Rome, like the creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually
dismembers itself into new wonders, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St.
Peter's Church, Raphael, &c.
With the passage through the Church of St. Peter the knight began the
fair race through immortality. The Princess let herself be bound by the
tie of art to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten with
edifices than with any other work of art, so did he see from afar with
holy awe the long mountain-chain of art, which again bore upon itself
hills; so did he stand before the plain, around which two enormous
colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues; in the centre
shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain,
and from the lofty steps the proud church of the world, inwardly filled
with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks down
upon the earth. But how enormously, as they drew near, had its columns
and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!
He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses,
kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice,
it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one
remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held
an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness
till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and
its hundred perpetual lamps;--what a stillness! Above them the heaven's
arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an
overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple
became greatest by walking in it; and when they passed round one
column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed
earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time,
filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily
possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant
stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of
it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than
abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdörfer replied:
"The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church
stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the
heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel
anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his
head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments
which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard
said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really
appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all
little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of
the minster,[79] and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its
grasses and villages.
The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.
The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and
cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world,
Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very
earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let
this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church.
They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one!
Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of
the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or
Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new
temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you
have built enough."[80] They stepped in; there reared itself around
them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches
soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music,
a world in the world! And overhead[81] the eye-socket of the light and
of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch
the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood
nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ gods
endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.
Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred
the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that
"youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated
the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man
ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to
strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the
moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, "build anything,
except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended
Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts,
because he never made a good figure, except in the æsthetic hall of
judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we
moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in
practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot
remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of
Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere
than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in
ashes--of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano
turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.
He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Here Sophocles,
there Shakespeare; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more
easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new
countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of
Heaven--not through a hazy horizon--transfigured in her eyes the
beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she took for
granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form.
When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is
contained; not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles; and on Peter's
Church stands Angelo's rotunda!" Just then the lofty cloud all at once,
as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the
ravished sun, like the eye of a Venus, floating through her ancient
heavens,--for she once stood even here,--looked mildly in from the
upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the
porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of
wonder and delight, and said, with low voice: "How transfigured at this
moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth
from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its
reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!" The Princess
looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and
said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"
On the next moonlit evening Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the
Colosseum with its giant-circle might, the first time, stand in fire
before them. The Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son
dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the
Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with
the noble youth his moments,--and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart
and his own common property. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that
an idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it up against
love, and crowds out persons, whereas with woman all ideas easily
become human beings.
They passed over the Forum by the _Via Sacra_ to the Colosseum, whose
lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood
before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades,
one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the
arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the
earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in,
and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of
the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or
highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did.
Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater
of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at
once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of
the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the
foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon,
which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where
the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single
columns and bare arcades,--temples and three palaces had the giant fed
and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out
livingly into the world.
"What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times
about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down
below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the
sun-god. The star of the north[82] glimmers low through the windows,
and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The
Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre,
and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building
prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still
flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must
bring forth a future."
The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming
wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,--the autumnal wind of the
past swept over the stubble,--on this holy eminence he saw the
constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of
Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon
graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if
they were still its kings and judges.
"This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess,
returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one,
a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and
nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable
confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but Nature. His
whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and as it were removed to
a distance,--he looked down after his father and went to find him,--he
looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.