amphitheatre of Titus, which has obtained the name of the
COLISEUM, either from its magnitude, or from Nero’s colossal
statue: an edifice, had it been left to time and nature, which might
perhaps have claimed an eternal duration. The curious antiquaries, who
have computed the numbers and seats, are disposed to believe, that
above the upper row of stone steps, the amphitheatre was encircled and
elevated with several stages of wooden galleries, which were repeatedly
consumed by fire, and restored by the emperors. Whatever was precious,
or portable, or profane, the statues of gods and heroes, and the
costly ornaments of sculpture, which were cast in brass, or overspread
with leaves of silver and gold, became the first prey of conquest or
fanaticism, of the avarice of the barbarians or the Christians. In the
massy stones of the Coliseum, many holes are discerned; and the two
most probable conjectures represent the various accidents of its decay.
These stones were connected by solid links of brass or iron, nor had
the eye of rapine overlooked the value of the baser metals; the vacant
space was converted into a fair or market; the artisans of the Coliseum
are mentioned in an ancient survey; and the chasms were perforated or
enlarged to receive the poles that supported the shops or tents of the
mechanic trades. Reduced to its naked majesty, the Flavian amphitheatre
was contemplated with awe and admiration by the pilgrims of the north;
and the rude enthusiasm broke forth in a sublime proverbial expression,
which is recorded in the Eighth Century, in the fragments of the
venerable Bede: “As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when
the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will
fall.” In the modern system of war, a situation commanded by three
hills would not be chosen for a fortress; but the strength of the walls
and arches could resist the engines of assault; a numerous garrison
might be lodged in the enclosure; and while one faction occupied the
Vatican and the Capitol, the other was entrenched in the Lateran and
the Coliseum.
The abolition at Rome of the ancient games must be understood with
some latitude; and the carnival sports, of the Testacean mount and the
Circus Agonalis, were regulated by the law or custom of the city. The
senator presided with dignity and pomp to adjudge and distribute the
prizes, the gold ring, or the _pallium_, as it was styled, of
cloth or silk. A tribute on the Jews supplied the annual expense; and
the races, on foot, on horseback, or in chariots, were ennobled by a
tilt and tournament of seventy-two of the Roman youth. In the year one
thousand three hundred and thirty-two, a bull-feast, after the fashion
of the Moors and Spaniards, was celebrated in the Coliseum itself; and
the living manners are painted in a diary of the times. A convenient
order of benches was restored; and a general proclamation, as far as
Rimini and Ravenna, invited the nobles to exercise their skill and
courage in this perilous adventure. The Roman ladies were marshalled
in three squadrons, and seated in three balconies, which on this day,
the third of September, were lined with scarlet cloth. The fair Jacova
di Rovere led the matrons from beyond the Tiber, a pure and native
race, who still represent the features and character of antiquity. The
remainder of the city was divided as usual between the Colonna and
Ursini: the two factions were proud of the number and beauty of their
female bands: the charms of Savella Ursini are mentioned with praise;
and the Colonna regretted the absence of the youngest of their house,
who had sprained her ancle in the garden of Nero’s tower. The lots of
the champions were drawn by an old and respectable citizen: and they
descended into the arena, or pit, to encounter the wild bulls, on foot
as it should seem, with a single spear. Amidst the crowd, our annalist
has selected the names, colours, and devices, of twenty of the most
conspicuous knights. Several of the names are the most illustrious of
Rome and the ecclesiastical state; Malatesta, Polenta, della Valle,
Cafarello, Savelli, Capoccio, Conti, Annabaldi, Altieri, Corsi; the
colours were adapted to their taste and situation; the devices are
expressive of hope or despair, and breathe the spirit of gallantry and
arms. “I am alone, like the youngest of the Horatii,” the confidence
of an intrepid stranger: “I live disconsolate,” a weeping widower: “I
burn under the ashes,” a discreet lover: “I adore Lavinia or Lucretia,”
the ambiguous declaration of a modern passion: “My faith is as pure,”
the motto of a white livery: “Who is stronger than myself?” of a lion’s
hide: “If I am drowned in blood, what a pleasant death,” the wish of
ferocious courage. The pride or prudence of the Ursini restrained
them from the field, which was occupied by three of their hereditary
rivals, whose inscriptions denoted the lofty greatness of the Colonna
name: “Though sad I am strong:” “Strong as I am great:” “If I fall,”
addressing himself to the spectators, “you fall with me:”--intimating
(says the contemporary writer) that while the other families were the
subjects of the Vatican, they alone were the supporters of the capitol.
