inhuman and unpleasant ; not seldom, as in the life of Aloysius, a youth " whose modesty was so rancid that he would not look on his mother," there are elements absolutely unclean and revolting — but with S. Francesca, as with her namesake S. Francis ^ — we feel immediately at 1 What would the Poverello have done with Aloysius or Berehmanns ? This latter, after his death, was once asked by a devotee whether the crude picture she had of him was like — the answer vouchsafed was the transformation of the picture into a very beautiful portrait which those who will may see in the Church of S. Maria in Campo Marcio. 234 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE home. Hers was, in spite (or because) of its astound- ing mixture of the naively supernatural (she saw her guardian angel perpetually for thirty years), an astonish- ingly simple, kindly and human faith. ^ The daughter of noble parents, she married a noble, and was a devoted wife and mother ; she spent much time and money in good works, was a woman of exceptional courage and capacity in emergencies. Her husband was on the Papal side in the war between Naples and Rome. Ladislas of Naples left as Governor of the City Count Pietro Troja. Skirmishing between the two parties was not infrequent, and in one bout, although Troja had the worst of it, Lorenzo Ponziano was wounded and had to take refuge in his palace in Trastevere — which is now a house for 1 In 141 2 Francesca Ponziano lost her son Evangelista Ponziano (he is buried in S. CaeciHa, one of his mother's favourite churches). A year after his death Francesca had a vision. Her son appeared to her, and told her that he was in bliss with the angels ; with him was a companion, like, yet more beautiful. This was the angel whom, Evangelista said, God had chosen to be her companion. " Night and day by your side he will assist you in all your ways.'- Then the vision of her son departed, but the angel guardian remained with her, visible to her alone, until the day of her death. Francesca described her heavenly companion to her confessor. " His brow is always serene, his glances kindle in the soul the flame of ardent devotion. When I look upon him, I understand the glory of the angelic nature and the degraded condition of our own. He wears a long shining robe, and over it a tunic, either as white as the lilies of the field, or the colour of a red rose, or of the hue of the sky when it is intensely blue. When he walks by my side his feet are never soiled by the mud of the street or by the dust of the road. The rays of light which dart from his brow send the demons away, howling." I leave to others to discuss how far such a vision as this was objective ; but in any discussion it should be remembered that Francesca was not a nun, but a wife and a mother, given to good works, who did not retire from the world until her husband's death, twenty-four years after the first appearance of her angel. I don't think she would have had much patience with the modem selfishness, which finds holy matrimony incompatible with a deep religious vocation. A SORCERER AND A SAINT 235 retreatants. Pietro Troja, probably despairing of making a successful attack in the huddled quarters of the poorest and most Papal part of Rome, demanded that Francesca should hand over her child as a hostage for her husband's good behaviour, and, in the event of refusal, threatened dire reprisals that Francesca apparently thought he might well succeed in carrying out. The mother, in the first agony of danger for her child — Gian Battista, who was only eight years old — fled with him, to try whether she could not hide him somewhere in security. On her way she met her confessor. He was probably a man who knew that Troja was more a blusterer than a man of action, and he bade the mother deliver her child to the Count (who was at the Capitol) and go herself to the Church of Ara Coeli. Francesca obeyed. The populace, fully persuaded that Troja was a devil, tried to prevent her ; but she took her son to the Governor, and then fled to Ara Coeli, and prayed before the picture of Our Lady. Troja, pleased at the soldierly aspect of the little boy, and put in a good humour at having brought to his feet one of the noblest and most pious and best loved women in Rome, asks Gian Battista if he can ride. *' But yes." A horse is brought and the boy placed upon the saddle in front of an officer. *' Would you hke to go off with this officer, and have a good ride ? " " Oh yes," said the boy, *' but — but I would like mother to come too." Troja, however, felt bound to stick to his word, and ordered the officer to ride off with the lad, and keep him safely until further orders. In a moment the oflicer gave his horse a slight touch with the whip, and — the animal refused to move. Spur and whip were plied with vigour ; but with the same result. Another horse was brought, and the same scene repeated. There was not a horse near — they tried four — that would sever Francesca the Beloved from her son. Troja, angry and puzzled, but rather impressed, gave orders that Gian Battista should 236 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE be given back to his mother, who hastened from Ara Coeh and took the boy back to the sickbed of her husband. It was this woman whom the Romans of the fifteenth century chose for their saint ; she was invoked long before official sanction was given to her worship in 1608, and to this day, on her feast, the room in the Convent of Tor di Specchi is visited by crowds of people.^ *' Convent " is not perhaps too accurate a word for the abode of the good ladies who follow the example and pre- cept of S. Frances. In nothing, perhaps, is her sense and piety better shown than in the religious order she founded. She must have noticed the ill effects that sprang from so many orders, nominally poor, living in great luxury and riches ; she must have lamented the decline of the Fran- ciscan and Dominican religions, and of that other order which the great Teresa of Jesus was to reform in Spain. S. Frances anticipated and exceeded the wisdom of Igna- tius and of Philip Neri when she founded in 1433 the Tor di Specchi for women. These Oblates, bound by no vows, live retired from the world in poverty, in obedience and self-sacrifice ; each retains her private property, but it is an accepted rule that she devotes the minimum of it to her personal needs, while the rest is spent in good works. The result is that here you have an order whose voluntary 1 The old Ponziano palace, now Casa degli Esercizii Pii, is also visited on 9th March. " On the day of the festival its rooms are thrown open, every memorial of the gentle saint is exhibited, Ughts bum on numerous altars, flowers deck the passages, leaves are strewn in the chapel, on the stairs, in the entrance court ; gay carpets, figured tapestry, and crimson silks hang over the doorways, and crowds of people go in and out, and kneel before the relics or the pictures of the dear Saint of Rome. It is a touching festival, which carries back the mind to the day when the young bride of Lorenzo Ponziano entered these walls for the first time, in all the sacred beauty of holiness and youth." — Lady G. Fullerton, " Life of St Frances of Rome." A SORCERER AND A SAINT 237 obedience and poverty and service is the result, not of a single moment