ROME BEFORE 1870
A stranger who had found himself in Rome the week before September 20,
1870 would have noticed the strange expectation, and also the strange
apathy in the Romans. "The Italians" were besieging their city, and
when it pleased them to enter they would enter. The Pope would not
resist them, and no one in his city thought it his business to die a
martyr to such a cause. Some workmen who had had orders to make a
barricade had got themselves under way with much difficulty and not
without many complaints, declaring as they prepared their tools and
tramped along the hot road in the September sun: "_ci vuole molto vino
per queste cose, molto vino_." At five o'clock on the morning of the
20th the bombardment began and at ten the white flag was hoisted in
Rome. Then a great silence succeeded in the city, every one stayed
within doors, and the papal brigand corps patrolled the streets. Thus
ingloriously the "Patrimony of Peter," the historical sway of the
popes, came to an end.
[Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
Begun by Julius Caesar, and completed by Augustus who dedicated it
to his sister's son. See pages 30, 160, 168, 228.]
Did the Romans welcome or reprobate the entry of "the Italians"? To
answer this question for ourselves we must bear in mind the political
events which preceded 1870 and the various elements represented in the
city. In September 1870 when the Italians entered, Rome was already
won for Italy, the Pope could not have offered any effective
resistance to Italian arms, Italian unity was already an accepted
fact; it only remained to take possession of Rome as the centre and
capital of this political unity, Victor Emmanuel having, out of
consideration to the Pontiff, fixed his capital first at Turin and
afterwards at Florence. And the events which led up to this result had
not spelt harmony between the Pope and his subjects or been years of
peace in the papal states. When Pius mounted the throne in 1846 people
were tired of Gregory XVI.'s old world methods, and Giovanni
Mastai-Ferretti was no sooner elected than the Romans asked him for a
constitution, a parliament, the substitution of laymen for clerks in
various departments of the executive. Pius IX. accorded a constitution
and a parliament of laymen. He did more. Against the suffrages of his
cardinals he granted a general amnesty to political offenders, and the
story runs that when he saw the rows of forbidding black balls which
the cardinals had cast, he lifted his little white skull cap and
covering the balls with it, said "I will make them all white," and so
the amnesty was granted.
It is often said that the liberal impulses of Pius IX. and his ready
response to popular clamour were repaid by outrageous ingratitude, and
that his Romans made him fly from Rome at the risk of his life to
ponder in solitude at Gaeta the futility of liberal pretences on the
part of popes. But the Romans were not simply ungrateful, they wanted
more, they thought they had a right to more--and what they wanted was
more than any pope could concede. They asked for modern civilisation
and the papacy represented ancient civilisation. The original demands
had not been demands made in _bona fides_ of a prince who has power to
give and to withhold what is asked. They were part of a political
campaign, the end of which was to be the destruction of the temporal
power. Mazzini's instructions to Young Italy to make one demonstration
after another under the windows of the Quirinal, when one liberty was
accorded to return the next day and demand another, until the Pope's
position was rendered intolerable and impossible, are not pleasant
reading; what is to be said in their favour is that the revolutionary
annals of no other people afford any better.
The time had come when men who lived in contact with the Italy outside
the walls of Rome, in contact with the ideas which were the conquest
of the nineteenth century, could not admit that the governed had only
duties and the ruler only rights, or reconcile with the modern ideal
of civil life the notion of a prince-bishop governing a subject people
in virtue of a theocratic idea, the abstract idea that certain
temporal rights fell--_mal gre bon gre_ of all concerned--to the vicar
of Jehovah on earth. The time will come when the existence of such a
pretension, the existence of such a government one moment after it
responded to the universal sentiment, will appear the strangest fable.