The combats of the amphitheatre were dangerous and bloody. Every
champion successively encountered a wild bull; and the victory may be
ascribed to the quadrupeds, since no more than eleven were left on the
field, with the loss of nine wounded and eighteen killed on the side
of their adversaries. Some of the noblest families might mourn, but
the pomp of the funerals, in the churches of St. John Lateran and St.
Maria Maggiore, afforded a second holiday to the people. Doubtless it
was not in such conflicts that the blood of the Romans should have been
shed; yet, in blaming their rashness we are compelled to applaud their
gallantry; and the noble volunteers, who display their magnificence,
and risk their lives, under the balconies of the fair, excite a more
generous sympathy than the thousands of captives and malefactors who
were reluctantly dragged to the scene of slaughter.
This use of the amphitheatre was a rare, perhaps a singular, festival:
the demand for the materials was a daily and continual want, which the
citizens could gratify without restraint or remorse. In the Fourteenth
Century, a scandalous act of concord secured to both factions the
privilege of extracting stones from the free and common quarry of the
Coliseum; and Poggius laments, that the greater part of these stones
had been burnt to lime by the folly of the Romans. To check this abuse,
and to prevent the nocturnal crimes that might be perpetrated in the
vast and gloomy recess, Eugenius the fourth surrounded it with a wall;
and, by a charter long extant, granted both the ground and edifice
to the monks of an adjacent convent. After his death, the wall was
overthrown in a tumult of the people; and had they themselves respected
the noblest monument of their fathers, they might have justified the
resolve that it should never be degraded to private property. The
inside was damaged; but in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, an
æra of taste and learning, the exterior circumference of one thousand
six hundred and twelve feet was still entire and inviolate; a triple
elevation of fourscore arches, which rose to the height of one hundred
and eight feet. Of the present ruin, the nephews of Paul the Third are
the guilty agents; and every traveller who views the Farnese Palace
may curse the sacrilege and luxury of these upstart princes. A similar
reproach is applied to the Barberini; and the repetition of injury
might be dreaded from every reign, till the Coliseum was placed under
the safeguard of religion by the most liberal of the pontiffs, Benedict
the Fourteenth, who consecrated a spot which persecution and fable had
stained with the blood of so many Christian martyrs.
When Petrarch first gratified his eyes with a view of those
monuments, whose scattered fragments so far surpass the most eloquent
descriptions, he was astonished at the supine indifference of the
Romans themselves; he was humbled rather than elated by the discovery,
that, except his friend Rienzi and one of the Colonna, a stranger of
the Rhone was more conversant with these antiquities than the nobles
and natives of the metropolis.
THE COLISEUM
CHARLES DICKENS
When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour staring
up into the dome: and would not have “gone over” the Cathedral then for
any money), we said to the coachman, “Go to the Coliseum.” In a quarter
of an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.
It is no fiction but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive
and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment--actually in
passing in--they who will, may have the whole great pile before them,
as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the
arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust, going on there,
as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its
utter desolation, strike upon the stranger, the next moment, like a
softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved
and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own
affections and afflictions.
To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches
overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass
growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on
its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds
dropped there by the birds, who build their nests within its chinks
and crannies; to see the Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the
peaceful Cross planted in the centre; to climb into its upper halls,
and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches
of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the
Palace of the Cæsars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down
and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old
city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the
most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic,
mournful sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the
sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest
life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a
ruin--God be thanked: a ruin!
As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among graves:
so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old
mythology and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and
cruel Roman people. The Italian face changes as the visitor approaches
the city; its beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one
countenance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that
would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow.
Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine in
its full and awful grandeur.
GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS
G. W. STEEVENS
The Sikhs are the youngest of the great powers of India. A kind of
Hindu Protestants, their Luther arose about 1500 to fulminate against
caste and the worship of idols. Instead of Shiva and Kali, they worship
their Bible, which is called the Granth. They abhor tobacco, and it is
impiety to shave or cut the hair. Sometimes, when a Sikh plays polo,
you may see it come undone and wave behind him like a horse-tail. From
Puritans they turned to Ironsides, praying and fighting with equal
fervour, wearing an iron quoit in their turbans, partly as a sign of
grace, and partly as a defence against a chance sword-cut.
For some three hundred years they fought the Musulmans, Mogul or
Afghan, for the dominion of the Punjab, and won it in the end. The
Musulmans tortured the Sikh teachers to death with their families; the
Sikhs sacked and massacred in return. The Musulmans took Amritsar, blew
up the temple of the Granth, and washed its foundations in the blood
of sacred cows; the Sikhs took Lahore, blew up the mosques, and washed
their foundations in the blood of unclean swine. Fanatics and heroes,
they lived only for the holy war, and became the barrier of India
against the Musulman tribes of the North-West. At last, in 1823, the
Sikhs were united under Ranjit Singh into the greatest power of India.
But he died in 1839; four wives and seven concubines were burned with
him, and you can see their tombs under marble lotuses in Lahore. Ten
years later the second Sikh War was over, and the Punjab was British.
If the Sikh rule was short, their battles have ever been long.
[Illustration: GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS, INDIA.]
The later history of the Sikhs--how kindly they accepted British rule,
which has still treated their religion with more than tolerant respect;
how they supplied and supply to-day noble regiments to our army; the
splendid services they rendered in the Mutiny, but a decade after
their conquest; the unswerving gallantry and devotion which they have
displayed on every field of honour,--all this is part of the military
history of the Empire. The very officers of Gurkha and Pathan and Dogra
regiments admit that the Sikh is the ideal of all that is soldierly.
Ranjit’s capital was Lahore, but the holy city has ever been Amritsar.
“The Pool of Immortality,” it means, and here in the centre of the
pool is the Golden Temple. In its present form it is not yet a century
old--quite an infant in India. Amritsar, indeed, is full of new things;
for, as it is the Mecca, it is also the Manchester of the Punjab.
Carpets and shawls and silks are manufactured there, or brought in by
merchants from Persia and Tibet, Bokhara and Yarkand. Here you can see
modern native India untainted by Europe.
Amritsar wears an air of solid prosperity. Not in the least like the
manufacturing towns we know, lacking the machinery of Bombay or
Calcutta, it neither shadows its streets with many-storied factories
nor defiles its air with smoke. But it wears a uniform and thriving
aspect, as of a town with a present and a future rather than a past.
The Bond Street of Delhi is a double row of decayed mansions propped up
by tottering booths; the houses of Amritsar are middle-sized, regular,
stably built of burned bricks, neither splendid nor ruinous. The looms
clatter and whir in the factories, and the merchant bargains between
the whiffs of his hookah in his shop, and Amritsar grows rich in a
leisurely Indian way, unfevered by Western improvements.
To the Western eye it is unenterprising and rather shabby. The stable
comfort of Amritsar stops short at the good brick walls; inside,
the shops are bare brick and plaster. There is nothing in the least
imposing about it. “Chunder Buksh, Dealer,” says one placard, and it
would be hard to say what else he could call himself; for his stock
seems to consist of one fine carpet, some brass pots, and a towel.
Above him is “Ali Mohammed, Barrister-at-Law,” in a windowless,
torn-blinded office, which you would otherwise take for the attic
of Chunder Buksh’s assistant. But compared with the rest of India,
Amritsar is a model of wellbeing. It is dusty, but otherwise almost
clean; the streets, of course, are full of bullocks and buffaloes, but
it seems rare that animals share their bed with men; there are plenty
of people all but naked, but it is rather from choice or religious
enthusiasm than of necessity. The trousered ladies, strolling with
trousered babies on their hips or smoking hubble-bubbles on shop
counters, wear silver in their blue-black hair, pearls in their noses,
gold in their ears; they jingle with locked-up capital. Finally, there
is a Jubilee statue of the Queen, and a clock-tower for all the world
like an English borough’s. But besides these and the Government offices
and the railway-station there is hardly a whisper from the West in the
town; and in Amritsar you begin to conceive a new respect for India.
