there is the closed gate of the garden. It is very hard to get admission
to it now, for the Pope himself is often there when the weather is fine.
In the Italian manner of gardening, the grounds are well laid out, and
produce the effect of being much larger than they really are. They are
not, perhaps, very remarkable, and Leo the Thirteenth must sometimes
long for the hills of Carpineto and the freer air of the mountains, as
he drives round and round in the narrow limits of his small domain, or
walks a little under the shade of the ilex trees, conversing with his
gardener or his architect. Yet those who love Italy love its
old-fashioned gardens, the shady walks, the deep box-hedges, the stiff
little summer-houses, the fragments of old statues at the corners, and
even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine
water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the
unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical
jesting of the last century.
When all is seen, the tourist gets into his cab and drives down the
empty paved way by the wall of the library, along the basilica, and out
once more to the great square before the church. Or, if he be too strong
to be tired, he will get out at the steps and go in for a few minutes to
breathe the quiet air before going home, to get the impression of unity,
after the impressions of variety which he has received in the Vatican,
and to take away with him something of the peace which fills the
cathedral of Christendom.
[Illustration]
SAINT PETER'S
We have an involuntary reverence for all witnesses of history, be they
animate or inanimate, men, animals, or stones. The desire to leave a
work behind is in every man and man-child, from the strong leader who
plants his fame in a nation's marrow, and teaches unborn generations to
call him glorious, to the boy who carves his initials upon his desk at
school. Few women have it. Perhaps the wish to be remembered is what
fills that one ounce or so of matter by which modern statisticians
assert that the average man's brain is heavier than the average woman's.
The wish in ourselves makes us respect the satisfaction of it which the
few obtain. Probably few men have not secretly longed to see their names
set up for ages, like the 'Paulus V. Borghesius' over the middle of the
portico of Saint Peter's, high above the entrance to the most vast
monument of human hands in existence. Modesty commands the respect of a
few, but it is open success that appeals to almost all mankind. Pasquin
laughed:--
'Angulus est Petri, Pauli frons tota. Quid inde?
Non Petri, Paulo stat fabricata domus.'
Which means:--
'The corner is Peter's, but the whole front Paul's.
Not being Peter's, the house is built for Paul.'
The thing itself, the central cathedral of Christendom, is so enormous
that many who gaze on it for the first time do not even notice that
hugely lettered papal name. The building is so far beyond any familiar
proportions that at first sight all details are lost upon its broad
front. The mind and judgment are dazed and staggered. The earth should
not be able to bear such weight upon its crust without cracking and
bending like an overloaded table. On each side the colonnades run
curving out like giant arms, always open to receive the nations that go
up there to worship. The dome broods over all, like a giant's head
motionless in meditation. The vastness of the structure takes hold of a
man as he issues from the street by which he has come from Sant' Angelo.
In the open space, in the square and in the ellipse between the
colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up
in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some
special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred
persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of
surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness
below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together,
the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves
unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet
high produces a monstrous effect upon the mind. Set down in words, a
description of it conveys no clear conception; seen for the first time,
the impression produced by it cannot be put into language. It is
something like a shock to the intelligence, perhaps, and not altogether
a pleasant one. Carried beyond the limits of a mere mistake,
exaggeration becomes caricature; but when it is magnified beyond
humanity's common measures, it may acquire an element approaching to
terror. The awe-striking giants of mythology were but magnified men. The
first sight of Saint Peter's affects one as though, in the everyday
streets, walking among one's fellows, one should meet with a man forty
feet high.
Involuntarily we conceive that Saint Peter's has always stood where it
stands, and it becomes at once, in our imaginations, the witness of much
which it really never saw. Its calm seems meant to outlast history; one
thinks that, while the Republic built Rome, and Augustus adorned it, and
Nero burned it on the other side of the Tiber, the cathedral of the
world was here, looking on across the yellow water, conscious of its own
eternity, and solemnly indifferent to the ventures and adventures of
mankind.