Will they be better or worse times? The future alone knows what it has
in store, but we can only say that they cannot ever be worse times
than some of those which the papacy created for the Romans. This
consideration would have sufficed at any time to make the tenure of
temporal power on the part of the Roman bishops, precarious--but it
did not by any means stand alone. We have to add to it the rise of
Italian patriotism, the passionate call for a united Italy, for the
country to issue once and for all from the tyrannies, the
immoralities, the crushing canker of pettiness which clung to the
princely and ducal governments, and rise to its place among the
nations.
Thus in September 1870 the feeling was very mixed in Rome. A large
part of the population had helped to prepare the _denouement_, knew
its advent was only a question of time; others, members of faithful
Roman houses, had used voice and influence to induce the Pope to
institute necessary reforms and had fallen into despondency when Pius
on his return from Gaeta issued his _non possumus_ and settled down to
a morose implacable reactionism. There remained the large army of
priests, of papal functionaries and retainers, the cardinals and their
numerous personnel, the religious orders and congregations of both
sexes and the hundreds upon hundreds of persons dependent on them, the
papal police and soldiery with their families. There were the great
families which owed their titles and their fortunes to the popes,
those whom common gratitude or honour kept at his side. And lastly
there was the _popolino_, the ignorant poor, untouched by modern
aspirations, by socialistic theories, living from day to day, from
hand to mouth in the strictest sense, with no ambitions, no "standard
of comfort" or of human dignity--ready to fall on their knees at any
hour of the day when the Pope "_Dio in terra_" passed, agape at the
latest royal visitor to the palace of their pontiff, content to
encounter injustice with cunning fraud, to sweeten the hard buffets of
life by the _finesse_ required for some small scheme of peculation,
some dastardly scheme of revenge. Such human passions as lay outside
the gratification of hunger and the greed for spectacles were
satisfied by the periodical uprising and savage disloyalty habitual to
the turbulent Roman people. And what applied to the populace applied
in some sense also to the small _bourgeoisie_. There are always those
who find it easier and pleasanter to keep within the pale of small
joys and small miseries, small achievements and small risks. There
were thousands of such people who stood well with the papacy, and who
could only lose by a competition with the outsider for which they
were, by training and talent, unprepared.
[Illustration: ISLAND OF THE TIBER--THE ISOLA SACRA
To the right is the Fabrician bridge, to the left the _pons Cestius_
which joins the island to Trastevere. See pages 7, 229, 240.]
These then were "for the Pope." Not because he had a divine right to
be in Rome but because they individually and collectively flourished
under his rule. They flourished because there was no hunger, because
though there were unsanitary hovels there were no haunts of starving
people who could obtain neither bread nor work--if any were in need
of bread they threw a _supplica_ into the Pope's carriage and he sent
it to them when he got home. They flourished, because "where ignorance
is bliss 'tis folly to be wise" and no wave of unrest, few of the
ignobilities and none of the nobilities of a more strenuous life had
passed over them. The papal government compared to a modern European
government was like a blunderbuss in a modern arsenal, but though it
was entirely ineffectual, though the people under its care merely
lived out their lives with enough to eat and generation succeeded
generation neither better nor worse than the men who went before
them--it was an honest government in the financial sense. The people
were not taxed, prices indeed were kept low as a means of humouring
them, and the Pope's subjects were not exploited to fill his
exchequer. In the strange medley of Roman ideas it seemed better to
accomplish this end by the methods of the Jubilee year which exploited
the soul of the foreigner. The papal government did not peculate, but
the hated _sbirri_--the papal police--were often responsible for a
missing bale of cloth or a burglary, and a child who had been left a
fortune by her aunt only learnt when she was grown up that the
_curato_ of the Pantheon who had been made _erede fiduciario_
(trustee) and executor of the testament had not thereby been
constituted sole beneficiary. The administration in all departments
was simpler than now, and the evils of the present bureaucracy were
