I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be
honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of
the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had
passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own
consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The
Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged
very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not
contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel
to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I
wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso
without the Pantheon's help.
I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in
the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which
runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then
stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so
simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or
possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers
passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from
their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such
things. However it was, I took the apartment, and found it, though
small, apt for me, as Ariosto said of his house, and I dwelt in it with
my family a month or more in great comfort and content. In fact, it
seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of
passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the
Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the
fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe
that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero
had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told
me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal
progress. At any rate, I had so long resigned the hope of revisiting the
quiet scene that when I revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of
ages, and one day found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from
something like a hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called
Via del Gambero still existed in that neighborhood. I said that I had
once lodged in it forty-odd years before; but I believed it had been
demolished. Not at all, the shopman said; it was just behind his place;
and what was the number of the house? I told him, and he laughed for joy
in being able to do me a pleasure; me, a stranger from the strange land
of sky-scratchers _(grattacieli),_ as the Italians not inadequately
translate sky-scrapers. If I would favor him through his back shop he
would show me how close I was upon it; and from his threshold he pointed
to the corner twenty yards off, which, when I had turned it, left me
almost at my own door.
In that transmuted Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged,
and there was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had
sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible youth. I had
not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing
across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I
might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious
question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and
what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the
Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to
the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was
no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a
chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there
behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my proud young double
that we were one, and that I was going in the archbishop's red coach as
well; he would never have believed it of my gray hairs and sunken
figure. I could not even ask him what had become of the grocer near by,
whom I used to get some homely supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or
the like, when I came out in the December mornings, and who, when I said
that it was very cold, would own that it was _un poco rigidetto,_ or a
little bit stiffish. The ice on the pavement, not clean-swept as now,
but slopped and frozen, had been witness of that; the ice was gone and
the grocer with it; and where really was I? At the window up there, or
leaning against the apse of the church opposite? What church was it,
anyway? I never knew; I never asked. Why should I insist upon a common
identity with a man of twenty-seven to whom my threescore and ten could
only bring perplexity, to say the least, and very likely vexation? I
went away from Via del Gambero, where the piety of the reader will seek
either of myselves in vain. In my earlier date one used to see the red
legs of the French soldiers about the Roman streets, and the fierce
faces of the French officers, fierce as if they felt themselves
wrongfully there and were braving it out against their consciences. Very
likely they had no conscience about it; they had come there over the
dead body of the Roman Republic at the will of their rascal president,
and they were staying there by the will of their rascal emperor, to keep
on his throne the pope from whom the Italians had hoped for unity and
liberty. No one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very
likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his countrymen, who may
have expected too much. But then the French had been there fifteen
years, and were to be there another fifteen years yet. Now they are
gone, with the archbishop's red coach, and the complaisant grocer, and
the young man of twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the
things that the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no
doubt, in our monotonous round of him.
To-day, instead of the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue
legs of the Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their
officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of the
Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging on lavender.
They are soldierly men none the less for their gentler aspect, and
perhaps something the more; and a better thing yet is that there are
comparatively few of them. There are few of the privates also, far fewer
than the priests and the students of the ecclesiastical schools, who
dress like priests and go dashing through the streets in files and
troops.
I have an impression that one sees about the proportion of Italian
soldiers in Rome that one sees of American soldiers in Washington, or,
at least, not many more. The barracks are apparently outside the walls;
there you meet cavalry going and coming, and detachments of
_bersaglieri;_ or riflemen, pushing on at their quick trot, or plainer
infantry trudging wearily. Certainly, in a capital where the Church
holds itself prisoner, there is no show of force on the part of its
captors; and this is pleasant to the friend of man and the lover of
Italy for other reasons. In the absence of the military you can imagine
that not only does the state not wish to boast its political supremacy
in the ancient capital of the Church, but it does not desire to show the
potentiality of holding its own against the republic which is instinct
there. The monarchy is the consensus of all the differing wills in
Italy, which naturally would not for the most part have chosen a
monarchy. But never was a monarchy so mild-mannered or seated so firmly,
for the present at least, in the affection and reason of its people.
