The _nil admirari_ school are out of favour. In our earnest working age,
it is the fashion to treat everything seriously, to find in every thing a
deep hidden meaning, in fact, to admire everything. Since the days of
Wordsworth and Peter Bell, every petty poet and romantic writer has had
his sneer at the shallow sceptic to whom a cowslip was a cowslip only,
and who called a spade a spade. I feel, therefore, painfully that I am
not of my own day when I express my deliberate conviction, that the
ceremonies of Holy Week at Rome are--the word must come out sooner or
later--an imposture. This is not the place to enter into the religious
aspect of the Catholic question, nor if it were, should I have any wish
to enter the lists of controversy as a champion of either side. I can
understand that for some minds the ideas of Church unity, of a mystic
communion of the faithful, and of an infallible head of a spiritual body
have a strange attraction, nay, even a real existence. I can understand
too, that for such persons all the pomps and pageantry of the Papal
services present themselves under an aspect to me unintelligible. Whether
these ideas be right or wrong, I am not able, nor do I care, to argue.
The Pontifical ceremonies, however, have not only a spiritual aspect, but
a material and very matter-of-fact one. They are after all great
spectacles got up with the aid of music and upholstery and dramatic
mechanism. Now, how far in this latter point of view the ceremonies are
successful or not, I think from some small experience I am pretty well
qualified to judge; and if I am asked whether, as ceremonies, the
services of the Church of Rome are imposing and effective, I answer most
unhesitatingly, No. I know that this assertion upsets a received article
of faith in Protestant England as to the seductive character of the Papal
ceremonies. I remember well the time when I too believed that the
shrines of the old faith were the haunts of sense-enthralling grandeur,
of wild enchantment and bewitching beauty; when I too dreamt how amidst
crowds of rapt worshippers, while unearthly music pealed around you and
the fragrant incense floated heavenwards, your soul became lost to
everything, save to a feeling of unreasoning ecstasy. In fact, I
believed in the enchantments of Papal pageantry, as firmly as I believed
that a Lord Mayor's feast was a repast in which Apicius would have
revelled, or that an opera ball was a scene of oriental and voluptuous
delight. Alas! I have seen all, and known all, and have found all three
to be but vanity.
Now the question as to the real aspect of the Papal pageantry, and the
effects produced by it upon the minds, not of controversialists, but of
ordinary spectators, is by no means an unimportant one with reference to
the future prospects of Italy and the Papacy. Let me try then, not
irreverently or depreciatingly, but as speaking of plain matters of fact,
to tell you what you really do see and hear at the greatest and grandest
of the Roman ceremonies. Of all the Holy Week services none have a more
European fame, or have been more written or sung about, than the
Misereres in the Sistine Chapel. Now to be present at these services you
have to start at about one o'clock, or midday, in full evening costume,
dress-coat and black trowsers. Any man who has ever had to walk out in
evening attire in the broad daylight, will agree with me that the
sensation of the general shabbiness and duskiness of your whole
appearance is so strong as to overcome all other considerations, not to
mention your devotional feelings. In this attire you have to stand for a
couple of hours amongst a perspiring and ill-tempered crowd, composed of
tourists and priests, for the Italians are too wise to trouble themselves
for such an object. During these two mortal hours you are pushed forward
constantly by energetic ladies bent on being placed, and pushed back by
the Swedish guards, who defend the entrance. The conversation you hear
around you, and perforce engage in, is equally unedifying, both
religiously and intellectually, a sort of _rechauffe_ of Murray's
handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday's sermon. When you
are reduced to such a frame of mind and body as is the natural result of
time so employed, the doors of the chapel are opened, and you have
literally to fight your way in amidst a crowd of ladies hustling,
screaming, and fainting. If you are lucky, you get standing room in a
sort of open pen, whence, if you are tall, you can catch a sight of the
Pope's tiara in the distance; or, if you belong to the softer sex, you
get a place behind the screen, where you cannot see, but, what is much
better, can sit. The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is
overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim
light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned
backwards. For three long hours you have a succession of dreary
monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible,
broken at intervals by a passage of intonation. There is no organ or
instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly
compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for
female vocalists.
The music itself may be very fine,--competent critics declare it is, and
I have no doubt they are right; but I say, unhesitatingly, it is not
music that addresses itself to popular tastes, or produces any feeling
save that of weariness on nine-tenths of its hearers. You can mark
clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as
candle after candle of the stack of wax-lights before the altar is put
out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony
were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a
dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the
same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance.