It is hard to reduce the great building in imagination to the little
basilica built by Constantine the sentimentalist, on the site of Nero's
circus; built by some other man perhaps, for no one knows surely; but a
little church, at best, compared with many of those which Saint Peter's
dwarfs to insignificance now. To remind men of him the effigy of that
same Constantine sits on a marble charger there, on the left, beneath
the portico, behind the great iron gate, with head thrown back, and
lifted hand, and marble eyes gazing ever on the Cross. Some say that he
really embraced Christianity only when dying. The names of the churches
founded by him in Constantinople are all sentimentally ambiguous, from
Sophia, 'wisdom,' to Anastasia, 'resurrection,' or revival, and hence
'spring.' It is strange that the places of worship built by him in Rome,
if they were really his work, should bear such exceedingly definite
designations and direct dedications as Saint Peter's, Saint John's,
Saint Paul's and the Church of the Holy Cross. At all events, whether he
believed much or little, Christianity owes him much, and romance is
indebted to him for almost as much more. But for Constantine there might
have been no Charlemagne, no Holy Roman Empire.
In old times criminals of low degree used to be executed on the
Esquiline, and were buried there, unburned, unless their bodies were
left to wither upon the cross in wind and sun, as generally happened.
The place was the hideous feeding ground of wild dogs and carrion birds,
and witches went there by night to perform their horrid rites. It was
there that Canidia and her companion buried a living boy up to the neck
that they might make philters of his vitals. Everyone must remember the
end of Horace's imprecation:--
"... insepulta membra different lupi,
Et Esquilinae alites."
Then came Maecenas and redeemed all that land; turned it into a garden,
and beautified it; uprooted the mouldering crosses, whereon still hung
the bones of dead slaves, and set out trees in their stead; piled thirty
feet of clean earth upon the shallow graves of executed murderers and of
generations of thieves, and planted shrubbery and flowers, and made
walks and paths and shady places.
Therefore it happened that the southern spur of the Janiculum became
after that time a place of execution and cruel death. The city had never
grown much on that side of the Tiber,--that is to say, on the right
bank,--and the southern end of the long hill was a wilderness of sand
and brushwood.
[Illustration: MAMERTINE PRISON]
In the deep Mamertine prison, behind the Tabulary of the Forum, it was
customary to put to death only political misdoers, and their bodies were
then thrown down the Gemonian steps. 'Vixerunt,' said Cicero, grimly,
when Catiline's fellow conspirators lay there dead; and perhaps the
sword that was to fall upon his own neck was even then forged. The
prison is still intact. The blood of Vercingetorix and of Sejanus is on
the rocky floor. Men say that Saint Peter was imprisoned here. But
because he was not of high degree Nero's executioners led him out across
the Forum and over the Sublician bridge, up to the heights of Janiculum.
He was then very old and weak, so that he could not carry his cross, as
condemned men were made to do. When they had climbed more than half-way
up the height, seeing that he could not walk much farther, they
crucified him. He said that he was not worthy to suffer as the Lord had
suffered, and begged them to plant his cross with the head downward in
the deep yellow sand. The executioners did so. The Christians who had
followed were not many, and they stood apart weeping.
When he was dead, after much torment, and the sentinel soldier had gone
away, they took the holy body, and carried it along the hillside, and
buried it at night close against the long wall of Nero's circus, on the
north side, near the place where they buried the martyrs killed daily by
Nero's wild beasts and in other cruel ways. They marked the spot, and
went there often to pray. Lately certain learned men have said that he
was crucified in the circus itself, but the evidence is slight compared
with the undoubted weight of a very ancient tradition, and turns upon
the translation of a single word.
