To Them An
Opportunity For A Little Paganism Is Like The Scratching Of A Mouse
To The Princess Who Had Been Born A Cat.
Off they go after it -
more especially Handel - under some decent pretext no doubt, but as
fast, nevertheless, as their art can carry them.
As for Handel, he
had not only a sympathy for paganism, but for the shades and
gradations of paganism. What, for example, can be a completer
contrast than between the polished and refined Roman paganism in
Theodora, {27} the rustic paganism of "Bid the maids the youths
provoke" in Hercules, the magician's or sorcerer's paganism of the
blue furnace in "Chemosh no more," {28} or the Dagon choruses in
Samson - to say nothing of a score of other examples that might be
easily adduced? Yet who can doubt the sincerity and even fervour
of either Milton's or Handel's religious convictions? The attitude
assumed by these men, and by the better class of Romanists, seems
to have become impossible to Protestants since the time of Dr.
Arnold.
I once saw a church dedicated to St. Francis. Outside it, over the
main door, there was a fresco of the saint receiving the stigmata;
his eyes were upturned in a fine ecstasy to the illuminated spot in
the heavens whence the causes of the stigmata were coming. The
church was insured, and the man who had affixed the plate of the
insurance office had put it at the precise spot in the sky to which
St. Francis's eyes were turned, so that the plate appeared to be
the main cause of his ecstasy. Who cared? No one; until a carping
Englishman came to the place, and thought it incumbent upon him to
be scandalised, or to pretend to be so; on this the authorities
were made very uncomfortable, and changed the position of the
plate. Granted that the Englishman was right; granted, in fact,
that we are more logical; this amounts to saying that we are more
rickety, and must walk more supported by cramp-irons. All the
"earnestness," and "intenseness," and "aestheticism," and "culture"
(for they are in the end one) of the present day, are just so many
attempts to conceal weakness.
But to return. The church of St. Mary of the Snow at Campra was
incorporated into the Graglia institution in 1628. There was
originally no connection between the two, and it was not long
before the later church became more popular than the earlier,
insomuch that the work at Graglia was allowed to fall out of
repair. On the death of Velotti the scheme languished, and by and
by, instead of building more chapels, it was decided that it would
be enough to keep in repair those that were already built. These,
as I have said, are the chapels of S. Carlo, and the small ones
which are now seen upon the way up to it, but they are all in a
semi-ruinous state.
Besides the church of St. Mary of the Snow at Campra, there was
another which was an exact copy of the Santa Casa di Loreto, and
where there was a remarkable echo which would repeat a word of ten
syllables when the wind was quiet.
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