not known, but it was a government of privilege and patronage; "one
under which a gentleman could live" said an Irishman, but the
unprivileged person might find himself in prison for not kneeling when
the Pope passed. A resident English sculptor who remembered the days
of Gregory XVI. told me that Rome was the paradise of artists, who in
their velvet jackets and squash felt hats did what seemed good in
their own eyes, no man hindering them. The curious traveller of family
and fortune--it was before the day of Cook's tourists--enjoyed every
liberty under the hospitable papal government save only the liberty to
speak or write about politics and religion, and suffered nothing save
the occasional loss of a newspaper or book which the paternal
government stopped at the frontier as likely to imperil the peace of
mind of the Romans. They lived in a picturesque world, which recalled
the middle ages at every step, where the prosaic dead level to which
justice and civilisation had reduced the rest of Europe, did not
penetrate, and they admired in Rome and for the Romans what they would
have exposed in Parliament or the _Times_ as intolerable abuses in
their own country. From 1848 onwards political rigours unworthy of the
Holy See were resorted to, though these were relaxed before 1870. Some
art students who had prepared Bengal fireworks to celebrate the
anniversary of the victory over the French at Porta San Pancrazio,
were sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. A similar sentence was
passed on a "non-smoker" (not to smoke was a protest against the
papacy at the expense of its tobacco trade) who came to words with a
"smoker" and this barbarous sentence was enthusiastically upheld by
such a journal as the _Civilta Cattolica_. Commendatore Silvagni who
cites these and similar instances in his _Corte e Societa romana_
writes indeed like a man too sore at what he has seen and too near to
what he describes to present it in perspective, and he seems to the
present writer a prejudiced guide to Rome before 1870. Sedition and
conspiracy have met with scant ceremony at the hands of every nation
and every prince in turn, and the way in which Pius IX. treated "the
patriots" does not differ from that which may be read of in the
history of any other country.
What was peculiar to the papal states was the confusion of the
spiritual and the temporal; the special scandal came from the union of
these two powers in one authority, the temporal being used to enforce
the "spiritual" and the spiritual being abused to assist the temporal.
The spectacle of priests, your "fathers in God," your spiritual
directors, ordering the public floggings, nay the public torture, of
men and women could hardly edify or civilise; Gregory XVI. had
abolished these public castigations which used to be suffered in the
_Campo de' fiori_ (under an archway which may still be seen), but
Antonelli strove to revive them in the _Piazza del Popolo_ in 1856.
Other mediaeval barbarisms ceased the day the Italians entered Rome,
among them the _Ghetto_.
The people as we see were not taxed, but neither were they taught.
Some subjects were altogether taboo--modern history was among them.
Obscurantism reigned supreme. Girls were taught to read in order that
they might read their prayers, but they did not learn to write lest
they should indite love letters. This was typical of the papal system.
You took away the light lest the child should ever happen to burn
itself, and you pursued the same policy with the adult. No instruction
was vouchsafed, no information given, no education whatever of the
intellectual or moral man. Girls were often destined from birth to the
nunnery, and the veil was the never-failing remedy against a marriage
distasteful to the parents or even the brothers, grand-parents, or
uncles of the victim. No one denies that this compulsory enclosure was
commonly practised in Rome. "Are you not ashamed to be reading, go and
knit stockings" shouted a Jesuit to a poor lady who sat reading in her
carriage in the Corso as the worthy father, who had been preaching a
retreat to women, crossed the street. Many of the poor ladies in
convents became imbecile so void were their minds, so vacuous their
lives, and in our own day a Roman community of thirty nuns required
the services of no fewer than thirty-one confessors. The education
received by the boys of good families sent them home with the airs and
gestures of so many little _abbes_. The children's games were tarred
with the same brush, the same universal insipidity. The little boys
dressed up as priests and said sham masses or moved about pieces of
white cardboard which represented the host; explaining to their little
sisters that such solemn fooling was not for "wicked girls."