Within two years Nero fell and perished miserably, scarcely able to take
his own life to escape being beaten to death in the Forum. In a little
more than a year there were four emperors in Rome; Galba, Otho and
Vitellius followed one another quickly; then came Vespasian, and then
Titus, with his wars in Palestine, and then Domitian. At last, nearly
thirty years after the apostle had died on the Janiculum, there was a
bishop called Anacletus, who had been ordained priest by Saint Peter
himself. The times being quieter then, this Anacletus built a little
oratory, a very small chapel, in which three or four persons could kneel
and pray over the grave. And that was the beginning of Saint Peter's
Church. But Anacletus died a martyr too, and the bishops after him all
perished in the same way up to Eutichianus, whose name means something
like 'the fortunate one' in barbarous Greek-Latin, and who was indeed
fortunate, for he died a natural death. But in the mean time certain
Greeks had tried to steal the holy body, so that the Roman Christians
carried it away for nineteen months to the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian,
after which they brought it back again and laid it in its place. And
again after that, when the new circus was built by Elagabalus, they took
it once more to the same catacombs, where it remained in safety for a
long time.
Now came Constantine, in love with religion and inclined to think
Christianity best, and made a famous edict in Milan, and it is said that
he laid the deep foundations of the old Church of Saint Peter's, which
afterward stood more than eleven hundred years. He built it over the
little oratory of Anacletus, whose chapel stood where the saint's body
had lain, under the nearest left-hand pillar of the canopy that covers
the high altar, as you go up from the door. Constantine's church was
founded, on the south side, within the lines of Nero's circus, outside
of it on the north side, and parallel with its length. Most churches are
built with the apse to the east, but Constantine's, like the present
basilica, looked west, because from time immemorial the bishop of Rome,
when consecrating, stood on the farther side of the altar from the
people, facing them over it. And the church was consecrated by Pope
Sylvester the First, in the year 326.
Constantine built his church as a memorial and not as a tomb, because at
that time Saint Peter's body lay in the catacombs, where it had been
taken in the year 219, under Elagabalus. But at last, in the days of
Honorius, disestablisher of heathen worship, the body was brought back
for the last time, with great concourse and ceremony, and laid where it
or its dust still lies, in a brazen sarcophagus.
Then came Alaric and the Vandals and the Goths. But they respected the
church and the Saint's body, though they respected Rome very little. And
Odoacer extinguished the flickering light of the Western Empire, and
Dietrich of Bern, as the Goths called Theodoric of Verona, founded the
Gothic kingdom, and left his name in the Nibelungenlied and elsewhere.
At last arose Charles, who was called the 'Great' first on account of
his size, and afterwards on account of his conquests, which exceeded
those of Julius Caesar in extent; and this Charlemagne came to Rome, and
marched up into the Church of Constantine, and bowed his enormous height
for Leo the Third to set upon it the crown of the new empire, which was
ever afterwards called the Holy Roman Empire, until Napoleon wiped out
its name in Vienna, having girt on Charlemagne's sword, and founded an
empire of his own, which lasted a dozen years instead of a thousand.
So the ages slipped along till the church was in bad repair and in
danger of falling, when Nicholas the Fifth was Pope, in 1450. He called
Alberti and Rossellini, who made the first plan; but it was the great
Julius the Second who laid the first stone of the present basilica,
according to Bramante's plan, under the northeast pillar of the dome,
where the statue of Saint Veronica now stands. The plan was changed many
times, and it was not until 1626, on the thirteen hundredth anniversary
of Saint Sylvester's consecration, that Urban the Eighth consecrated
what we now call the Church of Saint Peter.
We who have known Saint Peter's since the old days cannot go in under
the portico without recalling vividly the splendid pageants we have seen
pass in and out by the same gate. Even before reaching it we glance up
from the vast square to the high balcony, remembering how from there
Pius the Ninth used to chant out the Pontifical benediction to the city
and the world, while in the silence below one could hear the breathing
of a hundred thousand human beings.