of complete renunciation, but of a perpetual effort, a perpetually renewed series of acts of self -dedication. God forbid that I should say anything in depreciation of the great rule of S. Benedict, or of the rule of the Trappists, or of the Discalced Carmelites. But in this life of oblation you have, I think, a rule, which, in its freedom from regula- tion, achieves a greater ideal than the life of abnegation, which may be the work of haste or of ignorance, and after- wards be bitterly repented of. The old rules are no doubt fitter for certain characters, for those whom we are now accustomed to think of as '* saints " ; but for men and women who desire to serve God perfectly in religion it seems to me that it is difficult to choose a more excellent way than that selected by S. Frances for her friends and for herself. For to the Tor di Specchi Francesca Ponziano came, when she was left a widow, and for the last four years of her life she went about doing good, nursing the sick and visiting the poor. She had, however, none of that sickly and disgusting attitude towards the married life which we find praised in certain neo-Catholic books written by decadent Ultramontanes ; she had not for- gotten her husband and the joys of married life and the sweet solace of children. So when her time came to die, it is easy to imagine how pleased she must have been at being ordered by her confessor (who met her in the street, while she was ill) to go to the palace of her married life. So she returned to the house where she had lived with Lorenzo, and to the bridal chamber whither he had led her as a girl, and there, on 9th March 1440, she " went home.'' Her angel, still with her, for once left her side and stood before her, beckoning Francesca to follow : and murmuring to the watchers, " Love one another and be faithful unto death," Francesca went after the spirit who had for so long time been her companion and friend. 238 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Wlien we went to visit the Church of S. Francesca and kneel at her shrine, one of the brothers connected with it, an Ohvetan Benedictine (he was a young Frenchman) took us down behind the High Altar and withdrew the shutter which covers the glass casket in which the earthly remains of S. Frances rest. She had not that singular charisma which some saints have had — notably S. Csecilia and our own S. Oswald — and we saw only a skeleton clothed in the religious garb. I can find nothing but affection and beauty in such a treatment of the dear dead : it is good to remember the bare facts of death and of mortality in the presence of the remains of one who was, in her life, so fully and wonderfully cognizant of the things of the spirit : for there, at her shrine, it was not difficult to reahze how little a thing death is. He could spoil, and has spoiled, the fair form of Lorenzo's bride ; but the memory of her is fragrant still in the hearts of the Roman people, and her deeds have lived after her, while she her- self, reunited to Lorenzo and Agnese and Evangelista and her other relations and friends, still prays for the dear city of Rome and her own district of Trastevere. Apart from the memory of S. Frances and its connexion with the death of Simon Magus, ^ the church has little of interest. Architecturally it can boast one of the finest campanili in Rome. There is a statue group of S. Francesca and her angel by Bernini, which is rather more subdued than some of the sculptor's work, but quite uninspired by any understanding of the saint. There is a mosaic in the tribune — the only part of the old church which survived the fire of 12 16 — that has a good colour scheme but is poor in design and weak in its figures : it probably belongs to the twelfth century and represents 1 Perhaps I ought to say that there is no sort of likeUhood that the stone, said to be impressed by S. Peter's knee, is anything but unauthentic. I expect it was originally placed in S. Maria Nuova as a memorial of the incident. A SORCERER AND A SAINT 239 Madonna enthroned with SS. Peter, Andrew, James and John. When you have crossed the Ponte Cestio you are in a different Rome : here under the protection of Our Lady across the Tiber hve those who claim to be the hneal descendants of the old Romans ; people who boast of being Trasteverini and who speak with pity and con- tempt of those others who do not enjoy the same privilege. As to how far their claim is true I must leave archae- ologists to determine ; what is certain is that this district was annexed by Augustus and called Regio Transtiberina ; that in spite of the villas which lined the banks of the river, the region was chiefly inhabited by poor people — and indeed was not unlike what Chelsea had been before the days of modern improvements. Trastevere, however, was not only a poor quarter : it was a foreigners' quarter. It was in Trastevere that the Jews lived until Paul IV. in 1556 assigned to them the Ghetto near Santa Maria di Campitelli, and hard by Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, where the sermons, immortalized by Robert Browning, were preached to the obstinacy of the circumcision. As Tras- tevere was the Jews' quarters in Imperial times it is a probable tradition which states that S. Peter came here first on his arrival in Rome, and that Trastevere heard the Gospel before the Forum, the Palatine or the Vatican. And to-day, if you want to see beautiful men and women, people whose bearing and features answer a little to one's expectations of the Romans of Republican days, it is to Trastevere you must go. There are antiquarians who say these are no Romans, that the ancient stock is hopelessly mingled with Goth and Greek and Jew, and they may be right ; but here in the streets of Trastevere you may see a man who will not unnobly recall the figure of a Cincin- natus or an Antony, and a woman who will bring back recollections of Comeha or Volumnia. 240 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE If the ancient pagan associations of Trastevere are doubt- ful, there is no question about the glory which this part of the city has in the eyes of Christians. Caecilia and her church we had already visited ; but the Church of Our Lady we left till near the end of our visit, and were glad we did so. For dignity of effect, in spite of the restorer's efforts, the church is notable even in this city of notable basihcas. And apart from the beauty of this temple, it has a history which in length and interest can vie with that of the five great churches. Whether this or S. Maria Maggiore is actually the first Christian church named after Our Lady is an unsettled question. I like to think myself that it was here, among her own people, the Jews, that Mary first obtained honour ; and if the tradi- tion that there was a Christian meeting-house here in the time of Pope Calixtus I. is true, the church is older than that gorgeous building which shelters the relics of the holy manger.