TWO CURIOUS HOUSES
II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA’S HOUSE
“Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
visions.”
Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to
Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining
influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its
main secret—the hidden source from which the beauty and strength of a
nature, so persistently fresh in the midst of a somewhat jaded world,
might be derived. But Marius had never yet seen these friends; and it
was almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last lifted,
and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet’s villa at
Tusculum, he entered another curious house.
“The house in which she lives,” says that mystical German writer quoted
once before, “is for the orderly soul, which does not live on blindly
before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences, building and
adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself, only an
expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy of
Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the soul. For such an
orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities
establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways,
the lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may
seem incorporate with it—until at last, in the entire expressiveness of
what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between outward
and inward, no longer any distinction at all; and the light which
creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon the
wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular window, become to
her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of
apprehension and door-ways to things beyond—the germ or rudiment of
certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a
matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities of spirit and
sense.”
So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think, together
with that bodily “tent” or “tabernacle,” only one of many vestures for
the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on
the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they
borrowed what momentary value or significance they had.
The two friends were returning to Rome from a visit to a country-house,
where again a mixed company of guests had been assembled; Marius, for
his part, a little weary of gossip, and those sparks of ill-tempered
rivalry, which would seem sometimes to be the only sort of fire the
intercourse of people in general society can strike out of them. A mere
reaction upon this, as they started in the clear morning, made their
companionship, at least for one of them, hardly less tranquillising
than the solitude he so much valued. Something in the south-west wind,
combining with their own intention, favoured increasingly, as the hours
wore on, a serenity like that Marius had felt once before in journeying
over the great plain towards Tibur—a serenity that was to-day brotherly
amity also, and seemed to draw into its own charmed circle whatever was
then present to eye or ear, while they talked or were silent together,
and all petty irritations, and the like, shrank out of existence, or
kept certainly beyond its limits. The natural fatigue of the long
journey overcame them quite suddenly at last, when they were still
about two miles distant from Rome. The seemingly endless line of tombs
and cypresses had been visible for hours against the sky towards the
west; and it was just where a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into
the Appian, that Cornelius halted at a doorway in a long, low wall—the
outer wall of some villa courtyard, it might be supposed— as if at
liberty to enter, and rest there awhile. He held the door open for his
companion to enter also, if he would; with an expression, as he lifted
the latch, which seemed to ask Marius, apparently shrinking from a
possible intrusion: “Would you like to see it?” Was he willing to look
upon that, the seeing of which might define—yes! define the critical
turning-point in his days?
The little doorway in this long, low wall admitted them, in fact, into
the court or garden of a villa, disposed in one of those abrupt natural
hollows, which give its character to the country in this place; the
house itself, with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of
which surprised Marius as he entered, being thus wholly concealed from
passengers along the road. All around, in those well-ordered precincts,
were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste—a taste, indeed,
chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it
had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older
art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour
and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer
intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the
ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance—being indeed the
way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man,
perhaps with his soul—conceiving the new organism by no sudden and
abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon
elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times.
The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns,
the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such
juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave
thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, æsthetically, very
seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their
seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above
the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset. And from
the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it
would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to
bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian’s early essays
towards a new world of poetic sound. It was the expression not
altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness—the blithe
self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing
experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on this
bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.
His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of
places,—above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they might
have,—was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that
peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion
all around him, passed into the house. That intelligent seriousness
about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who
lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself,
accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days
at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed
congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision,
into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is in proportion to
what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul. As he
passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant
thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their
children—of all the various affections of family life under its most
natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some
sublime new type of it, into large controlling passions. There reigned
throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way
of making ready for some gracious spousals. The place itself was like a
bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the
abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he
received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein
it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at
first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still
with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he
forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his
companion.
An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here and there with
a venerable olive-tree—a picture in pensive shade and fiery blossom, as
transparent, under that afternoon light, as the old miniature-painters’
work on the walls of the chambers within—was bounded towards the west
by a low, grass-grown hill. A narrow opening cut in its steep side,
like a solid blackness there, admitted Marius and his gleaming leader
into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither more nor less in fact than the
family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this residence belonged,
brought thus, after an arrangement then becoming not unusual, into
immediate connexion with the abode of the living, in bold assertion of
that instinct of family life, which the sanction of the Holy Family
was, hereafter, more and more to reinforce. Here, in truth, was the
centre of the peculiar religious expressiveness, of the sanctity, of
the entire scene. That “any person may, at his own election, constitute
the place which belongs to him a religious place, by the carrying of
his dead into it”:—had been a maxim of old Roman law, which it was
reserved for the early Christian societies, like that established here
by the piety of a wealthy Roman matron, to realise in all its
consequences. Yet this was certainly unlike any cemetery Marius had
ever before seen; most obviously in this, that these people had
returned to the older fashion of disposing of their dead by burial
instead of burning. Originally a family sepulchre, it was growing to a
vast necropolis, a whole township of the deceased, by means of some
free expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest natural
limits. That air of venerable beauty which characterised the house and
its precincts above, was maintained also here. It was certainly with a
great outlay of labour that these long, apparently endless, yet
elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so rapidly, with their
layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut, on either side the
path-way, in the porous tufa, through which all the moisture filters
downwards, leaving the parts above dry and wholesome. All alike were
carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness at command; some
with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched by
fair inscriptions: marble taken, in some cases, from older pagan
tombs—the inscription sometimes a palimpsest, the new epitaph being
woven into the faded letters of an earlier one.