[Illustration: PANORAMA
From the Orti Farnesiani]
That is all in ghostland now, and will soon be beyond the reach of
memory. In the coachhouses behind the Vatican, the old state coaches are
mouldering; and the Pope, in his great sedia gestatoria, the bearers,
the fan-men, the princes, the cardinals, the guards and the people will
not in our time be again seen together under the Roman sky.
Old-fashioned persons sigh for the pageantry of those days when they go
up the steps into the church.
The heavy leathern curtain falls by its own weight, and the air is
suddenly changed. A hushed, half-rhythmic sound, as of a world breathing
in its sleep, makes the silence alive. The light is not dim or
ineffectual, but very soft and high, and it is as rich as floating gold
dust in the far distance, and in the apse, an eighth of a mile from the
door. There is a blue and hazy atmospheric distance, as painters call
it, up in the lantern of the cupola, a twelfth of a mile above the
pavement.
It is all very big. The longest ship that crosses the ocean could lie in
the nave between the door and the apse, and her masts from deck to truck
would scarcely top the canopy of the high altar, which looks so small
under the super-possible vastness of the immense dome. We unconsciously
measure dwellings made with hands by our bodily stature. But there is a
limit to that. No man standing for the first time upon the pavement of
Saint Peter's can make even a wide guess at the size of what he sees
unless he knows the dimensions of some one object.
Close to Filarete's central bronze door a round disk of porphyry is
sunk in the pavement. That is the spot where the emperors of the Holy
Roman Empire were crowned in the old church; Charlemagne, Frederick
Barbarossa and many others received the crown, the Chrism and the
blessing here, before Constantine's ancient basilica was torn down lest
it should fall of itself. For he did not build as Titus built--if,
indeed, the old church was built by him at all.
A man may well cast detail of history to the winds and let his mind
stand free to the tremendous traditions of the place, since so much of
them is truth beyond all question. Standing where Charles the Great was
crowned eleven hundred years ago, he stands not a hundred yards from the
grave where the Chief Apostle was first buried. There he has lain now
for fifteen hundred years, since the 'religion of the fathers' was
'disestablished,' as we should say, by Honorius, and since the Popes
became Pontifices Maximi of the new faith. This was the place of Nero's
circus long before the Colosseum was dreamed of, and the foundations of
Christendom's cathedral are laid in earth wet with blood of many
thousand martyrs. During two hundred and fifty years every bishop of
Rome died a martyr, to the number of thirty consecutive Popes. It is
really and truly holy ground, and it is meet that the air, once rent by
the death cries of Christ's innocent folk, should be enclosed in the
world's most sacred place, and be ever musical with holy song, and
sweet with incense. It needs fifty thousand persons to fill the nave
and transepts in Saint Peter's. It is known that at least that number
have been present in the church several times within modern memory; but
it is thought that the building would hold eighty thousand--as many as
could be seated on the tiers in the Colosseum. Such a concourse was
there at the opening of the Oecumenical Council in December, 1869, and
at the jubilees celebrated by Leo the Thirteenth; and on all those
occasions there was plenty of room in the aisles, besides the broad
spaces which were required for the functions themselves.
To feel one's smallness and realize it, one need only go and stand
beside the marble cherubs that support the holy-water basins against the
first pillar. They look small, if not graceful; but they are of heroic
size, and the bowls are as big as baths. Everything in the place is
vast; all the statues are colossal, all the pictures enormous; the
smallest detail of the ornamentation would dwarf any other building in
the world, and anywhere else even the chapels would be churches. The eye
strains at everything, and at first the mind is shocked out of its power
of comparison.
But the strangest, most extravagant, most incomprehensible, most
disturbing sight of all is to be seen from the upper gallery in the
cupola looking down to the church below. Hanging in mid-air, with
nothing under one's feet, one sees the church projected in perspective
within a huge circle. It is as though one saw it upside down and inside
out. Few men could bear to stand there without that bit of iron railing
between them and the hideous fall; and the inevitable slight dizziness
which the strongest head feels may make one doubt for a moment whether
what is really the floor below may not be in reality a ceiling above,
and whether one's sense of gravitation be not inverted in an
extraordinary dream. At that distance human beings look no bigger than
flies, and the canopy of the high altar might be an ordinary table.