The stream in the streets sets steadily towards the Golden Temple.
From the heavy-browed city gate to the holy pool the winding alleys
are splashed with all the familiar hues--orange outshining lemon
and emerald throttling ultramarine. Following the stalwart, bearded
pilgrims, in the midst of the city of shopkeepers you suddenly break
into a wide square: within it, bordered by a marble pavement--white,
black, and umber--a green lake dances in the sunlight; and in the midst
of that, mirrored in the pool--you look through your eyelashes, for the
hot rays fling back sevenfold-heated, blinding--gleam walls and roofs
and cupolas of sheer gold.
A minute or two you blink and stare, then you see that it is a small
temple on an island with a causeway leading to it from under an arch.
And after the first blink and stare your notions of beauty rise up and
protest against it. The temple is neither imposing by size nor winsome
by proportion. It has two stories--the lower of marble, inlaid, like
the marble of Agra, with birds and beasts and flowers, but with none
of Agra’s grace and refinement; all above it is of copper-gilt. Above
the second story rises something half-cupola, half-dome, but it is not
in the middle; there are smaller cupolas at the side overlooking the
causeway, and others smaller still at the far side. The whole temple
is smaller than St. Clement Danes, and a little building has no right
to be irregular. If the Taj Mahal, you say, which is three times this
size, can take the trouble to be symmetrical--well, if this is the
masterpiece of modern India--as for the gold, it blinds you for the
first moment and amuses you for the second; but you might as well ask
beauty of a heliograph.
Nevertheless, do not go away, for you will hardly see anything more
Indian. Outside the gate they show you a Government ordinance that
everybody must either conform to the religious customs of the place
or forbear to indulge his curiosity; you bow, and a bearded giant,
who might be a high-priest for dignity, takes off your boots and
ties on silk slippers instead. You leave your cigar-case behind you:
tobacco must not defile the holy place. Then, behind a white-bearded
policeman--who performs the triple function of guiding, preventing you
from doing anything impious, and clearing worshippers out of the way
before you--you start forth to see.
The pilgrims shuffle on eagerly round the pavement to the great gate
before the causeway. On a gilt tablet, in English and Punjabi, stands
the record of a miracle: how that a great light from heaven fell before
the holy book, and then was caught up into heaven again, whence the
learned augured much blessing upon the British Raj. Past the gate
they press without turning the head, though it is carved and pictured
over every inch. On one side of the entrance a marble tablet shows the
legend XXXV Sikhs and something in Punjabi. From the gate you issue
on to the causeway. It also is flagged with marble, and lined with
gilded lamp-posts; but the lamps above the gold are that crass-blue
and green-coloured glass of the suburban builder, and more than one
hangs broken. So you come to the sanctuary itself--a lofty chamber
with four open doors of chased silver. Within sit three priests on the
floor, under a canopy of blue and scarlet, before a low ottoman draped
in crimson and green and yellow. The high-priest, eagle-eyed and long
black-bearded, reads continually in a loud voice from the Granth;
beside him sits one with a gilt-handled wisk and fans the sacred book.
At another side sit two musicians: one twangs a sort of one-stringed
mandoline, one thrums a tom-tom. Before the Granth lies a cloth; and
each believer, crouching in, flings on it flowers or cowries or copper
coins for his offering. To the white man they bring what looks like a
dry half-orange or candied citron, only white; it is made of sugar, and
the white man responds with the offering of a rupee. The walls about
this strange worship blaze with blue and red and gold in frets and
scrolls and flower-tendrils; above are chambers and galleries of the
same and studded mirrors; in one more than holy room are brooms made of
peacocks’ feathers wherewith alone it may be swept.