Occasionally, the natural talent, the natural wit and moral courage of
a girl might provide her with a role and allow her to dominate
instead of being the sport of circumstances. But the young men as a
rule fell victims to that weak-kneedness which makes them the prey of
the fear of derision in their school-days, intensified by a training
which made self-dependence and self-development impossible. Thus one
of the Doria, a family which had given heroes to its country, the
younger brother of that Doria whose English wife's name _Mary_ is cut
in a box hedge in the Villa Pamfili, broke the heart of the noble
Vittoria Savorelli because his uncle, of whom he was independent,
objected to their engagement. A Roman _marchese_ having been struck in
the face by another Roman in the middle of the Corso at midday rushed
off to consult his confessor as to what steps he should take, and we
are not surprised to learn that he was able to follow the advice
proffered, and "bear it patiently." There is a story of a _frate_ who
could have taught him differently. As he was crossing a bridge a man
struck him on the cheek; the good _frate_ immediately turned the
other, then he picked up his man and pitched him into the river; for,
as he explained, the Gospel bid him turn the other cheek to the
smiter, but it did not tell him what he was to do afterwards.
[Illustration: THE STEPS OF ARA COELI
The church which occupies the site of the Sabine arx. See pages 6,
86, 230-31.]
The fierce light of publicity has transformed the lives of the Roman
clergy and religious since 1870. Those Roman priests who live without
reproach themselves, confess that "the revolution" has brought about
this signal benefit. The _Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici_ which
received impoverished nobles, ordained them, and sent them _at
twenty-five years old_ to rule as prefects over the papal provinces
was the fertile nursing-ground of a corrupt prelacy. The proud and
affectionate interest with which the Romans, despite many lapses,
regarded the popes, was not extended to the great papal officers who
from the _Governatore di Roma_ downwards did not cease to provide a
scandalous example to the people until the moment when "the Italians"
entered the city.
It will be said: these people at least were taught their religion?
They were taught their religion as they were taught everything
else--that is, not at all. They knew that you must obey the pope and
obey the priest, that you would be damned if you did not go to
confession and hear mass. But they thought one Madonna would hear
their petitions better than another ("_Non andate da quella, non vale
niente_" "don't go to that one, she is no good") and that exorcism was
a surer remedy for a plague of bugs than cleanliness. They never heard
a single verse of the Gospel explained to them, and young men of the
higher _bourgeoisie_ learnt their religion if they learnt it at all,
after 1870, when they were grown up and thought and read for
themselves. Such men, many of whom belong to the _Circolo San Pietro_,
are to-day the mainstay of intelligent and faithful religion in the
city. Before 1870 there was in Rome a real ignorance of the doctrines,
the beauties, and the duties, of Christianity. The one moment chosen
for a great religious impression was of course the first Communion.
Boys and girls were then enclosed and eight days were spent in pious
exercises and instruction. The sons of the poor went to the
_Cappellette di San Luigi_ at Ponte Rotto, the well to do to the same
institution near Santa Maria Maggiore. On the other side of the
basilica the girls of well to do families were prepared at the Bambin
Gesu, the poor at San Pasquale. I am assured that at Ponte Rotto the
effect of these eight days shut up in a religious house frequently
changed the lives of boys with vicious tendencies. In other classes
the appeal to unreal emotions was not always so successful, and the
girls at the Bambin Gesu, dressed up in the stiff unaccustomed habit
of the religious, often communicated with the one dread filling their
minds that they might inadvertently commit "the sin" of touching the
host with their teeth. Not less mistaken was the custom of the "Six
Sundays," the girls and boys alike for the next six weeks
communicating "in honour of the chastity of S. Lewis Gonzaga." And
then _buon viaggio_, as the Italians say; they probably never
communicated again except as "paschal lambs" at Easter. They
communicated then of course. At the rails, the moment they had
received the host, a ticket was handed to them with the name of the
parish and some pious Latin verse inscribed on it. To this the
communicant appended his name and address, and no succour was given,
no "grazia" accorded except to those provided with this ticket. The
names of those who had not communicated were posted at the church
doors. Thus not only did all who could in conscience do so communicate
once a year, but those who could not and would not procured the
services of some woman who made it her business to communicate every
day, or several times a day, during Easter tide, selling the tickets
thus received for a franc or two francs each.