As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the
worship or commemoration of the departed was disposed around—incense,
lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved to the
utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a
volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt-out fires. Would they ever kindle
again?—possess, transform, the place?—Turning to an ashen pallor where,
at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a hard beam of
clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon row within,
leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time could move
along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed to shut one in
into the great company of the dead. Only the long straight pathway lay
before him; opening, however, here and there, into a small chamber,
around a broad, table-like coffin or “altar-tomb,” adorned even more
profusely than the rest as if for some anniversary observance. Clearly,
these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius
himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling
of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no
irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and
irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing
to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in
him a preference for that other mode of settlement to the last sleep,
as having something about it more home-like and hopeful, at least in
outward seeming. But whence the strange confidence that these “handfuls
of white dust” would hereafter recompose themselves once more into
exulting human creatures? By what heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew
from above, such as was certainly never again to reach the dead
violets?— Januarius, Agapetus, Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you,
the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many,
scratched, like a passing sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar
that had closed up the prison-door. All critical estimate of this bold
hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set
aside, here at least, carried further than ever before, was that pious,
systematic commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal
to forget or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius
as the central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.
The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty
theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of infants
not a span long, on the floor of hell. Every visitor to the Catacombs
must have observed, in a very different theological connexion, the
numerous children’s graves there—beds of infants, but a span long
indeed, lowly “prisoners of hope,” on these sacred floors. It was with
great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them, decked in some
instances with the favourite toys of their tiny occupants—toy-soldiers,
little chariot-wheels, the entire paraphernalia of a baby-house; and
when he saw afterwards the living children, who sang and were busy
above—sang their psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum!—their very faces caught
for him a sort of quaint unreality from the memory of those others, the
children of the Catacombs, but a little way below them.
Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and
sometimes even at these children’s graves, were the signs of violent
death or “martyrdom,”—proofs that some “had loved not their lives unto
the death”—in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red
flowers for their heavenly “birthday.” About one sepulchre in
particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what,
by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia—a birthday, the
peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered. And it was
with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order
of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics,
snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years
before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the
whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in
its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so
tragic for the “Christian superstition.” Something of them he had heard
indeed already. They had seemed to him but one savagery the more,
savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.
And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards
to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering,
in the remote background. Yes! the interest, the expression, of the
entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of some
priceless incense. Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching
everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all
this visible mortality, death’s very self—Ah! lovelier than any fable
of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of
fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
Peace! Pax tecum!—the word, the thought—was put forth everywhere, with
images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world which
had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the various
consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of regeneration, of
escape from the grave—Hercules wrestling with Death for possession of
Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep,
the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulders. Yet these
imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed but a slight
contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope there—a kind of
heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart, as with the sense,
again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to deepen the longer one
lingered through these strange and awful passages. A figure, partly
pagan in character, yet most frequently repeated of all these visible
parables—the figure of one just escaped from the sea, still clinging as
for life to the shore in surprised joy, together with the inscription
beneath it, seemed best to express the prevailing sentiment of the
place. And it was just as he had puzzled out this inscription—
I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!
—that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself
emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark
places “quieted by hope,” into the daylight.
They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession
of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a
great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond. The
orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with
twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible,
was still afloat in crimson splendour. The colour of all earthly things
seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great richness
lingering in their shadows. At that moment the voice of the singers, a
“voice of joy and health,” concentrated itself with solemn antistrophic
movement, into an evening, or “candle” hymn.
“Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured,
Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:—
Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue.”—
It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with
the stars shining in the midst of it. Half above, half below the level
white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the mistress
of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a few years
before, by Cecilius “Confessor and Saint.” With a certain antique
severity in the gathering of the long mantle, and with coif or veil
folded decorously below the chin, “gray within gray,” to the mind of
Marius her temperate beauty brought reminiscences of the serious and
virile character of the best female statuary of Greece. Quite foreign,
however, to any Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care,
with which she carried a little child at rest in her arms. Another, a
year or two older, walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her
girdle. She paused for a moment with a greeting for Cornelius.
That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the
afternoon’s strange experiences. A few minutes later, passing forward
on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream. The
house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he had
lately visited at Tusculum. And what a contrast was presented by the
former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate
cleanness, of responsive affection!—all alike determined by that
transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the
old puzzle of life had found its solution. In truth, one of his most
characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for
escape—for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces
of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most pleasantly—for a
lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the
necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or
open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a sick man’s
longing for northern coolness, and the whispering willow-trees, amid
the breathless evergreen forests of the south. To some such effect had
this visit occurred to him, and through so slight an accident. Rome and
Roman life, just then, were come to seem like some stifling forest of
bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the
generations of living trees, yet with roots in a deep, down-trodden
soil of poignant human susceptibilities. In the midst of its
suffocation, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this
vision of the church in Cecilia’s house, as never before. It was still,
indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his temperament, to the
eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those experiences appealed—the
peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed to sing, the
virginal beauty of the mother and her children. But, in his case, what
was thus visible constituted a moral or spiritual influence, of a
somewhat exigent and controlling character, added anew to life, a new
element therein, with which, consistently with his own chosen maxim, he
must make terms.
The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy
which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or
evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in
which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what
was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul
thereto. This had carried him along in a continuous communion with
ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own
being, or in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius.
Surely, in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first
time to-day—in this strange family, like “a garden enclosed”—was the
fulfilment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that
half-understood friend, which of late years had been his protection so
often amid the perplexities of life. Here, it might be, was, if not the
cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows—of that
constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but
which had made his life certainly like one long “disease of the
spirit.” Merciful intention made itself known remedially here, in the
mere contact of the air, like a soft touch upon aching flesh. On the
other hand, he was aware that new responsibilities also might be
awakened—new and untried responsibilities—a demand for something from
him in return. Might this new vision, like the malignant beauty of
pagan Medusa, be exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but
itself? At least he suspected that, after the beholding of it, he could
never again be altogether as he had been before.
NOTES
93. +Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystic writer, 1688-1772. Return.