-^ It seems probable that here, where the Christian community was almost entirely Jewish, the thoughts of the church, when the question was discussed whose protection the building should be put under, should turn to the Jewish maid whose full beauty and power were then beginning to dawn upon the Catholic world. Here, amid people who were hers in race, in poverty, in shame, Mary began to receive that honour which has since been so marvellously increased; here, away from the pride of Rome, the haughtiness of the Caesars, and the power of the Capitol, may have been sung for the first time, in honour of Our Lady, that old song of the Jewish Church, " Lord, I am not high-minded : I have no 1 The story is that the tavern-keepers disputed with the Chris- tian community the ownership of a certain building : but the question came before Alexander Severus, who decided in favour of the Christians on the ground that any worship of God should be given the precedence over revelry and drunkenness. Perhaps a converted popinarius was the cause of the trouble. A SORCERER AND A SAINT 241 proud looks. I do not exercise myself in great matters ; which are too high for me. But I refrain my soul, and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother : yea, my soul is even as a weaned child. O Israel, trust in the Lord : from this time forth for evermore." And Israel, who had seen the coming of the Messiah, showed their trust in erecting to God the temple now known as S. Maria in Trastevere. The present building was erected by Innocent II. in 1 140, and consecrated by Innocent III. in 1198. The most noticeable characteristic of this church is the con- trast, greater than usual, between the nave and the choir. The mosaics of the choir may not be more beautiful, but they appear to be more gorgeous than most of those decorative wonders that make the Roman churches glow and sing with colour ; they represent scenes familiar to those who have looked at other mosaics ; here you have again the procession of sheep towards the Lamb of God, and here is Madonna, in a garb heaA^ with jewels, rich with embroidery, '* her clothing of wrought gold," seated beside her Son and Saviour. He holds a book with the words, '' Veni electa mea et ponam te in thronum meum," while in the scroll which Madonna holds are the words from Solomon's Song : " Laeva eius sub capite meo, et dextera illius amplexabitur me." Once again I am reminded of that amazing ode in which one of the greatest of English Catholic poets sang the Triumph of Mary : See in highest heaven pavilioned Now the maiden Heaven rest. The many-breasted sky out-milHoned By the splendours of her vest. Lo, the Ark this holy tide is. The un-handmade Temple's guest, And the dark Egyptian bride is Whitely to the spouse -heart prest ! 242 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE He the Anteros and Eros, Nail me to Thee, sweetest Cross ! He is fast to me, Ischyros, Agios Aihanaios ! Who will give them me for brother, Counted of my family, Sucking the sweet breasts of my Mother ? I His Flesh, and mine is He ; To my Bread myself the Bread is. And my Wine doth drink me : see. His left hand beneath my head is, His right hand embraceth me ! Sweetest Anteros and Eros, Lo, her arms He leans across ; Dead that we die not, stooped to rear us, Thanatos Athanatos. Who is She, in candid vesture, Rushing up from out the brine ? Treading with resilient gesture Air, and with that Cup divine ? She in us, and we in her are, Beating Godward : all that pine, Lo, a wonder and a terror ! The Sun hath blushed the Sea to wine ! He the Anteros and Eros, She the Bride and Spirit ; for Now the days of promise near us And the Sea shall be no more." This is the enthronement of woman, the victory of love, the coronation of self-sacrifice, the definite glory of what has been the contemned of the world — here is the trans- valuation of all values which the ragged-minded prophet of Germany sought for in vain. And on what a scene those gorgeous mosaics look ! The huge nave with its twenty-two columns, massive, irregular, is typical of that Judaism, stern, grand and unyielding, which was destined to be the path to Christian- ity. There is no decided note of colour, in spite of the A SORCERER AND A SAINT 243 splendid entablature above the columns, until you look down and see the pavement, or up to the ceiling, with its Domenichino's Assumption, and its gold and blue decora- tion. It is in this church that one can reahze more than in any other the change, the growth, the inevitable change and the necessary growth that has passed over Catholicism. One may regret that it is no longer possible to stand in the little Cahxtine building that was erected on the site of the holy oil-spring, where had been a hospital for sailors ; one may regret and remember the fifth-century building which once stood where is now the Church of the Innocents — but as one watches the crowds that flock to the present shrine it is not possible to avoid seeing that here those people are at home, that here, just as in the past, they can find Mary and Jesus, that this is right for them as the older buildings for people of older days : and in this spirit it is possible to meet the chance of future changes not merely with equanimity but with gladness. A modern Jesuit writes sadly of Trastevere : " Unfortimately various Protestant sects and Socialist clubs are doing their utmost to sap the faith of this simple people, and much harm is being done " — I don't believe it, or if it is so, the fault is with the Church. No harm, but good should come of opposition and criticism and attack. By them the Christian Church is made to realize her position, to revise her standards, to furbish her arms, to look to her battle- ments. Not easily is Mary ousted from the hearts of her children ; and it would need a wilderness of sects and clubs to break the charm of the old basilica — but if the people are careless and faithless, if the Christian plebs, these here who boast themselves Trojans, have been immoral and shiftless ; if they forget Caeciha who died for them, and Francesca who laboured for them, then it may well be that their faith is in danger. Nothing is more damnably untrue than the lie that all heretics are evil-livers ; nothing is more certainly true than the truth that all evil-livers 244 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE are on the verge of heresy. One has heard it said that an immoral CathoHc is better than a heretic ; the adage would be true if only we could forget that mortal sin cuts a man off from God entirely ; and who would argue that a man who sees God faultily, through an imperfect glass, is worse off than he from whom the Divine vision is hid altogether, who has no glimpse at all of the glory that shines from the throne of the Eternal ? CHAPTER XIII RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO OF all the Pagan stories that Christianity adopted, the one most easily borrowed, the one that needed least adaptation, was the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The con- crete genius of Apuleius left the tale as beautiful, as spiritual as he found it ; and it was left for Christian painters to insinuate that strange cry of the flesh distinct from the spirit which is the subtlest snare of the devil. Many quite good people go wrong on the question of the body. You meet Christians who argue whole-heartedly against the nude in art, and the Vatican galleries, with their rows of fig-leaves, testify that where lust reigned prudery reigned also. Of course the question of the nude in art is too big to be argued here : but there are two things which need saying before I go on to the Psyche frescoes in