Here was one of the inevitable degradations of a theocracy. Another
was this--people found working at their trade, in their back shop, in
their private room, on _festas_ were arrested and imprisoned sometimes
for several days. Respectable citizens who found themselves compelled
to finish a piece of work, behind closed doors, in this way, were
subjected to the ignominious and futile punishment, which was
certainly not calculated to educate their own religious sense or that
of their families and children. Spies, under such a government, were
always easy to find, and this and similar laws gave fine scope to the
purveyors of private revenge. You could not ostentatiously abstain
from going to mass, if you were poor you could not abstain at all, for
the Roman parish priests were so many civil magistrates with definite
powers, and if the answers to their numerous questions were not
satisfactory it was the worse for the householder and his prospects.
One means of finding out people's private affairs was through the
servants who acted as spies reporting everything to the _parocco_.
Pinelli the famous designer and engraver, whose bust to-day adorns the
Pincio, who had never been pious or even respectable, repaid the old
woman who reported his habitual absence from mass by ringing up the
neighbourhood between half past four and five every morning, and in
reply to the usual "_Chi e?_" calling out "_e Pinelli che va a
messa_"; nor did he desist ringing at his enemy's door till she got
out of bed to hear his announcement. The carabineers of the theocracy
also had a mixed service. A room had to be set apart for the
temerarious folk who required meat on a Friday or a fast day, and the
carabineers entered the restaurants and eating houses, sequestrating
the dish which smoked before the customer if this regulation was not
observed. Moreover, at the head of every department was a cardinal;
the Roman wife of a political exile once described to me what a _via
crucis_ it was for a young woman to run the gauntlet of these clerical
departments if she had to ask some favour for the exiled husband.
[Illustration: STEPS OF THE CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO
Above the steps of _Magnanapoli_ which lead from the Forum of Trajan
to the Quirinal hill. Their architect was Bernini. See page 231.]
But if they were unlettered and superstitious were the people in those
days better than now? The comparisons we sometimes hear urged are not
really fair for two reasons. There is to be found in Rome to-day among
the lower and the half educated classes all that want of moral
equilibrium which a revolution of ideas brings with it. Moral Italy
has yet to be made, as the moral unity of Italy is also as yet only in
the making. Before 1870, on the other hand, those who were faithful to
the standard then put before them, were faithful to what was never
better than a poor and low ideal of conduct, sentiment, and religious
duty. The papal standard required no refinement of feeling, no
education of the conscience: no one was scandalised that a shop should
display the barbarous notice "_Qui si castrono per la cappella
papale_," or that the popular story ran that when Guido Reni was
painting his picture of the Crucifixion before a living model attached
to a cross, he killed him at the last moment in his frenzy to see and
seize the death struggle, and fled the city; but that the holy father
had absolved him because, as you who go may see, it is a _capo
d'opera_. And the poor man killed to make a fine picture of Him who
endured death to teach us pity for each other? _Ebbene, poveretto_....
The pope is like Nemesis, like the blind forces of nature, like an
avalanche, a falling mountain, or an earthquake--not a moral force,
but a weight of authority. As you can see for yourself if you go to
San Lorenzo in Lucina the work is a _capo d'opera_ and the pope knows
better than you. Moral judgment is silent before the weight of
authority.
My narrator, who only wished to magnify a great picture, not to raise
a moral problem, always carried with him a paper blest by the pope,
and of extraordinary efficacy, that is it was Spanish and was covered
with writing, every corner had something pious in it, and no one who
carried it could die unabsolved. The proof was set forth in the blest
paper itself, for one man _did_ die unabsolved, they cut off his head
in fact; but the head was not to be brow-beaten, it simply went off to
the nearest town--and in these cases, as the witty Marquise du Deffand
said to Gibbon, _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_--and found a
priest (what priest ever shows himself the least _deroute_ in such
circumstances?) who at once confessed the head, and there the matter
ended.
