[Illustration: 25 SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA]
If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I
should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was
none. Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the instinct of
imperial Rome for ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct
collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in the
innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other. This position
will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I may be driven
in, especially by travellers who have seen the churches I did not see. I
took my chances, they theirs; for nobody can singly see all the churches
in Rome; that would need a syndicate.
If imperial Rome was beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to
imagine the things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be
unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the beauty
of its religious aspiration--that is, if it was the Goths who invented
Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was. Anyway, there is said to
be but one Gothic church in Rome, and this I did not visit, perhaps
because I felt that I must inure myself to the prevalent baroque, or
perhaps from mere perversity. I can merely say in self-defence that, on
the outside, Santa Maria sopra Minerva no more promised an inner beauty
than Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the
power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches
sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in sculpture,
in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures at points in the
roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at others. Marvels of riches
are lavished upon chapels and altars, which again are so burdened with
bronze gilded or silver plated, and precious stones wrought and
unwrought, that the soul, or if not the soul the taste, shrinks dismayed
from them. Execution in default of inspiration has had its way to the
last excess; there is nothing that it has not done to show what it can
do; and all that it has done is a triumph of misguided skill and power.
But it would be a mistake for the spectator to imagine that anything has
been done from the spirit in which he receives it; everything is the
expression of devoted faith in the forms that the art of the time
offered.
In the monstrous marble tableau, say, of “Religion Triumphing Over
Heresy,” he may be very sure that the artist was not winking an ironical
eye where he made Faith spurning Schism with her foot look very much
like a lady of imperfect breeding who has lost her temper; he was most
devoutly in earnest, or at least those were so, both cleric and laic,
for whom he wrought his prodigy. We others, pagans or Protestants, had
better understand that the children of the Church, and especially the
poor children, were serious through all the shows that seem to us
preposterous; they had not renounced something for nothing; if they
bowed that very fallible thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for
their reward and could gladly accept whatever symbol of it was offered
them.
[Illustration: 26 CHURCH OP ARA COELI]
No matter how baroque any church was, it could express something of this
sincerity, and in their way the worshippers seemed always simply at home
in it. In San Lorenzo in Lucina, where I went to see the truly sublime
“Crucifixion” by Guido (there is also a bar of St. Lawrence's gridiron
to be seen, but I did not know it at the time) I liked the
unconsciousness of the girl kneeling before the high altar and
provisionally gossiping with the young sacristan before she began her
devotions. She gave her mind to them when he asked me if I wished to see
the Guido, for I could see her lips moving while she shared my
veneration of that most affecting masterpiece; the more genuinely
affecting because it expresses the rapture and not the anguish of the
Passion. I have no doubt she was grateful when the sacristan proposed my
having the electric light turned on it, and when, though that I knew it
would cost me something more, I assented.
They have the electric light now in all the holy places, and notably in
the dungeon where St. Peter was imprisoned, and where the custodian was
so proud of it, as the latest improvement, and as far more satisfactory
than candles. The shrine of the miraculous Bambino in the Church of Ara
Coeli is also lighted by electricity, which spares no detail of the
child's apparel and appearance. To other eyes than those of faith it has
the effect of a life-size but not life-like doll, piously bedizened and
jewelled over, but rather ill-humored looking, or, if not that, proud
looking or severe looking. To the eyes in which its sickbed visits have
dried the tears it must wear an aspect of heavenly pity and beauty; and
I am very willing to believe that these are the eyes which see it
aright. As it was, and taking it literally, it seemed far less
mechanical and unfeeling than the monk who pulled it out and pushed it
back on its wheeled platform. But he must get tired of showing it to the
unbelievers who come out of curiosity, and very likely I should, if I
were in his place, as nonchalantly wipe across the glass front of the
shrine the card with the Bambino's legend printed in various languages
on it, which you may then buy with the blessing from the glass for
whatever you choose to give.
Where art and antiquity are so abundant as in Rome, the Bambino incident
is probably what the reader, when he has visited the Church of Ara Coeli
will chiefly remember, and I will not pretend to be any better than the
reader, though I will say that I have a persistent sense of something
important about the roof; and there are the Pinturrichio frescos, which
an old Sienese like me must have the taste for. The not easily praiseful
Hare says it is “one of the most interesting of Christian churches,” and
without allowing that there are any other sorts of churches I may allow
that this is one of the least unlovely in Rome. Trinita de' Monti seemed
to be another, but only, I dare say, subjectively, because of the
exquisite pleasure we had one afternoon in March when we went into it
for the nuns' singing of the Benediction. That, we had been told, was
something which no one coming to Rome should miss; and we were so
anxious not to miss it that on our way to the Pincian Hill we stopped at
the foot of the church-steps, and reassured ourselves of the hour
through the kindness of an English-speaking nurse-maid at the bottom and
of a gentle nun at the top, who both told us the hour would be exactly
five.