the Farnesina Palace. First we have this truth : that the human body is an entirely beautiful and holy thing, and that any representation of it is more beautiful where the body is undraped than where it is clothed ; then we must admit that the devil as usual has soiled and spoiled this as he soils and spoils other of God's beautiful things, and that the vessel of honour, the Temple of the Holy Ghost, may become the home of demons, of lust and of cruelty. That this can be any reason for condemning the nude in art is perhaps the oddest position ever taken by thinking man : it is surely obvious that nothing would be more difficult than to make a salacious picture out of purely nude figures — you might have pictures directly indecent, but scarcely an art that 245 246 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE has, for instance, the various hibricity of FeHcien Rops. The nude is in itself a pure thing. Then there comes the more difficult problem as to how far a merely sensuous picture is tolerable ; on this I have touched in writing about Correggio — and I feel that in any true, Platonic state art such as his in the mythological pictures, and art such as glows from many of Rubens' nudes, would be treated as quite illegitimate. For what do these painters do ? They accomplish the great severance — the monstrous divorce — they divide body from soul. So long as a picture of the nude conveys not only the body, but the fact that it is the body of a human being, the artist cannot go wrong. Remember, I am not here speaking of artistic methods, or of the artist's motive ; Rembrandt in his nudes never achieves salaciousness — least of all in his few indecent pictures — because Rembrandt the man was incapable of painting mere flesh. I do not say that Rembrandt, when he painted, for instance, the " Woman bathing," in the National Gallery, tried to do anything but be truthful ; but for Rembrandt the truth he saw included the fact that it was a woman bathing and not merely an effect of light and air on human flesh, on the linen smock and the woman's bowed, engaged head. For painters like Rubens, at moments, like Ingres, like Sargent, the thing to be painted is really the effect of hght on certain materials — they have no subject, they have only a series of effects. This attitude, when applied to the nude, does produce an effect which I can do nothing but condemn : it is contrary to human dignity, it is contrary to the true aims of a high art that man should be painted as if he were a haystack, a tiger, or a pome- granate. Pictures of men and women as stiU life, or as mere animal life, have no legitimate place in art. This principle, as a principle, should never be forgotten in judging nude pictures : it makes the difference between Giulio Romano and Michael Angelo, between Etty and RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 247 Watts, between Rubens and Rembrandt, in so far as these painters attempted the nude ; and furthermore, the principle extends to pictures that are concerned with draped figures — over-absorption with artistic material, as such, is the ruin of fine art. And we have to be pecu- liarly careful to avoid accepting an artist's own estimate of the motive and purpose of his work. To take an instance : nothing can be more futile than a criticism of Whistler's art based on that master's own expressed opin- ions. Whistler was really one of the greatest literary painters of his day : in his revolt against the literary, " academic " picture he continually produced pictures which only differed from them in being superbly conceived and painted, and succeeding as episodes when they failed. In his curious, perverse way he may label a picture an arrangement, a symphony, a study, a note — but who can remove the humanity from the portrait of his mother, from the Carlyle, from the Connie Gilchrist, nay, from the Cremorne Rooms or the Old Bridge at Battersea ? Whistler had an intensely literary and critical temperament, and was perhaps too occupied with the non-artistic side of his subjects. He never painted a purely decorative thing in his life, never achieved anything whose interest was merely pictorial : his keen, thin, waspish personality was far too vivid to escape when he was painting. Take even the Peacock room — apart from La Princesse, who reigned over it, and showed so much of Japanese influence — how clearly the true Whistler emerged in the savage satire of his unfortunate patron ! For years the art critics, dazzled or terrified by Whistler's biting pen, took him at his own valuation, insisted that he was a " mere painter," " throwing a pot of paint in the face of the British public " — yes, but behind each pot of paint, always active, ever evading notice, is the vigorous, alert figure of the painter who imposes his personality in every dab of paint, in every sweep of his brush. 248 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE I said earlier in this book that Raphael ought to have been the god of those who cry " Art for Art's sake." I would justify that by putting anyone in the Villa Farne- sina and bidding them look at the Cupid and Psyche series, and the '' Triumph of Galatea." Certainly there are merits about the Cupid and Psyche room. The colour, though hard, is vivid, and at times beautiful ; there is no delicacy, but there is a certain vigour of line ; there is no gracefulness, except occasion- ally in the figure of Cupid, but there is a real swing of composition. But can any, or all of these, excuse the utter absence of soul ? Here you have one of the most beautiful stories in the world treated as if it were the record of a love affair in the streets off the Piazza di Spagna — Cupid is a coarse, sensual youth. Psyche little better than a girl off the streets. The great Jupiter is a doddering old man, the wonderful Venus a pretty, noxious woman, Mercury a sort of aeronautical postman, and the court of heaven the amazed clique of a Renascence suburb. There is a complete lack of dignity, of life, of reality about the whole series. But, say the defenders of Raphael, this is not the master's work ; except for one or two figures, he probably never touched the frescoes, and though the design was his he never meant it to be so coarsely executed. Well, let us admit that, and turn to the Galatea, painted two years before, and painted by Raphael. Its colour is suaver, the line is not so hard, the nude figures not so arrogant and vulgar, but is this the Polyphemus and Galatea of Theocritus ? '* O Nicias, there is no other remedy for Love, With ointing, or with sprinkUng on, that ever I could prove, Beside the Muses nine ! . . . The cause of this my speech A Cyclops is, who lived here with us right wealthily ; That ancient Polyphem, when first he loved Galate (When, with a bristled heard, his chin and cheeks first clothed were :) He loved her not with roses, apples, or with curled hair ; m jumMH p It 'lAZZA 1)1 .