[Illustration: 33 COLONNADE AND FOUNTAIN AT ST. PETER'S]
It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman
situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of
the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of
special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well
content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they
are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the
explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I
believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained
self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only
invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian
occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more
unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his
part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the
pope's attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who
otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the
Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it
was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than
others.
To the passing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many
dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up
at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with
their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius
X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms
where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the
wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the
States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their
pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in
the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not
been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the
high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.
But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a
feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his
piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his
three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their
simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street
opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a
Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in
him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him
in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection
and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.
Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which
even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The
tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of
family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference
of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in
the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists
and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and
Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help
hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions
part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly
noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled
by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning
family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not
as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to
meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them
openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I
cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of
priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance
than mine.
One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is
built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or
below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval,
and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the
visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its
antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I
fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them,
that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the
Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and
artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions
daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these
read: _“VV. la Repubblica”_ (Long live the Republic), and the other:
_“M. ai Preti”_ (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to
efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and
the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere.
Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one
inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other.
I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect
from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The
name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with
recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my
creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it
which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the
kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When
I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of
the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the
nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the
fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a
question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its
many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the
kind of wickedness they were accused of.
There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and
the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be
almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and
that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this
year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of
course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like
the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to
imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point.
Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is
through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It
must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made
it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French
troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal
troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained
behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the
Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power.
One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because
the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta
Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli
brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of
Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost
sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond
and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered
conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through
the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side
the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the
pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record
of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John
Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes
and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is
suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired
when it took Rome from the papacy.
Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration
would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no
apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it
lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than
Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be
surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State
not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from
other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its
step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house--if we
choose so to think of the Vatican--has a supreme claim, if we love the
sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.
We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with
guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part,
to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get
the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do
not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the
place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the
race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at
least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the
outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still
have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs
warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as
we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading
aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the
different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it
before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as
prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets
and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater
charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera
playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with
joy.
[Illustration: 34 SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN PALACE]
It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by
now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read
them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the
canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of
Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration.
If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are
from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are
otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of
ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose
it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought
things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from
our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure
in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here
and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.
I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does
that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly
remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades
before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and
in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms,
with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for
the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such
rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and
Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where
the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art,
welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have
been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did
not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the
terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely
struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the
human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could
have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though
I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the
flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of
Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge
from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have
seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture
galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the
statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with
murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain
window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable
roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was
nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as
English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold
with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep
off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that
brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many
minds in March as in April at New York.
But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of
spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in
his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is
sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated
hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the
churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but,
if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting
you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined
overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with
fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer and a
stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door
warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than
ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against
shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you
impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you
select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn
till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the
padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I
should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and
mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a
legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen
dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of
twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.