When we came back at that time and bought our way into the church by
rightful payment to the two blind beggars who guarded its doors, we
found it packed with people who bad been more literally punctual. They
were of all nations, but a large part were Anglo-Americans, and a young
girl of this race rose and gave her seat, with a sweet insistence that
would not be denied, to that one of us who deserved it most. He who was
left leaning against the soft side of a pillar hesitated whether to make
some young priests spreading over undue space on one of the benches push
up, and he enjoyed a rich moment of self-satisfaction in his
forbearance. He was there, to be sure, an alien and a heretic, out of
mere curiosity, and they were there probably so rapt in their devout
attention that they did not notice their errant step-brother, and so did
not think to offer him the hospitality of their mother church's house.
But he would not make any such allowance; he condemned them with the
unsparing severity of the strap-hanger in a trolley-car, who blushes
with shame for the serried rows of men sitting behind their newspapers.
When he was at his wit's end to find excuse for them a priest on another
bench made room, and he sank down glad to forgive and forget; but now he
would not have yielded his place to any other Protestant in Christendom.
In the collective curiosity he lost the sense of self-reproach for his
own, and eagerly bent his gaze on the group of officiating priests at
the high altar beyond the grille of the choir. The altar was all a blaze
of electric lights, and there was a novel effect in their composition in
the crosses resting diagonally on either side of it. Next the grille
showed the feathers and fashions of the mothers and sisters of the young
girls from the school of the adjoining Convent of the Sacred Heart, and
midway between these visitors, like a flock of white birds stooping on
some heavenly plain, the white veils of the girls stretched in lovely
levels to left and right. Nothing could have attuned the spirit for the
surprise awaiting it like this angelic sight; and when the voices of the
nuns fell suddenly from the organ gallery, behind all the people, like
the singing of the morning stars molten in one adoring music and falling
from the zenith down, whatever moments of innocent joy life might have
had it could have had none surpassing that.
But when we came out the self-mockery with which life is apt to recover
itself from any exaltation began. In returning from the Pincio the only
cab we had been able to get was the last left of the very worst cabs in
Rome, and we had bidden the driver wait for us at the church-steps, not
without some hope that he would play us false. But there he was, true
to his word, with such disciplined fidelity as that of the Roman
sentinels who used to die at their posts; and we mounted to ours with
the muted prayer that we, at least, might reach home alive. This did not
seem probable when the driver whipped up his horse. It appeared to have
aged and sickened while we were in the church, though we had thought it
looked as bad as could be before, and it lurched alarmingly from side to
side, recovering itself with a plunge of its heavy head away from the
side in which its body was sinking. The driver swayed on his box, having
fallen equally decrepit in spite of the restoratives he seemed to have
applied for his years and infirmities. His clothes had put on some such
effect of extreme decay as those of Rip Van Winkle in the third act;
there was danger that he would fall on top of his falling horse, and
that their raiment would mingle in one scandalous ruin. Via Sistina had
never been so full of people before; never before had it been so long to
that point where we were to turn out of it into the friendly obscurity
of the little cross street which would bring us to our hotel. We could
not consent to arrive in that form; we made the driver stop, and we got
out and began overpaying him to release us. But the more generously we
overpaid him the more nobly he insisted upon serving us to our door. At
last, by such a lavish expenditure as ought richly to provide for the
few remaining years of himself and his horse, we prevailed with him to
let us go, and reached our hotel glad, almost proud, to arrive on foot.