^I'Al.N/. RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 249 But with the Furies' rage. All other things he little plied. Full often to their fold, from pastures green, without a guide, His sheep returned home : when all the while he singing lay In honour of his Love, and on the shore consumed away From morning until night ; sick of the wound, fast by the heart. Which mighty Venus gave, and in his Uver stuck the dart. For which this remedy he found, that sitting oftentimes Upon a rock and looking on the sea, he sang these rhymes : ' O Galatea fair, why dost thou shun thy lover true ? More tender than a lamb, more white than cheese when it is new, More wanton than a calf, more sharp than grapes unripe, I find. You use to come, when pleasant sleep my senses all do bind : But you are gone again when pleasant sleep doth leave my eye ; And as a sheep you run, that on the plain a wolf doth spy.' " How far removed from the Greek idyllist's conception is this modish figure v/ith the conventional, armorial Amo- rini, and the tritons struggling with too-willing maids. It is too evident that the painter, whatever were his ambi- tions, has really cared for nothing save that symmetry of form and grace of colour in which he has hardly ever been excelled ; but he has loved not art, but the things of art, and so has lost his touch on the real thing. The rule for the artist is the same as the rule for the religious or the lover : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness ; and all these things shall be added unto you." Raphael was the slave of that convention which subordinated subject to style, matter to manner — he has not even had his reward, for his followers disown him and those whom he would fain have followed cannot allow him place of honour among them. Dominic insists that I am too hard on Raphael ; and that all kinds of fallacies lurk in my arguments. ** It is all very well, but don't all of us at times, and quite legitimately, take pleasure in form as form ? For in- stance, the flash of bodies in the sunlit sea, the kind of picture that Tuke paints, gives me a great pleasure though I may not be a bit moved by any human motive either in the actual scene of boys bathing or in such a picture as 250 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Fred Walker's ' Bathers ' or many of Tuke's : and how much human interest is there in Botticelh's * Birth of Venus/ that we both love ? Isn't that purely de- corative ? " *' I don't think so," I retorted. '* There is more idea, more of what Blake insisted on as the core of art, in Botticelli than in Raphael ; the idea may not be strongly in- tellectual — indeed, both in his ' Venus ' and the ' Primavera ' it is primarily a spiritual idea — you can feel, swaying through the trees of the one and over the waves and among the blown petals of the other, the great Renascence of nature and the great Renascence of love. There is love of the body in both, but it is that love which claims the body as vehicle and does not desiderate it as end. I do not know whether I can put it better than by saying that Botticelli has a sacramental quality that Raphael lacks. Botticelli or Crivelli or Lippo Lippi are not content with painting beautiful things perfectly : they know that beyond their greatest effort is something that no brush can ever catch, no pigment ever convey. Raphael has no modesty, ' no high humility ' ; he achieves perfection, and will not hear of any mystery. There is no unfathomed pool of sorrow and love in the eyes of his Madonna ; in his pagan pictures there is none of that haunting wistful- ness of allegory that I can find in Pompeian frescoes, and even at times in Correggio ; he has no simplicity of mind, and he has too great a knowledge of his own art. Do you remember in the great Sistine Madonna — for it is great — at the sides of the picture hang the heavy folds of curtains, drawn back that we may see the vision of Mary and the Child : well, that is typical of Raphael — for him the curtain is drawn — he believes he can take away the veil from the sanctuary ; and so, unlike Michael Angelo and Leonardo, he fails in rendering the mystery of religion ; he paints what he sees — not what he dreams, or believes, or hopes. And there is a terrible fate for RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 251 those who paint only what they see : in the end what they see is simply what they paint.*' '* Um — yes — does that mean anything in particular ? That last sentence ? Hasn't Raphael the right to his vision, even if it is not as mystical as Leonardo's or as godhke as Buonarroti's ? " *' Oh yes ! I love Raphael's pictures, if I could forget his subject. Think of that Bible of his in the Loggia. The frescoes were not painted by him — at least not all — but the lack of taste, of artistic feeling, must be laid on his shoulders. Think of the first three — do you remember ? — those dreadful, empty, fiat parodies of the magnificent three in the Sistine roof ! Instead of that mysterious Force, given awefully under the guise of age, first looming from clouds of gas and space, then ringed with cherubs, supported by seraphs, omnipotently eager and then brooding, creating over the earth and water — what do you get ? The hideous blue, the hasty, undignified pose, the feeble floating figure with the conventionally blown scarf, and in the third the dancing, silhouetted old man with the two globes against either palm — what a hideously inadequate idea of the great creation of Sun and Moon ! " '* As you know, I don't like the Loggia any more than you ; though there is something to be said for Jacob's flight with its amusing camels, and David's triumph has a certain processional dignity — and what do you say about the Last Supper ? " " Again it is poor, it is lacking in imagination. I would far rather have the older treatment, with its frank refusal to treat that solemn incident naturally ; the treatment that gives us the truth about the Supper, at the cost of accuracy. It needed a painter with infinitely more imagination than Raphael to try to give us the Eucharist in a natural way — and you know that Leonardo was not satisfied with the Cenacolo he left on the convent wall." '' Oh ! of course, I didn't want to put Raphael against 252 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Leonardo : but I do think you are rather bigoted on the point of pictures that are beautiful only because they are harmonious, beautiful arrangements of hne, beautiful in colour, in chiaroscuro : I'm quite sure that if you are treating the whole of a subject conventionally, decoratively, you may use the human figure without — as you put it — * trying to get the soul in/ For instance, you love the Burne- Jones and Morris tapestry in Exeter College Chapel. Surely that is just as * merely ' decorative as a Raphael ? " " I don't think so. Let's go on to the two big frescoes I liked most, the ' Parnassus ' and the oddly miscalled * Disputa.' To begin with, isn't it curious that a Christian painter should make no difference in his treatment of the two subjects ? I don't mean in technique, but in that evanescent thing, spirit. For me it looks as if both Parnassus and the heaven of heavens were to Raphael equally mythical — or equally true. Really it is a certain lack of truth that I complain of in each picture. There is an aspect of Parnassus which is as true as the Blessed Sacrament and the Beatific Vision : indeed, from that point of view, Parnassus is only another form in which God expresses Himself. But I don't find that in Raphael's frescoes. I fancy he believed that he was treating a mythical subject in the one fresco and a theological and true subject in the other — but he doesn't convey that idea to