That is the great shrine of all; but there is much else. All round the
lake are palaces of stone and white marble belonging to the great
Sikh chiefs who came here to worship. Before them, on the pavement,
men squatting under canvas screens hawk flowers--lotus, jasmine,
marigold, or scabious--to be offered before the Scripture. In one of
the palaces, which matches the temple with a gilt dome of its own, you
see a glass case; within it, under crimson silk, rest the sword and
mace of some old Sikh Boanerges, mighty in prayer as in battle. Then
there is a tower temple of eight stories, dedicated to a bygone saint
and miracle-worker, the lower chamber aflame with paint and gold. As
the policeman enters he touches the step with his finger; a woman in
violet trousers flings a flower on to a cloth and ottoman like that
of the central shrine; a woman in green-and-gold trousers places a
bread-cake before it and lays her forehead on the marble sill; others
grovel and shampoo it with their hands. The next thing you come to is
a plain shed with a dynamo that supplies the shrines and gardens with
electric light. After that a group of naked fakirs, powdered white with
ashes, with long mud-matted hair and mad eyes. Then a door, fast closed
and seeming to lead nowhither, with a tiny wreath of marigolds hung on
it.
Everywhere the same grotesque contradictions--splendour and squalor,
divinity and dirt, superstition and manliness. The Western mind can
make nothing of it, cannot bring it into a focus. You simply hold your
head, and say that this is the East, and you are of the West. In the
treasury above the gate are silver staves and gilt maces, canopies of
gold and diadems of pearls and diamonds. In the sacred, putrid lake
rot flowers. A fakir standing before an enclosure drones in a full
voice words you do not understand, like a psalm without any end to it:
the refrain, after every half-dozen words, sounds like “Hullah hah
leay.” Inside the shrine the high-priest never ceases to intone the
Granth, nor the other priest to fan it, nor the musicians to tinkle and
thrum; and in and out that holy place fly clouds of pigeons, perching
on the canopy and fouling the growing pile of offerings before the
ottoman. At every turn you come on little shrines with books on silken
cushions and prostrate adorers. A calf, unchecked, is trying to lick
the gold off the great gateway.
THE GIRALDA
ΤΗÉΟΡΗΙLΕ GAUTIER
The Giralda, which serves as a campanila to the cathedral, and rises
above all the spires of the town, is an old Moorish tower, erected by
an Arabian architect, named Geber or Guever, who invented algebra,
which was called after him. The appearance of the tower is charming,
and very original; the rose-coloured bricks and the white stone of
which it is built, give it an air of gaiety and youth, which forms a
strange contrast with the date of its erection, which extends as far
back as the year 1000, a very respectable age, at which a tower may
well be allowed to have a wrinkle or two and be excused for not being
remarkable for a fresh complexion. The Giralda in its present state
is not less than three hundred and fifty feet high, while each side
is fifty feet broad. Up to a certain height the walls are perfectly
even; there are then rows of Moorish windows with balconies, trefoils,
and small white marble columns, surrounded by large lozenge-shaped
brick panels. The tower formerly ended in a roof of variously coloured
varnished tiles, on which was an iron bar, ornamented with four gilt
metal balls of a prodigious size. This roof was removed in 1568 by the
architect Francisco Ruiz, who raised the daughter of the Moor Guever
one hundred feet higher in the pure air of heaven, so that his bronze
statue might overlook the sierras, and speak with the angels who
passed. The feat of building a belfry on a tower was in perfect keeping
with the intentions of the members composing that admirable chapter who
wished posterity to imagine they were mad. The additions of Francisco
Ruiz consist of three stories; the first of these is pierced with
windows, in whose embrasures are hung bells; the second, surrounded by
an open balustrade, bears on the cornice of each of its sides, these
words--_Turris fortissima nomen Domini_; and the third is a kind
of cupola or lantern, on which turns a gigantic gilt bronze figure of
Faith, holding a palm in one hand and a standard in the other, and
serving as a weathercock, thereby justifying the name of Giralda given
to the tower. This statue is by Bartholomew Morel. It can be seen at a
very great distance; and when it glitters through the azure atmosphere,
really looks like a seraph lounging in the air.
[Illustration: THE GIRALDA, SEVILLE, SPAIN.]