Rome before 1870 was not even externally what we see it now. An old
world city of tall palaces, the windows in the lower story grated, of
monasteries and churches, of ruins in unconscious beauty, of fountains
of waters, of cabbage gardens and _orti_, of orange and lemon gardens
which at every turn surprised and delighted the eye. The main streets
straight as Roman roads, the piazzas, in contrast to these, full of
sun, intolerable from May onwards at noonday. A city of narrow squalid
streets huddled together, in which the domesticities are carried on
unrebuked and unabashed--in the poorer quarters every third house
appeared to be a washerwoman's, the linen hung across the road on
lines stretched from window to window. And everywhere an unpromising
door, an open gate, may reveal a little picture, a cool garden and
fountain, orange and lemon trees, a bend of the river, a view of the
Janiculum or the Aventine. A Roman smell pervading everything and
sufficiently characteristic to make you sure, if you were suddenly set
down in any part of the town, that you were in Rome: and at night
another smell, the smell of the ages, unwholesome, penetrating, coming
up from the soil, or the freshly turned earth, and making one shut the
windows hastily on the loveliest of moonlit evenings. A wealth of
street cries, varying with the season, and the nocturnal serenades,
assist that atmosphere of noise for noise' sake and movement which are
essential to the Italian, the noise of the shabby two-horsed carriages
grinding along on the paved streets and driven by the bad Roman
drivers with a continual cracking of the whip and a constant
application of the squeaking break, of wine carts lazily winding their
way across the streets of the eternal city with that sense of infinite
time and space born of long colloquies with the sun by day and the
moon by night across a deserted _campagna_, a score of little brazen
bells, perhaps, clanging and jingling at the driver's ear--the
constant noise by day and night of a life-loving, loquacious,
complaining, gesticulating, rebellious and keenly observant people. A
city of priests and dependents of priests, here there are no
industries, no great machines are set in motion every day, no
factories open with daylight to give employment to hundreds of skilled
workmen. Every one who is not a priest works for priests or for the
monasteries. The little workshops may be seen in the Borgo of S.
Peter's, in Campo Marzo, in the arches of the theatre of
Marcellus--every little doorway contains a cobbler, the _piazze_ which
lead to the big churches are crowded on _festas_ with vendors of
religious pictures and rosaries. The convents of women make their own
habits, but there is a great industry for providing the thousands of
priests, the seminarists, canons, monsignori, cardinals and cardinals'
retainers, and Vatican functionaries with cassocks, robes, uniforms,
hats, berrettas, stocks and pumps. In the centre of this life, which
is ecclesiastical even for the layman, it seems right that when we
notice a stir and turn round with the rest, we should see the papal
_cortege_ and the Pope round whom all this life revolves; the centre
of this city of churches and cassocks, because he is the centre of a
far larger world. For Rome is what it is because its sovereign bishop
is the cynosure for the eyes of that Christendom which counts the
largest number of adherents on the face of the globe, and their Mecca
is his city, Rome.