me. You may say this is just the atmosphere of the later Renascence ; perhaps it is — but I dislike it and think it is definitely untrue, a false and harmful view of reality. And you do not find it in Michael Angelo." I found myself unconsciously comparing " The Triumph of Faith " with that very different picture which I have loved for years, " The Adoration of the Lamb," by the Van Eycks. Both pictures are lacking in imaginative force ; both dwell astonishingly on the externals of religion; and there the resemblance ends. The Van Eycks' great master- RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 253 piece is like the plain, simple creed of a peasant : it is full of colour, of order, of precision, of force, of a certain sadness that contact with the earth and nights underneath the sky bring to men ; but it is a picture that the greatest poet in the world ought to find satisfying. It does not attempt to represent mystery, to pierce beyond what is revealed to the common man ; but in its plain statement of truths, believed from the soul, it attains a spiritual dignity which makes it as satisfying to the soul as the realities of the Sistine Chapel, Fra Angelico's "Vision of Heaven," the cool triumph of the "Virgin of the Rocks," or the deep pathos of Rembrandt's " Supper at Emmaus." But this "Disputa" of Raphael — graceful, clever, full of beautiful detail, full of imerring and unboastful precison, yet lacks that one final grip, that touch of imaginative unity that would lift it from being one of the most beautiful frescoes in Rome to being one of the greatest religious pictures in the world. I have found that my friends credit me with little better than obstinacy when I insist that I can discover far more religious feeling in Pinturicchio than in Raphael. I do not know that I shall succeed in explaining what I felt : but I did feel strongly that in spite — though why should one say " in spite " ? — of the painter's love for pomp, for gaiety, for gallantry there is far more religion in the Borgia Apartments than in the Stanze, which most well-conditioned visitors appear to discover full of " imaginative beauty " and " religious feeling." It always strikes me that Raphael takes people in : he is so — dare I say? — " smug," that we have accepted his images of things religious as being the things themselves; he is so consciously not familiar, so terribly striving after a dignified aloofness — always excepting a few of the easel pictures — that such frankly " homely " painters as Carpaccio and Pintu- ricchio are a little despised as superficial, occupied with trivial anecdote and lacking in the grave, sober, religious qualities that distinguish Raphael. I think it was just 254 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE this na'ivetS that first charmed me in the Pinturicchios at S. Maria del Popolo. The '* Coronation of Our Lady," at the Vatican, is not a particularly outstanding example of his beautiful work, though there the composition of the figures in the foreground, and the gay angels behind Our Lord had roused in me a sentiment that quite escaped the appeal of Raphael. But when I saw the Assumption in S. Maria del Popolo I felt that here was a painter who knew he had not the angelic power of Leonardo or the superhuman strength of Michael Angelo, and was content to be truthful, charming , and graceful. " I suppose really," I said to Dominic, as we looked at the Pintu- ricchio Assumption, " that what I feel about this work is that it represents so much more readily and properly that element in the Gospels which in form is rather mythical. Of course you know that I believe in the historical character of the Birth stories in the Gospels ; and I am not inclined to say that the story of the Assump- tion, in some of its forms, is anything but historical — but this does not prevent me from seeing that the Birth stories, the Star, the Magi, the Shepherds, and the later legend of the animals are in form akin to the folk tale. Where I differ from the modern critic is just here : he thinks the Nativity stories are fiction, because they are like fairy stories. I think many fairy stories are true because they are like the tale of the Nativity — or rather, perhaps, that each group represents a reality that the world was waiting for, and received in its fulness at the Incarnation. " I cannot see that because an incident is spiritually and poetically appropriate — as the homage of angels, the homage of wealth and wisdom and might, the homage of lowliness, the homage of the animal world certainly is appropriate — that therefore it is likely to be historically untrue. I do not see things hke that : where I am sus- picious of truth is when I find a manifest discordance RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 255 between what should happen and what did. Now Pin- turicchio — as also Lippo Lippi and Penigino — seems to have this view of the mysteries of Our Lord's earthly life. Of course the frankly childlike way of presentation is not the only way ; you can have Mantegna's intellectual vision, Leonardo's mystical vision, or Michael Angelo's spiritual vision — and all these are greater : greater too is that fervour of simplicity and intense personal devotion which you get in Fra AngeHco and Giotto, and which lingers, shadow-like, in the paintings of Gozzoli ; but still there is room for Pinturicchio and Carpaccio, with their simple vision, their gay acceptance of the Cathohc stories. Now Raphael seems to have tried to reduce the Christian story to a philosophical whole ; to get a syn- thesis of theology and religion and art, which he was never big enough to manage — and in this effort he misses rehgion, misinterprets theology, and spoils his art. Pin- turicchio " " You mean that Pinturicchio is in the mood of the old miracle plays : that he feels rather than thinks ; that he worships rather than criticizes ; that he is assisting at Mass ? Or perhaps that his art is like the jolly children at Ara Coeli who bow and talk to the Bambino as if they were in the stable at Bethlehem, and who are ready to tug Mary's robe, and pull Joseph's beard ; who are fearless, reverent — and yet have not got that glow of personal devotion which, say, little Philip Neri had — and which distinguishes Fra Angelico from Pinturicchio ? " So Dominic. " Exactly : that's just what I wanted. This merry child of Umbria is like the Jewish boys and girls of whom Our Lord spoke. He pipes, and the critics — heavily serious after a round of the Stanze — come in and refuse to dance : but we — we will go and dance, shall we, before the wonderful, cheerful frescoes of the Borgia rooms ? " " But first just look at this story of St Jerome again. 