ALTARS AND INCENSE
Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at hand, for all the
necessitous, than any other spot under the sun; and Hilda’s despondent
state made her peculiarly liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be
termed, of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.
Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her
inheritance of New England Puritanism would hardly have protected the
poor girl from the pious strategy of those good fathers. Knowing, as
they do, how to work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately
impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith, which so
marvellously adapts itself to every human need. Not, indeed, that it can
satisfy the soul’s cravings, but, at least, it can sometimes help
the soul towards a higher satisfaction than the faith contains within
itself. It supplies a multitude of external forms, in which the
spiritual may be clothed and manifested; it has many painted windows,
as it were, through which the celestial sunshine, else disregarded, may
make itself gloriously perceptible in visions of beauty and splendor.
There is no one want or weakness of human nature for which Catholicism
will own itself without a remedy; cordials, certainly, it possesses in
abundance, and sedatives in inexhaustible variety, and what may once
have been genuine medicaments, though a little the worse for long
keeping.
To do it justice, Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness for its
own ends, many of which might seem to be admirable ones, that it is
difficult to imagine it a contrivance of mere man. Its mighty machinery
was forged and put together, not on middle earth, but either above
or below. If there were but angels to work it, instead of the very
different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety
valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its
origin.
Hilda had heretofore made many pilgrimages among the churches of Rome,
for the sake of wondering at their gorgeousness. Without a glimpse at
these palaces of worship, it is impossible to imagine the magnificence
of the religion that reared them. Many of them shine with burnished
gold. They glow with pictures. Their walls, columns, and arches seem a
quarry of precious stones, so beautiful and costly are the marbles
with which they are inlaid. Their pavements are often a mosaic, of rare
workmanship. Around their lofty cornices hover flights of sculptured
angels; and within the vault of the ceiling and the swelling interior
of the dome, there are frescos of such brilliancy, and wrought with so
artful a perspective, that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears
to be opened only a little way above the spectator. Then there are
chapels, opening from the side aisles and transepts, decorated by
princes for their own burial places, and as shrines for their especial
saints. In these, the splendor of the entire edifice is intensified
and gathered to a focus. Unless words were gems, that would flame with
many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a tremulous glimmer
into the reader’s eyes, it were wain to attempt a description of a
princely chapel.
Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another pilgrimage
among these altars and shrines. She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara
Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood
in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which
the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were
Roman deities in the antique niches. She went into every church that
rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New
England meeting-house.
She went--and it was a dangerous errand--to observe how closely and
comfortingly the popish faith applied itself to all human occasions. It
was impossible to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual
advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own formless mode of
worship; which, besides, so far as the sympathy of prayerful souls is
concerned, can be enjoyed only at stated and too unfrequent periods. But
here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it
could on the instant be appeased. At one or another altar, the incense
was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying
upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own
prayer. And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to offer,
his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath, there were divine
auditors ever ready to receive it from his lips; and what encouraged him
still more, these auditors had not always been divine, but kept, within
their heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience. Now
a saint in heaven, but once a man on earth.
Hilda saw peasants, citizens, soldiers, nobles, women with bare heads,
ladies in their silks, entering the churches individually, kneeling for
moments or for hours, and directing their inaudible devotions to the
shrine of some saint of their own choice. In his hallowed person, they
felt themselves possessed of an own friend in heaven. They were too
humble to approach the Deity directly. Conscious of their unworthiness,
they asked the mediation of their sympathizing patron, who, on the score
of his ancient martyrdom, and after many ages of celestial life, might
venture to talk with the Divine Presence, almost as friend with friend.
Though dumb before its Judge, even despair could speak, and pour out the
misery of its soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon whatever
were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she deemed to be an example of this
species of confidence between a young man and his saint. He stood before
a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in
an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and
pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that
torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him
into indifference.
Often and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels of the
Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps. Here, perhaps,
strange as it may seem, her delicate appreciation of art stood her
in good stead, and lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had
represented Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in the very
mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in which she held so elevated
a position. But she saw that it was merely the flattered portrait of
an earthly beauty; the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a
peasant girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom he desired
to pay his court. For love, or some even less justifiable motive, the
old painter had apotheosized these women; he thus gained for them, as
far as his skill would go, not only the meed of immortality, but the
privilege of presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth. Hilda’s fine
sense of the fit and decorous could not be betrayed into kneeling at
such a shrine.
She never found just the virgin mother whom she needed. Here it was
an earthly mother, worshipping the earthly baby in her lap, as any and
every mother does, from Eve’s time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother’s face, of some divine quality
in the child. In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher
perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin’s joy at
bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably
mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of
celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow
of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and
motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as
the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.
“Ah,” thought Hilda to herself, “why should not there be a woman to
listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless
girls like me? In all God’s thought and care for us, can he have
withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs?”
Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St. Peter’s.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great
dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both
for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature’s
spiritual want.
Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this
mighty cathedral. When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at
one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled
out of sight by the reality. Her preconception of St. Peter’s was a
structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim
and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and
overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast
breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might
feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in
her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior
glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness;
a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket,
marvellously magnified.