[Illustration: 27 CHURCH OF SANTA MAGGIORE]
Hare tells me, now it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa
Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of
the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many
postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in
1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the
exceptional dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of
its most noble nave is thickly plated with the first gold mined in South
America, which Ferdinand and Isabella gave that least estimable of the
popes, Alexander VI. Now I know that it is far richer than any gold
could make it in the treasures of history and legend, which fairly
encrust it in every part. Doubtless some portion of this wealth my
fellow-sightseers were striving to store up out of the guide-books which
they bore in their hands and from which they strained their eyes to the
memorable points as they slowly paced through the temple. Some were
reading one to another in bated voices, and I thought them ridiculous;
but perhaps they were wise, and rather he was ridiculous who marched by
them and contented himself with a general sense of the grandeur, the
splendor. More than any other church except that of San Paolo fuori le
Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore imparts this sense, for, as I have already
pretended, St. Peter's fails of it. Without as well as within the church
is spacious and impressive from its spaciousness; but it seems more
densely fringed than most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic
pins. On going in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out
you do not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in
spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the driver while
he made a last, a humorous appeal. “Skiddoo?” he asked in my native
speech. “Yes,” I sullenly replied, “skiddoo!” But it is now one of the
regrets which I shall always feel for my wasted opportunities in Rome
that I did not buy all his post-cards. Patient gayety like his merited
as much.
As it was, I drove callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San
Pietro in Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for
Michelangelo's Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in the
minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to be quite
honest with one's self as to the why and wherefore of one's earlier
veneration, one might not get a very distinct or convincing reply. Do
sculptors and painters suffer periods of slight as authors do? Are
Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and
by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting
limbo? I find I have said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and
unimpressive, and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two
Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you enter the
church. Is the true, then, better than the ideal, or is it only my
grovelling spirit which prefers it? What I scarcely venture to say is
that those two men evidently lived and still live, and that
Michelangelo's prophet never lived; I scarcely venture, because I
remember with tenderness how certain clear and sweet spirits used to bow
their reason before the Moses as before a dogma of art which must be
implicitly accepted. Do they still do so, those clear and sweet spirits?
[Illustration: 28 MICHELANGELO'S “MOSES” IN SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI]
The archaeologist who was driving my cab that morning had pointed out to
me on the way to this church the tower on which Nero stood fiddling
while Rome was burning. It is a strong, square, mediaeval structure
which will serve the purpose of legend yet many centuries, if progress
does not pull it down; but the fiddle no longer exists, apparently, and
Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted into my cab, my driver
showed me with his whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very
beautiful against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said
was the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know why
it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers; but it was a
great satisfaction to have it identified. Very possibly I had seen both
of these memorable towers in my former Roman sojourn, but I did not
remember them, whereas I renewed my old impressions of San Paolo fuori
le Mura in almost every detail.
That is the most majestic church in Rome, I think, and I suppose it is,
for a cold splendor, unequalled anywhere. Somehow, from its form and
from the great propriety of its decoration, it far surpasses St.
Peter's. The antic touch of the baroque is scarcely present in it, for,
being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the fourth-century
basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of sixteenth-century excess.
It would be a very bold or a very young connoisseur who should venture
to appraise its merits beyond this negative valuation; and timid age can
affirm no more than that it came away with its sensibilities unwounded.
Tradition and history combine with the stately architecture, which
reverently includes every possible relic of the original fabric, to
render the immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of
construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with the body
of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the actual spectacle of
that unstinted outlay of riches which has filled Rome with its
multitudes of pious monuments--monuments mainly ugly, but potent with
the imagination even in their ugliness through the piety of their
origin. Where did all that riches come from?
Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of
what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of wealth that
released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted hands of work that
spared it from their need. The giving continues in this latest Christian
age as in the earliest, and Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which
its thinkers think no longer believes.
From San Paolo we were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our
literary sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and
bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden
slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard where
Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery held by some
shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome which was largely so
jerry-built, and which I would not leave out of the landscape if I
could, for I think their shabbiness rather heightens your sense of the
peaceful loveliness to which you come under the cypresses, among the
damp aisles, so thickly studded with the stones recording the death in
exile of the English strangers lying there far from home. In a faulty
perspective of memory, I had always seen the graves of the two poets
side by side; but the heart of Shelley rests in a prouder part of the
cemetery, where the paths between the finer tombs are carefully kept;
and the dust of Keats lies in an old, plain, almost neglected corner,
well off beyond a dividing trench. It seems an ungracious chance which
has so parted the two poets so inextricably united in their fame; it is
as if here, too, the world would have its way; but, of course, it is
only at the worst an ungracious chance. Keats, at least, has the
companionship of the painter Severn, the friend on whose “fond breast
his parting soul relied,” and who has here followed him into the dust.
A few withered daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the
poet, and one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the
heartbreaking epitaph which one could not spell for tears.