Another
day, the last day I came, there were companies of the personally
conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the lectures
in several languages, which no more stirred the immense tranquillity
than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy of the temple:
You
were vaguely sensible of the one and of the other like things heard and
seen in a drowse. It was a pleasant vagueness in which all angularities
of feeling were lost, and you were disposed to a tolerance of the things
that had hurt or offended you before. As a contemporary of the edifice,
throughout its growth, you could account for them more and more as of
their periods. Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came,
however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your
presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or
little instructed. If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would
you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the
whole baroque keeping? Possibly this consideration made you go away much
modester than you came. "After all," you may have said, "it is not a
gallery; it is not a museum. It is a house of prayer," and you emerged,
let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the
beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.
VII
CHANCES IN CHURCHES
If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I
should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was
none. Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the instinct of
imperial Rome for ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct
collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in the
innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other. This position
will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I may be driven
in, especially by travellers who have seen the churches I did not see. I
took my chances, they theirs; for nobody can singly see all the churches
in Rome; that would need a syndicate.
If imperial Rome was beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to
imagine the things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be
unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the beauty
of its religious aspiration - that is, if it was the Goths who invented
Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was. Anyway, there is said to
be but one Gothic church in Rome, and this I did not visit, perhaps
because I felt that I must inure myself to the prevalent baroque, or
perhaps from mere perversity. I can merely say in self-defence that, on
the outside, Santa Maria sopra Minerva no more promised an inner beauty
than Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the
power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches
sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in scuplture,
in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures at points in the
roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at others. Marvels of riches
are lavished upon chapels and altars, which again are so burdened with
bronze gilded or silver plated, and precious stones wrought and
unwrought, that the soul, or if not the soul the taste, shrinks dismayed
from them. Execution in default of inspiration has had its way to the
last excess; there is nothing that it has not done to show what it can
do; and all that it has done is a triumph of misguided skill and power.
But it would be a mistake for the spectator to imagine that anything has
been done from the spirit in which he receives it; everything is the
expression of devoted faith in the forms that the art of the time
offered.
In the monstrous marble tableau, say, of "Religion Triumphing Over
Heresy," he may be very sure that the artist was not winking an ironical
eye where he made Faith spurning Schism with her foot look very much
like a lady of imperfect breeding who has lost her temper; he was most
devoutly in earnest, or at least those were so, both cleric and laic,
for whom he wrought his prodigy. We others, pagans or Protestants, had
better understand that the children of the Church, and especially the
poor children, were serious through all the shows that seem to us
preposterous; they had not renounced something for nothing; if they
bowed that very fallible thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for
their reward and could gladly accept whatever symbol of it was offered
them.
No matter how baroque any church was, it could express something of this
sincerity, and in their way the worshippers seemed always simply at home
in it. In San Lorenzo in Lucina, where I went to see the truly sublime
"Crucifixion" by Guido (there is also a bar of St. Lawrence's gridiron
to be seen, but I did not know it at the time) I liked the
unconsciousness of the girl kneeling before the high altar and
provisionally gossiping with the young sacristan before she began her
devotions. She gave her mind to them when he asked me if I wished to see
the Guido, for I could see her lips moving while she shared my
veneration of that most affecting masterpiece; the more genuinely
affecting because it expresses the rapture and not the anguish of the
Passion. I have no doubt she was grateful when the sacristan proposed my
having the electric light turned on it, and when, though that I knew it
would cost me something more, I assented.
They have the electric light now in all the holy places, and notably in
the dungeon where St. Peter was imprisoned, and where the custodian was
so proud of it, as the lastest improvement, and as far more satisfactory
than candles. The shrine of the miraculous Bambino in the Church of Ara
Coeli is also lighted by electricity, which spares no detail of the
child's apparel and appearance.
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