256 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE I'm not very keen on the interior, except for those two dogs, and the beautiful ghmpse through the window ; but isn't the one with the hon a perfect joy ? There's an amusing resemblance between the old saint and the lion which I'm sure the painter intended, and the two brothers standing by the good beast's tail are so successful — the half-nervous, half-shocked attitude of the clean- shaven one, as who should say, * Really, we knew Jerome was odd, but a lion ! ' And the rather cross, severe expression of the older man. ' Well, Jerome has no busi- ness to go after lions at his time of life. He ought to be thinking of other things.' Or do you think I'm too flip- pant ? " " Not a bit, Dominic ; it's just the note of the picture ; and to my mind that note of art is vastly more healthy and religious than the forced Raphael touch, or the bravura of Rubens. And see how the same painter can really achieve a noble effect in the picture of Jerome in the Desert. That landscape, with the menhir in the fore- ground, is not the work of a mere careless, joyful person with no interest beyond flowers and marriage-bells and cloth-of-gold. The figure of the saint, too, has, in its simplicity and directness, a real note of aspiration that I seek for in vain in " " Oh ! poor Raphael, do leave him alone ! And we will go to the Borgia rooms." Of course critics dispute as to how much of the fresco- painting in the rooms of the Borgias is by the master himself, and how nmch is by pupils ; but there is no doubt that the influence of Pinturicchio is predominant and availing. The subjects vary from Egyptian mythology to allegorical paintings of Grammar and Rhetoric ; one includes scenes from the Uves of Mary and Our Lord ; while you have the story of Susannah, of S. Barbara and S. Catherine. The fresco of Susannah is an astonishingly RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 257 simple example of the skill with which the artist can get his story into small scope ; and in the light treatment of the scenes, and the beautiful creatures in the foreground we can certainly see Pinturicchio's hand. Particularly pleasant is the little rabbit, sitting up right in the front, with protesting paws and ears avid for any scandal, while her mate crouches down by the fountain ashamed and annoyed at the wickedness of the elders. The richest of any of the frescoes is the meeting between S. Catherine and Maxentius, in which are portraits of contemporary celebrities such as Prince Djem and Andrew Paleologus, about whom the curious may read in Mgr. Bur- chard's diary. Yet gorgeous as this fresco is, it must yield for beauty to the two frescoes in the Hall of the Mysteries. One represents the Annunciation. The scene is in an Italian house, and in arrangement the picture differs little from the ordinary Itahan painting. Our Lady kneels on one side, submissive, tender, with none of the mystery of a Leonardo, but with a certain grace and a beautiful charm that is peculiarly individual : Gabriel, crowned with flowers , and with the great wings of some mythical bird, kneels before her, and between them is a bowl of roses. That pot of roses might be Pinturicchio's signature : it gives a personal touch in its prominence. Over the roses hovers the Padre Eterno supported by those little cherubim that are so lovely and so frequent in the master's pictures. Greater than this, evidence of the real power of Pintu- ricchio, is the Resurrection. Our Lord, with the pennant of victory in His hand, has arisen out of the tomb; cherubs support Him — and below are the Roman guards, and, kneeling in adoration, his Holiness Pope Alexander VI. One's first feeling is of incredulity that this heavy, gross, amiable face can be the countenance of the man whom centuries have agreed to execrate — one's next is that Alexander must have been better than the tradition, that the Orsini did really blacken his character, and the 258 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE German master of ceremonies lied in hatred. But it is a mistake, I suppose, to assume that vice such as Borgia is credited with need be associated with active mahgnancy. It is quite possible — even likely — that a deep indolence and disbelief, a weariness and slackness of character led the Borgia Pope into his worst excesses. Anyway, here he is painted with unrelenting fidelity ; not a line left out, not a feature softened. Pinturicchio may be a shallow, light-hearted painter ; but he knew, did he not, how to tell the plain truth in plain terms ? " Plain terms " per- haps hardly suits this bit of revealing, veracious portrait- ure : I sometimes think that Pinturicchio is here liker Browning than anyone else. He has not Browning's astonishing intellectual curiosity, that amazing mental vivacity which inspires the Renascence poems ; but he has something of that master's splendour and simplicity of statement — that terrible candour which is so vastly more effective than any satire, such as Goya's. Pope Alexander, sitting, one can see him, rather vainly, wearing his cope with a boy's heavy pride, arranging his fat hands — how often the Borgia hands, so bewraying in character, reappear in Pinturicchio's pictures — to their best advantage, asked the painter, " Is that the right position for my head ? " And one can hear the painter's quiet assent, as a smile flickers over his face and he begins his study for this, the greatest of his portraits. And so we see him and wonder. " This is all ; this torpid, foolish blown old man is the terrible Borgia ! And that spoilt-looking, rather mean-faced figure kneeling at the other side, and gazing arrogantly out of the fresco, is Cesare ! " Moral indignation is a good and necessary thing, but is it, I wonder, half so effective as this relentless speaking of the truth, this fearless rendering of two common sinners in their habit as they lived ? There is, however, one touch by which Pinturicchio felt he must emphasize what and whom he has been painting : the face ALEXANDER VI FINTURICCHIO Borgia Rooms. The V'atica) RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 259 of the Risen Christ is stern, even sad, and rather full of foreboding, and the eyes of Him are turned away, away from the man who was His vicar. On Peter, in his hasty, hot-tempered sin, Jesus looked : but from this, this self- satisfied, indulgent, carefully-sinful old man the Lord Jesus averts His countenance ; and the blessing of His wounded hand falls, out of the fresco, on those who are in the room. " Is it Zeus, or Moses, or Tiber, or Pan } " So Dominic before the great statue of Michael Angelo, designed for Julius's tomb in San Pietro in Vincoli. And indeed I think the question is excusable. The draperies are ancient Roman, the beard is the beard of a river-god, the horns are the horns of Pan — and the eyes ? There indeed you do find the burning anger, the haste and zeal of the lawgiver who smashed the Divine tables, and devised that awful punishment for Korah, Dathan and Abiram. There is a French critic who says, " ce n'est pas Moise, le plus doux des hommes, mais c'est un espece de Jupiter tonnant et remerant TOlympe par le froncement de son sourcil." Anything less true than " le plus doux des hommes " can scarcely be imagined : the Moses of the Pentateuch is from the very beginning hasty, fiery-tempered, ready to argue with Jehovah, to slay and to kill, to curse and threaten, to wade through blood out of the country of bondage to the land of promise. No, it is not that this statue is too terrible for Moses : it is not terrible enough. If he must have horns ^ they should have been curved and longer, not the stubby, pushing pair that emerge so abruptly from the cataract of hair. And that cascade of beard, in which the right hand is tangled, is a thing of the sea or the river : it is heavy with the salt of undiscovered oceans, and dank with unattempted rivers. It parts and 1 In giving them Michael Angelo followed an old error in the Vulgate, Exodus, 34, 35. 