This is not the place (as writers say who have not prepared themselves
with the requisite ideas at a given point) to speak of the situation in
Rome; and I meant only to note that there are more ecclesiastics than
conscripts to be seen there. Of all the varying costumes of the varying
schools, none is so pleasing, so vivid, as that of the German students
as they rush swiftly by in their flying robes of scarlet. The red
matches the ruddy health in their cheeks, and there is a sort of
gladness in their fling that wins the liking as well as the looking; so
that almost one would not mind being a German student of theology one's
self. There are other-costumes running in color from violet, and blue
with orange sashes, to unrelieved black and black trimmed with red; but
I cannot remember which nationality wears which.
[Illustration: 24 THE MOSAICS UNDER THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH]
I am not sure but one sees as many priests in Rome now as in the times
when they ruled it; and I am no such Protestant that I will pretend I do
not like a monsignore when I meet him, either in the street or at
afternoon tea, as one sometimes may. I have no grudge against priests of
any rank; but I did not seek to see them at the functions, as I used in
the old days to do. Shall I say that I now rather tolerated than
welcomed myself there through the hospitality which so freely opens the
churches of the Church to all comers of whatever creed? What right had
I, a heretic and recusant, to come staring and standing round where the
faithful were kneeling and praying? If we could conceive of our
fast-locked conventicles being thrown as freely open, could we conceive
of Catholics wandering up and down their naves and aisles while the
hymning or preaching went on? After being so high-minded in the matter,
shall I confess that I was a good deal kept out of the churches by the
cold in them? It was a sort of stored cold, much greater than that
outside, though there was something warming to the fancy, at least, in
the smoke and smell of the incense.
Even with the Church of the Capuchins, which we lived opposite, I was
dilatory, though in my mediaeval days it had been one of the first
places to which I hurried. In those days everybody said you must be sure
and go to the Capuchins', because Guide's “St. Michael and the Enemy”
was there, and still more because the wonderful bone mosaics in the
cemetery under the church were not on any account to be missed. I
suspect that in both these matters I had then a very crude taste, but it
was not from my greater refinement that I now let the Capuchin church go
on long un-revisited. It was, for one thing, too instantly and
constantly accessible across the street there; and it is well known
human nature is such that it will not seek the line of the least
resistance as long as it can help. Besides, I could hardly believe that
it was really the Capuchin church which I had once so hastened to see,
and I neglected it almost two months, contenting myself with the display
of those hand-bills on the convent walls, spreading largely and
glaringly incongruous over it. When I did go I found the Guido
ridiculous, of course, in the painter's imagination of the archangel as
a sort of dancing figure in a _tableau vivant,_ and yet of a sublime
authority in the execution. To be more honest, I had little feeling
about it and less knowledge.
It was not so cold in the church as I had expected; and in the
succession of side chapels, beginning with the St. Michael's and opening
into one another, we found a kind of domesticity close upon cosiness,
which we were enjoying for its own sake, when we were aware of a pale,
gentle young girl who seemed to be alone there. She asked, in our
unmistakable native accents, if we were going to see the Capuchin
mosaics in their place below; and one of us said, promptly, No, indeed;
but relented at the shadow of disappointment that came over the girl's
face, and asked, Was she going? The girl said, Oh, she guessed she could
see them some other time; and then she who had spoken ordered him who
had not spoken to go with her. I do not know what question of propriety
engaged them with reference to her going alone with the handsome young
monk waiting to accompany her; but he was certainly too handsome for a
monk of any age. We followed him, however, and I had my usual nausea on
viewing the decoration of the ceilings and walls of the place below; it
always makes me sick to go into that place; between realizing that I am
of the same make as the brothers composing those mosaics, and trying to
imagine what the intricate patterns will do at the Resurrection Day, I
cannot command myself. Neither am I supported by the sight of some
skeletons, the raw material of that grewsome artistry, deposited whole
in their coffins in the niches next the ground, though their skulls
smile so reassuringly from their cowls; their cheeriness cannot make me
like them. But my companion seemed to be merely interested; and I
fancied her deciding that it all quite came up to her expectations,
while I translated for her from the monk that the dead used to be left
in the hallowed earth from Jerusalem covering the ground before they
were taken up and decoratively employed, but that since the Italian
occupation of Rome the art had fallen into abeyance. She said nothing,
but when we came out she stood a moment on the pavement beside our cab
and confessed herself a New England girl, from an inland town, who was
travelling with relatives. She had been sick, and she had come alone, as
soon as she could get out, to see the wonders of the Capuchin church,
because she had heard so much of them. We said we hoped she had been
pleased, and she said, “Oh yes, indeed,” and then she said, “Well,
good-bye,” and gently tilted away, leaving us glad that there could
still be in an old, spoiled world such sweetness and innocence and
easily gratified love of the beautiful.