Let us follow a pedestrian who is starting on his afternoon walk, one
bright day in April, from the neighbourhood of Santa Maria dell' Orto
on the other side of the Tiber, and see Rome before 1870 with his
eyes. Like all good Italians he is curious, and he crosses the street
when he sees a man with a large oblong box covered with some black
waterproof stuff ring at what is apparently a convent door--and the
meanest door in Rome may give access to the scene of busiest monastic
life. The door is opened by the convent porteress, and when the lid is
removed our friend sees the _ostie_, the hosts for the use of the
convent, which are brought round every week or every fortnight to the
monasteries and churches, a hundred here, twenty there, according to
the need. As he passes the convent of Santa Maria in Capella he gets a
glimpse of the beautiful cool cloister garden with its lemon trees and
sees the _cornette_ of the "Daughter of France" whose application for
permission to remain and work on French soil was immediately granted
at a time when so many companies of priests monks and friars applied
in vain. While crossing the river by the island of the Tiber, he meets
a procession from the church hard by with its Franciscan friars who
walk next after the confraternity of the quarter in their well-known
red "sacks" or gowns; the priest in his short surplice and stole is
followed by the men bearing the bier, all carry lighted torches and
chant the _Miserere_ or the Gradual psalms. Leaving the Ghetto well to
the left he takes the street which passes the famous Roman house of
the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, and crosses in front of the Capitol
and the steps of Ara Coeli. He meets many priests, monks, and friars,
but the numerous _suore_ to be seen in the modern city are conspicuous
by their absence. The nuns, of course, are never seen, the Oblates
occasionally drive in large closed landaus like those in which the
cardinals progress to-day; but new communities of women find it
difficult to obtain authorisation, and a constant supervision, no
longer feasible, checks the mushroom growth of "active" congregations.
Just beyond he hears a bell and guesses, rightly enough, that the
Viaticum is being brought from the neighbouring parish church of San
Marco to some sick or dying parishioner--in a moment he sees the
little familiar procession, the acolytes with incense and bell, the
priest carrying the host enveloped in the humeral veil under the
_ombrellino_, the women and men who were in or near the church at the
time following with lighted candles, and stopping beneath the windows
of the sick man while his Lord visits him--if it were wet a little
dark knot of people under umbrellas would be waiting, and would
accompany the host with candle and umbrella just the same. Is it for
the same sick person, he wonders, that the gala carriage of Duca
Torlonia next passes him carrying the _Bambin Gesu_, the little wooden
painted doll from Ara Coeli. If the person whom it visits is to
live the _Bambino_ will turn red, if he is to die he will turn pale.
Our pedestrian crosses the Forum of Trajan and as he mounts the steps
he encounters a man of the people who tells him as he hurries
breathless along that he is going to fetch Monsignor B., one of the
episcopal canons of Santa Maria Maggiore, to _cresimare_ his baby,
three weeks old, who is dying. He and the mother are bent on their
baby going to paradise with all the glory of the added sacrament. A
baby of three weeks old "confirmed" will sound strange in English
ears. It must be borne in mind therefore that the rite of confirmation
in the English Church is a new rite unlike that in use in any ancient
Christian Communion. In the Roman Church the rite of chrism is the
ancient sacramental rite complementary to baptism, which always
included the imposition by the bishop of the sign of the cross on the
forehead of the newly baptized, "for a type of the spiritual baptism."
As such it is not properly a separate ceremony at all from the baptism
with water. Our friend turns to the left and as he reaches the piazza
before the Quirinal palace he sees the papal _cortege_ approach. The
Pope (it is Pius IX.) is coming--not in his state carriage with the
gilt angels, which we may still see at the papal stables on the way to
the Vatican museum of sculpture or the papal garden--but in the
carriage he uses every day. Every one kneels, and a mother who holds
up her baby for the apostolic blessing secretly "makes the horns" with
her free hand, for Pius IX. is reputed to have the evil eye and to
cast the _jettatura_.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE
The great facade of the Liberian basilica, the first church in the
city to be dedicated to the Madonna. To the right is the Military
Hospital of Sant' Antonio. The house was until 1870 the residence of
the Camaldolese nuns, and here S. Francis of Assisi was received
when he first arrived in Rome. The site is presumed to be that of
the Temple of Diana. The column facing the basilica is one of the
eight Corinthian columns which supported the vault of the basilica
of Constantine. See pages 34, 60, 145, 231, and interleaf, page
252.]