The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first
place, it comes when your patience is exhausted; and, in the second, it
lasts so long, that you begin to wonder whether it will ever end. The
slavery to conventional rules in England, which causes one to shrink from
the charge of not caring about music as zealously as one could, and from
pleading guilty to personal cowardice, makes Englishmen, and still more
Englishwomen, profess to be delighted with the Miserere; but, in their
heart of hearts, their feeling is much such as I have given utterance to.
The ceremonies in St Peter's itself are, as sights, much better; but yet
I often think that the very size and grandeur of the giant edifice
increases the _mesquin-ness_ (for want of an English word I must
manufacture a French one) of the whole ceremony. At the exposition of
the relics, for instance, you see in a very lofty gallery two small
figures, holding up something--what, you cannot tell--set up in a rich
framework of gold and jewels; it may be a piece of the cross, or a
martyr's finger-bone, or a horse's tooth--what it is neither you nor any
one else can guess at that distance. If the whole congregation knelt
down in adoration, the artistic effect would unquestionably be fine, but
then not one person in seven does kneel, and therefore the effect is
lost. So it is with the washing of the high altar. If one priest alone
went up and poured the wine and oil over the sacred stone, and then
cleansed the shrine from any spot or stain, the grandeur of the idea
would not be marred by the monotony of the performance; but when some
four hundred priests and choristers defile past, each armed with a chip
besom, like those of the buy-a-broom girls of our childhood, and each
gives a dab to the altar as he passes, the whole scene becomes tiresome,
if not absurd. The same fatal objection applies to the famous washing of
the feet at the Trinita dei Pellegrini. As a mere matter of simple fact,
there is nothing very interesting in seeing a number of old women's feet
washed, or in beholding a number of peasants who would be much better if
the washing extended above their feet, engaged in gulping down an
unsavoury repast. The whole charm of the thing rests in the idea, and
this idea is quite extinguished by the extreme length and tediousness of
the whole proceeding. The feet have too evidently been washed before,
and the pilgrims are too palpably got up for the occasion.
The finest ceremony I have ever witnessed in Rome is the High Mass at St
Peter's on Easter-day; but as a theatrical spectacle, in which light
alone I am now speaking of it, it is marred by many palpable defects.
Whenever I have seen the Pope carried in his chair in state, I can never
help thinking of the story of the Irishman, who, when the bottom and seat
of his sedan-chair fell out, remarked to his bearers, that "he might as
well walk, but for the honour of the thing." One feels so strongly that
the Pope might every bit as well walk as ride in that ricketty, top-heavy
chair, in which he sits, or rather sways to and fro, with a sea-sick
expression. Then the ostrich feathers are so very shabby, and the whole
get-up of the procession is so painfully "not" regardless of expense. You
see Cardinals with dirty robes, under the most gorgeous stoles, while the
surplices are as yellow as the stained gold-worked bands which hang
across them. There is, indeed, no sense of congruity or the inherent
fitness of things about the Italian ceremonials. A priest performs mass
and elevates the host with muddy boots on, while the Pope himself, in the
midst of the grandest service, blows his nose on a common red
pocket-handkerchief. The absence of the organ detracts much from the
impressiveness of the music in English ears, while the constant bowings
and genuflexions, the drawling intonations, and the endless monotonous
psalms, all utterly devoid of meaning for a lay-worshipper, added to the
utter listlessness of the congregation, and even of the priests engaged
in celebration of the service, destroy the impression the gorgeousness of
the scene would otherwise produce.
The insuperable objection, however, to the impressiveness of the whole
scene is the same as mars all Papal pageants,--I mean the length and
monotony of the performance. One chant may be fine, one prostration
before the altar may be striking, one burst of the choral litany may act
upon your senses; but, when you have chant after chant, prostration after
prostration, chorus after chorus, each the twin brother to the other, and
going on for hours, without apparent rhyme or reason, you cease to take
thought of anything, in order to speculate idly when, if ever, there is
likely to be an end. There is no variety, and little change, too, about
the ceremonies. When you have seen one you have seen all; and when you
have seen them once, you can understand how to the Romans themselves
these sights have become stale and dull, till they look upon them much as
I fancy the musician in the orchestra of the old Princess's must have
looked upon one of Kean's Shaksperian revivals when the season was far
spent.