Taking Rome so easily, so provisionally, while waiting the eventualities
of the colds which mild climates are sure to give their frequenters from
the winterlands, I became aware of a latent anxiety respecting St.
Peter's. I did not feel that the church would really get away without
our meeting, but I felt that it was somehow culpably hazardous in me to
be taking chances with it. As a family, we might never collectively
visit it, and, in fact, we never did; but one day I drove boldly (if
secretly) off alone and renewed my acquaintance with this contemporary
of mine; for, if you have been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you
find that you are coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and
the imperial Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at
least, to that of Pius IX. St. Peter's will not be, by any means, your
oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long standing that
you may not wish to use it with all the frankness which its faults
invite. If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime
colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the
whole world to the church's heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's,
you will not be wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there
where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober
and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed
flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above
the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable
all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we
could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may
very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my
remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an
environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the
time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite
the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged
to take in my rapture. The fact is, that unless you delight in a
hugeness whose bareness no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal,
you do not find the interior of St. Peter's adequate to the exterior. In
the mere article of hugeness, even, it fails through the interposition
of the baldachin midway of the vast nave, and each detail seems to fail
of the office of beauty more lamentably than another.
I had known, I had never forgotten, that St. Peter's was very, very
baroque, but I had not known, I had not remembered how baroque it was.
It is not so badly baroque as the Church of the Jesuits either in Rome
or in Venice, or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is badly
baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture as in the
sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not
be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an
excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however
Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the
taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world,
now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil
in art from its evil life. The saints and the popes are, aesthetically,
lamentable enough; but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are
mostly the sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are
inexpressible--some of these creatures ought really to be put out of the
place; but I suppose their friends would say they ought to be left as
typical of the period. In the case of that merciless miscreant, Queen
Christina of Sweden, who has her monument in St. Peter's, there would be
people to say she must have her monument in some place; but, all the
same, remembering Monaldeschi--how he was stabbed to death by her
command, the kinder assassins staying their hands from time to time,
while his confessor went vainly to implore her pardon--it is shocking to
find her tomb in the prime church in Christendom. At first it offends
one to see certain pontiffs with mustaches and imperials and goatees;
but, if one reflects that so they wore them in life, one perceives right
in it; only when one comes to earlier or later popes, bearded in
medieval majority or shaven in the decent modern fashion, one can endure
those others only as part of the prevailing baroque of the church.
Canova was not so Greek or even so classic as one used to think him, but
one hardly has a moment of repose in St. Peter's till one comes to a
monument by him and rests in its quiet. It is tame, it is even weak, if
you like; but compared with the frantic agglomeration of gilt clouds and
sunbursts, and marble and bronze figures in the high-altar, it is
heavenly serene and lovely.
There were not many people in St. Peter's that afternoon, so that I
could give undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement
at one point and grinding the marble smooth with a slow, secular
movement, as if he were part of its age-Ions: waste and repair. Another
day, the last day I came, there were companies of the personally
conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the lectures
in several languages, which no more stirred the immense tranquillity
than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy of the temple: you
were vaguely sensible of the one and of the other like things heard and
seen in a drowse. It was a pleasant vagueness in which all angularities
of feeling were lost, and you were disposed to a tolerance of the things
that had hurt or offended you before. As a contemporary of the edifice,
throughout its growth, you could account for them more and more as of
their periods. Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came,
however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your
presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or
little instructed. If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would
you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the
whole baroque keeping? Possibly this consideration made you go away much
modester than you came. “After all,” you may have said, “it is not a
gallery; it is not a museum. It is a house of prayer,” and you emerged,
let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the
beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.