But it is drawing towards the _Ave Maria_, the sunset hour, and it is
rather free and easy even in a monsignore's servant to be abroad after
that late hour. We will therefore leave our pedestrian in the Via del
Quirinale, first noticing with him a group of seminarists on their way
to pay their evening visit at the church of the _Santi Apostoli_; they
raise their hats as they pass the door of the _Sacramentate_, opposite
the palace, where the host is constantly exposed, and then hurry on to
see the Pope and receive his paternal blessing. We, however, will turn
down at the Four Fountains, and follow a priest who mounts a narrow
staircase to the apartment occupied by a canon of the basilica of
_Santa Maria in Trastevere_ in an old granary of Palazzo Barberini,
which has been converted into dwellings for faithful retainers of the
princely house. It contains all that is necessary for his wants--a
chapel where he says his daily mass, the kitchen regions and some
slips of rooms where his food is prepared and eaten in company with
the two orphan relatives who, at his invitation, arrived at his door
hand in hand one winter's evening many years ago, two little girls of
ten and fifteen, who had come alone all the way from a northern town.
They communicate at his daily mass, but their generous guardian, who
sees to their moral training, carefully hides away his copy of the
Scriptures as a perilous work for two young souls. The sisters enjoy
an incredible distinction among their _commari_ and _compari_--their
neighbours and gossips--for in the canon's chapel there is a _corpo di
santo sano_. Besides the chapel he has a bedroom and sitting-room,
communicating--they are decorated with full length Magdalenes grasping
skulls in evident deprecation of their want of apparel, of crucifixes
painted on canvas, and of pictorial compositions consisting of a
crucifix hung with a rosary, flanked by a couple of guttering church
candles and enlivened with a book, a death's head, or an hour glass.
These are his own handiwork, and no intimacy with the works of art in
the eternal city enlighten him as to their relative merits. The priest
enters the sitting-room first, and finds six or seven men, all
priests, on their knees, in the various corners of the room. Presently
the door beyond opens, and a priest comes in and kneels down by a
vacant chair. Another rises enters the bedroom and shuts the door
carefully behind him. Our canon is a favourite confessor among his
brother clergy, and it is the general custom for priests to be
confessed at the houses of the religious or secular clergy they select
as confessors, the rule about the use of the public confessionals in
the churches applying especially to the confessions of women. The men
kneeling in the first room are preparing for their weekly confession
or making their thanksgiving after it.
When the poor canon died, leaving his orphan kinswomen unprovided for,
the _corpo di santo sano_, which might have fetched something, was
taken away at once because it was against ecclesiastical rules for
them to keep it, but the pictures, which could fetch nothing,
continued to gaze on the struggles of the little sisters, reminding
them of the poor canon and also of the fickleness of the public taste
in _articles de virtu_--for during his lifetime these pictures had
received their full meed of respectful admiration.
As our pedestrian enters his own house door, which is covered with
_immagini_ and texts serving as charms--among which S. Anna the mother
of the Madonna is not absent as a house-patron, and the faded rose
brought from the festa of the _Divin Amore_ figures conspicuously--he
may indeed have a vague sense that the _annus Domini_ will soon be too
strong for the life he has just been witnessing, but he will hardly be
disturbed by any speculation as to the elements which have conspired
to form the atmosphere surrounding the first Bishop of Christendom in
this his capital once the capital of the world. He will not think of
the apotheosis of the emperor in ancient Rome, of the orientalism
which crept into Western Christendom through Byzantium, imposing
things which especially here in Rome were alien to its religious
genius; he will scarcely remember that the Pope's temporal sovereignty
added a diadem to his tiara, for he has never distinguished the
temporal from the spiritual arm, or discerned the part which the
former has played in determining the manifestations of the latter.
[Illustration: ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
Erected by the Senate in his honour A.D. 312. Eighteen years later
he retired to Byzantium, leaving the Roman Bishops in virtual
possession of the eternal city. See pages 32, 42, 237.]