This latter image best pleased her fancy; a casket, all inlaid in the
inside with precious stones of various hue, so that there Should not be
a hair’s-breadth of the small interior unadorned with its resplendent
gem. Then, conceive this minute wonder of a mosaic box, increased to
the magnitude of a cathedral, without losing the intense lustre of its
littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be sublime. The magic
transformation from the minute to the vast has not been so cunningly
effected but that the rich adornment still counteracts the impression of
space and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits than
of its extent.
Until after many visits, Hilda continued to mourn for that dim,
illimitable interior, which with her eyes shut she had seen from
childhood, but which vanished at her first glimpse through the actual
door. Her childish vision seemed preferable to the cathedral which
Michael Angelo, and all the great architects, had built; because, of
the dream edifice, she had said, “How vast it is!” while of the real St.
Peter’s she could only say, “After all, it is not so immense!” Besides,
such as the church is, it can nowhere be made visible at one glance.
It stands in its own way. You see an aisle, or a transept; you see the
nave, or the tribune; but, on account of its ponderous piers and other
obstructions, it is only by this fragmentary process that you get an
idea of the cathedral.
There is no answering such objections. The great church smiles calmly
upon its critics, and, for all response, says, “Look at me!” and if you
still murmur for the loss of your shadowy perspective, there comes no
reply, save, “Look at me!” in endless repetition, as the one thing to
be said. And, after looking many times, with long intervals between, you
discover that the cathedral has gradually extended itself over the whole
compass of your idea; it covers all the site of your visionary temple,
and has room for its cloudy pinnacles beneath the dome.
One afternoon, as Hilda entered St. Peter’s in sombre mood, its interior
beamed upon her with all the effect of a new creation. It seemed an
embodiment of whatever the imagination could conceive, or the heart
desire, as a magnificent, comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious
faith. All splendor was included within its verge, and there was space
for all. She gazed with delight even at the multiplicity of ornament.
She was glad at the cherubim that fluttered upon the pilasters, and of
the marble doves, hovering unexpectedly, with green olive-branches
of precious stones. She could spare nothing, now, of the manifold
magnificence that had been lavished, in a hundred places, richly enough
to have made world-famous shrines in any other church, but which
here melted away into the vast sunny breadth, and were of no separate
account. Yet each contributed its little all towards the grandeur of the
whole.
She would not have banished one of those grim popes, who sit each over
his own tomb, scattering cold benedictions out of their marble hands;
nor a single frozen sister of the Allegoric family, to whom--as, like
hired mourners at an English funeral, it costs them no wear and tear of
heart--is assigned the office of weeping for the dead. If you choose to
see these things, they present themselves; if you deem them unsuitable
and out of place, they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon
the walls.
The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-colored
marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and
shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly
garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,
filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after
centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal
comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider
sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and
warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can
satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human
necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not
here?
As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New
England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to
one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty
cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon
her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her
finger-tips. She felt as if her mother’s spirit, somewhere within
the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan
forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy
superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the
hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman;
a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter,
who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright
with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same,
the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda’s eyes. But again she
went onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right transept,
and thence found her way to a shrine, in the extreme corner of the
edifice, which is adorned with a mosaic copy of Guido’s beautiful
Archangel, treading on the prostrate fiend.
This was one of the few pictures, which, in these dreary days, had not
faded nor deteriorated in Hilda’s estimation; not that it was better
than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtile
delicacy of the painter’s genius was peculiarly adapted to her
character. She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a
great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of
Good. The moral of the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of
virtue, and its irresistibles might against ugly Evil, appealed as much
to Puritans as Catholics.
Suddenly, and as if it were done in a dream, Hilda found herself
kneeling before the shrine, under the ever-burning lamp that throws
its rays upon the Archangel’s face. She laid her forehead on the marble
steps before the altar, and sobbed out a prayer; she hardly knew to
whom, whether Michael, the Virgin, or the Father; she hardly knew for
what, save only a vague longing, that thus the burden of her spirit
might be lightened a little.
In an instant she snatched herself up, as it were, from her knees, all
a-throb with the emotions which were struggling to force their way out
of her heart by the avenue that had so nearly been opened for them. Yet
there was a strange sense of relief won by that momentary, passionate
prayer; a strange joy, moreover, whether from what she had done, or for
what she had escaped doing, Hilda could not tell. But she felt as one
half stifled, who has stolen a breath of air.
Next to the shrine where she had knelt there is another, adorned with
a picture by Guercino, representing a maiden’s body in the jaws of the
sepulchre, and her lover weeping over it; while her beatified spirit
looks down upon the scene, in the society of the Saviour and a throng
of saints. Hilda wondered if it were not possible, by some miracle of
faith, so to rise above her present despondency that she might look down
upon what she was, just as Petronilla in the picture looked at her own
corpse. A hope, born of hysteric trouble, fluttered in her heart. A
presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her, that, before she
had finished the circuit of the cathedral, relief would come.
The unhappy are continually tantalized by similar delusions of succor
near at hand; at least, the despair is very dark that has no such
will-o’-the-wisp to glimmer in it.