She Had Been Sick, And She Had Come Alone, As
Soon As She Could Get Out, To See The Wonders Of The Capuchin Church,
Because She Had Heard So Much Of Them.
We said we hoped she had been
pleased, and she said, "Oh yes, indeed," and then she said, "Well,
good-bye," and gently tilted away, leaving us glad that there could
still be in an old, spoiled world such sweetness and innocence and
easily gratified love of the beautiful.
Taking Rome so easily, so provisionally, while waiting the eventualities
of the colds which mild climates are sure to give their frequenters from
the winterlands, I became aware of a latent anxiety respecting St.
Peter's. I did not feel that the church would really get away without
our meeting, but I felt that it was somehow culpably hazardous in me to
be taking chances with it. As a family, we might never collectively
visit it, and, in fact, we never did; but one day I drove boldly (if
secretly) off alone and renewed my acquaintance with this contemporary
of mine; for, if you have been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you
find that you are coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and
the imperial Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at
least, to that of Pius IX. St. Peter's will not be, by any means, your
oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long standing that
you may not wish to use it with all the frankness which its faults
invite. If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime
colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the
whole world to the church's heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's,
you will not be wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there
where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober
and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed
flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above
the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable
all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we
could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may
very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my
remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an
environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the
time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite
the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged
to take in my rapture. The fact is, that unless you delight in a
hugeness whose bareness no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal,
you do not find the interior of St. Peter's adequate to the exterior. In
the mere article of hugeness, even, it fails through the interposition
of the baldachin midway of the vast nave, and each detail seems to fail
of the office of beauty more lamentably than another.
I had known, I had never forgotten, that St. Peter's was very, very
baroque, but I had not known, I had not remembered how baroque it was.
It is not so badly baroque as the Church of the Jesuits either in Rome
or in Venice, or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is badly
baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture as in the
sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not
be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an
excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however
Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the
taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world,
now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil
in art from its evil life. The saints and the popes are, assthetically,
lamentable enough; but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are
mostly the sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are
inexpressible - some of these creatures ought really to be put out of the
place; but I suppose their friends would say they ought to be left as
typical of the period. In the case of that merciless miscreant, Queen
Christina of Sweden, who has her monument in St. Peter's, there would be
people to say she must have her monument in some place; but, all the
same, remembering Monaldeschi - how he was stabbed to death by her
command, the kinder assassins staying their hands from time to time,
while his confessor went vainly to implore her pardon - it is shocking to
find her tomb in the prime church in Christendom. At first it offends
one to see certain pontiffs with mustaches and imperials and goatees;
but, if one reflects that so they wore them in life, one perceives right
in it; only when one comes to earlier or later popes, bearded in
medieval majority or shaven in the decent modern fashion, one can endure
those others only as part of the prevailing baroque of the church.
Canova was not so Greek or even so classic as one used to think him, but
one hardly has a moment of repose in St. Peter's till one comes to a
monument by him and rests in its quiet. It is tame, it is even weak, if
you like; but compared with the frantic agglomeration of gilt clouds and
sunbursts, and marble and bronze figures in the high-altar, it is
heavenly serene and lovely.
There were not many people in St. Peter's that afternoon, so that I
could give undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement
at one point and grinding the marble smooth with a slow, secular
movement, as if he were part of its age-Ions:
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