And thence, climbing up between the double domes, one may emerge from
the almost terrible perspective to the open air, and suddenly see all
Rome at one's feet, and all the Roman mountains stretched out to south
and east, in perfect grace of restful outline, shoulder to shoulder,
like shadowy women lying side by side and holding hands.
And the broken symmetry of the streets and squares ranges below, cut by
the winding ribbon of the yellow Tiber; to the right the low Aventine,
with the dark cypresses of the Protestant cemetery beyond, and the
Palatine, crested with trees and ruins; the Pincian on the left, with
its high gardens, and the mass of foliage of the Villa Medici behind it;
the lofty tower of the Capitol in the midst of the city; and the sun
clasping all to its heart of gold, the new and the old alike, past and
present, youth, age and decay,--generous as only the sun can be in this
sordid and miserly world, where bread is but another name for blood, and
a rood of growing corn means a pound of human flesh. The sun is the only
good thing in nature that always gives itself to man for nothing but the
mere trouble of sitting in the sunshine; and Rome without sunshine is a
very grim and gloomy town today.
It is worth the effort of climbing so high. Four hundred feet in the
air, you look down on what ruled half the world by force for ages, and
on what rules the other half today by faith--the greatest centre of
conquest and of discord and of religion which the world has ever seen. A
thousand volumes have been written about it by a thousand wise men. A
word will tell what it has been--the heart of the world. Hither was
drawn the world's blood by all the roads that lead to Rome, and hence it
was forced out again along the mighty arteries of the Caesars'
marches--to redden the world with the Roman name. Blood, blood and more
blood,--that was the history of old Rome,--the blood of brothers, the
blood of foes, the blood of martyrs without end. It flowed and ebbed in
varying tide at the will of the just and the unjust, but there was
always more to shed, and there were always more hands to shed it. And so
it may be again hereafter; for the name of Rome has a heart-stirring
ring, and there has always been as much blood spilled for the names of
things as for the things themselves.
It is wonderful to stand there and realize what every foot means,
beneath that narrow standing room on the gallery outside the lantern,
counting from the top downward as one counts the years of certain trees
by the branches. For every division there is a pope and an architect:
Sixtus the Fifth and Giacomo della Porta, Paul the Third and
Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi and Leo the Tenth, Julius the Second
and Bramante, Nicholas the Fifth and Alberti. Then the old church of
Constantine, and then the little oratory built over Saint Peter's grave
by Saint Anacletus, the third or, according to some, the fourth bishop
of Rome; then, even before that, Nero's circus, which was either
altogether destroyed or had gone to ruins before Anacletus built his
chapel.
And far below all are buried the great of the earth, deep down in the
crypt. There lies the chief Apostle, and there lie many martyred bishops
side by side; men who came from far lands to die the holy death in
Rome,--from Athens, from Bethlehem, from Syria, from Africa. There lie
the last of the Stuarts, with their pitiful kingly names, James the
Third, Charles the Third, and Henry the Ninth; the Emperor Otho the
Second has lain there a thousand years; Pope Boniface the Eighth of the
Caetani, whom Sciarra Colonna took prisoner at Anagni, is there, and
Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander the Sixth, lay there awhile, and Agnes
Colonna, and Queen Christina of Sweden, and the Great Countess, and
many more besides, both good and bad--even to Catharine Cornaro, Queen
of Cyprus, of romantic memory. In the high clear air above, it chills
one to think of the death silence down there in the crypt; but when you
enter the church again after the long descent, and feel once more the
quick change of atmosphere by which a blind man could tell that he was
in Saint Peter's, you feel also the spell of the place and its ancient
enchantment; you do not regret the high view you left above, and the
dead under your feet seem all at once near and friendly.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SAINT PETER'S]