26o A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE breaks and falls like some great waterfall, till it reaches the huge shelter of the left hand. In those hands, with their great, masterful fingers, and in the angr^^ amazed eyes, eyes full of wrath at the stubbornness of the people, I find the Moses who broke the rock and bullied the cowardly Jew away from the delicacies of Egypt to the hard life of Canaan. Here is the Moses who slew the Egyptian, and cursed as he saw the light people dancing and capering round the calf of gold. What is he doing now ? Is he watching that dance ? Scarcely, I think, for he saw that gay scene of silly sin as he strode down Sinai, out of the cloud and the glory, with the favour of Jehovah's presence still about him. No : if we look through Deuteronomy I do not think we can doubt what was in the sculptor's mind when he represented this seated lawgiver. This is the Moses who was an hundred and twenty years old ; whose eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And these are the words that he is uttering over the tomb that should have been the tomb of Giuliano della Rovere the Lord Pope Julius II : ** It shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his com- mandments and his statutes which I command thee this day ; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and over- take thee : Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou sett est thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly ; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me. The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, RAPHAEL AND PINTURICCHIO 261 whither thou goest to possess it. The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew ; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish. And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust : from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies : thou shalt go out one way against them, and fiee seven ways before them : and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away. . . . And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other ; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest : but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind : and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee ; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life : In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even ! and at even thou shalt say. Would God it were morning ! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again : and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you." " Ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you ! " That is the motto for this terrible image. It is easy to speculate how far the sculptor was moved to anger by the perpetual 262 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE disturbances to his work at the hands of changing masters, and how far he was occupied with the thought of JuUus's Itahan poHcy and the difficulties that beset him : but I prefer to think that here, as in " The Last Judgment," it is horror of sin — how acquired who can tell ? — that broods on those mighty brows and flashes in those august eyes. The lightness, the gaiety, the warmth, the honey-coloured processions of popes and princes, and their myrmidons, all " dancing down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire," roused in the great heart and mind of Buon- arroti the flame of a devouring passion, a burning and consuming wrath — and here, in the guise of Moses, with the most terrible execration ever penned pouring over that pouted lip, we have the soul of Michael Angelo gazing out in anger and heart-broken sorrow at the light laughter and easy sin of the people of Rome dancing, dancing in the presence chamber of the wrath of God. Not in this mood, nevertheless, would I remember Michael Angelo : in his old age, after the terrors of the Last Judgment, he turned again to the vision of the dead Christ that had occupied him in his youth. In the court- yard of the Palazzo Rondanini is a fragment of a group which is called on the pediment a Pieta. It is, I believe, part of a design for an Entombment. Vaguely, as you gaze at it, the composition becomes apparent. Mary, older than Our Lady in the Vatican group, is supporting the Lord's body, which hangs limp, inert and so tired ; but she has not received it from above. It is evident too that the design is meant to represent rather a historical incident than a devotional moment such as is shown in a Pieta : and under the Christ's right leg is a hand, whose arm is broken off just above the elbow, which belongs probably to one of the other Marys, or to S. Joseph of Arimathasa. The moment, I think, that the sculptor has chosen is when Joseph has taken off the garment of MOSES MICHAEL AN(;KI. ^ 35; in prison, 55, 56; head of, 196 ; Simon Magus and, 231 Philip Neri, S., 116, 133 Phryne, 60 Pinturicchio, 2, 25, 30, 93, 150, 190, 253 ; at S. Maria del Popolo, 254- 256 ; Borgia apartments, 256-259 Pius IV., 20 Pius IX., the travellers and, 3 ; 20 ; Liberals and, 199-200; 211; tomb of, 218 PiusX., 9, 18, 265 and^ Plain-song, the beauty of, 91-93 ; Palestrina and, 107 Plato, 43, 173, 174 Pompey the Great, 40 Pope, the, position of and devotion to, 18-20; and his see, 198 Praxiteles, emotion in sculpture and, 60 Raphael, 3 ; Michael Angelo and, 21- 22; 25, 30, 150; Transfiguration, 166 ; Cupid and Psyche, 248 ; Gala- tea, 249 ; Loggie and Stanze, 250- 252 ; religious feeling of, 253, 255, 256 Relics, 74-76, 195-196, 225, 238 Reynolds, Sir J., 21 Rienzi, 203 Roads, Roman, 133 Rocca di Papa, 140 Romulus, 9 Rothenburg on the Tauber, 5 Ruskin, J., pathetic fallacy and, 124; S. Coecilia and, 219, 226 Sancta Sanctorum, chapel of, 196- 197 Saints, at S. 1 eter's shrine, 15 ; in- terference of, 143-145 Scala, Santa, origin of, 194 ; devotion of, 195-196 Sculpture, Roman, realism of, 38, 59 ; Seated Boxer, 60 ; Hermaphroditits, 61 ; Antinous, 62-64; Laocoon, 65 ; Apollo Belvedere, 65 ; Nihts, 65 Seneca, 43, 54, 230 Sermon, a bad, 100 ; disadvantages of, 182-185 Shrines, use of, 114 Simon Magus, legend of, 228-233 Size, heresy of, 38 ; Oriental love ot, reasons for, 39 Slavery, under the Empire, 51-54 ; and Christianity, 52 ; and the philoso- phers, 53 Socrates, 43, 173. i74 274 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE Sophocles, 43 ; character and statue of, 173-175 Spitting, how far a matter of habit, 89 ; horror of an Irish friar at, 112 Suburbs, how they spoil cities, 5, 6 Tacitus, 47, 50 Testament, the Old, early Christian use of, 170-171 Theresa, S., 116; Bernini's statue of, 164 Tiberius, 47, 50; galleys of, 140, 146, 149 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love^ by, 159-161 Tivoli, Hadrian's villa at, 44 Trams, electric, at Rome, qualities of, 138-140 Trastevere, 239 Tufa, Our Lady of the, legend of, 141- 143 Ultramontanism, narrow, instance of, 37 Van Eyck, Hubert and Jan, 252 Vatican, the (see also under Sculpture), 166 Velasquez, portrait by, 157- 1 59 Vespasian, 40, 43 Vestals, the, 47-50 Water, holy, English attitude to, 131- 132 Wesley, John, chapels of, 17 Yacco, Sada, Japanese music and, 96 J?i) e« THE RIVERSn>H PRFSS LIJ.UTFD. 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