I Will Not Follow The Reader With That Kind
Guide Who Will Cheer His Wanderings Through Those Sunless Corridors Of
Death, Where Many Of The Sleepers Still Lie Sealed Within Their Tombs On
Either Hand, And Show Him By The Smoky Taper's Light The Frescos Which
Adorn The Cramped Chapels.
I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance
and ask him if he noticed how the artist
Sometimes seemed not to know
whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance,
putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah.
Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek god as good as
a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be
converted, having a presentiment of the dark and bloody themes the new
religion would give it to deal with.
The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and
he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he
carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may
prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at
the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are
among the cheer-fulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something
sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady
whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and
martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not
know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house
of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where
they suffered death for their faith, under the Passionist church named
for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and
there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will
perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in
the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average
Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling
would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are
incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman
nobles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and
Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the
Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.
The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the
house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch,
but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both,
radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and
justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which
lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us
he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly
acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow
him he said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the
wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all
his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity
before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before
he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him
there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just
too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go
back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it
would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or
plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many
other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from
sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims
lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in
it, joined with other friends in his assassination. The sex has indeed
had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has
been rendered fearless in the assertion of its rights. With poor women
one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the
courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised
charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven
past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he
dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing
transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and
experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.
A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted
to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of
Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a
fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of
their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them,
and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and
distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches
above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church
in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest
churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with
the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced
by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not
spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio's, which is indeed
for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its associations
with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.
Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred
years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid
that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church
where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St.
Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the
sixth century.
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