Part 15 (1/2)
Then I heard such a service as did the heart good to hear. It was only vespers--just five psalms, a hymn, and the Magnificat; nothing more.
But the psalms were sung in alternate verses between the choir and the congregation, who knew every word and every note, and sang l.u.s.tily from their hearts' depths, the plain old Gregorian tones with which many of us are so familiar at home. I found the words welling up in my mind: ”The voice of a great mult.i.tude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord G.o.d Omnipotent reigneth.” I was glad there was no one with me as we dispersed, to speak to me. I could not have answered, my heart was too full. But I went back to the Maison Carree, and looked again at it for long, and then realised, in a way I had never realised before, how that the Carpenter of Nazareth had transformed the whole idea of wors.h.i.+p into something of which the world previously had no conception.
To the ordinary English traveller the services in a foreign Roman Catholic church are so unintelligible that I may be excused if I say a word on vespers that may enable him to understand it. Usually--always on week days--two evening services, vespers and compline are said together, or rather one immediately after the other. Each consists of confession and absolution, a short Scriptural lesson, psalms, a canticle, a hymn and collects. The canticle for vespers is the Magnificat; for compline is the Nunc Dimittis.
Now as the two services were practically united, what our Reformers did was to weld them together. They cut out the second confession and absolution and the second batch of psalms, but retained the second lesson and the second canticle. The English even-song is therefore simply the Latin vespers and compline pressed into a single service. The Reformers, by putting a psalm as alternative for each canticle, perhaps intended the English even-song to serve as either vespers (when Magnificat was sung) or as compline (when Nunc Dimittis was sung).
When I was in Rome during the winter, I was very much astonished, one day, as the King of Italy pa.s.sed, to see a whole school of little boys under the direction of three Christian Brothers, strut by with their little noses in the air, and without raising their hats. At the same pension with myself was a young Swiss Benedictine monk, who sat by me at _table d'hote_, and with whom I struck up a warm friends.h.i.+p. I commented to him on what I had seen. ”Oh!” he replied, ”we make a point of never saluting the king. Why,”
he continued, ”only yesterday I was walking down the Corso with Cardinal U----, when we saw the queen's carriage approaching. I asked what was to be done. His eminence replied, 'Keep your hat on, don't notice her.'”
I confess that my English blood boiled up, and for the first and last time I spoke sharply to my friend. I believe I made a certain allusion to an injunction of S. Paul, and told him plainly that I thought such conduct unbecoming in a gentleman and a Christian, and a priest.
On entering France ones sees what devastation the Revolution wrought on the Church, and one compares the condition there with the very light and easy way in which she has been taken out of her temporal throne and seated on the ground in Italy. She has been treated there too easily, so easily that she pouts, and frets, and sulks; whereas in France she has been an Antaeus who rose from the ground stronger than when cast down. In Rome, the Church shuffles along in her old slouching, hands-in-the-pockets, half-asleep, don't-care style, letting every opportunity slip away, neglected by the people, because she neglects them. In France, the Church is tingling with fresh life-blood to her fingers' ends, full of energy, activity, zeal. Why, there is not to be found in Rome, or Florence, or Naples, a church where a tolerable service is to be heard sung. In Rome one gets sick of and angry with the squalling of eunuchs, and longs for a scourge of small cords to drive them out of the temple. No one cares for the Church services in Rome.
No attempt is made to attract the people to them. At Florence the service is like the bleating of a flock of sheep driven into a pen to be shorn, and the old canons who baa are enclosed within gla.s.s against draughts, and to the exclusion of all congregational wors.h.i.+p. But in France, the people who have any religion in them love their services--love them and have made them their own, sing in them and follow them with eager interest. I remember, when I was a youth in France, that few men were seen in church, and the ladies lounged through the service. It is not so now, you see as many men in church as you will in England, and the women are attentive and devout.
The Italian Church must suffer deeper humiliation, and learn to touch her cap to ”the powers that be, ordained of G.o.d,” before the people will rally to her and show her reverence.
On the summit of the hill above the fountain and temple of the Nymphs is a most puzzling building, the _Tourmagne_. It is of Roman construction, a great tower like that of Babel, in stages, the upper stage with semicircular recesses that sustained the external wall, now in part fallen.
No one can tell its purpose. It has clearly been utilised since its first construction by the Romans, by making it an angle tower of some other building, the foundations of which have been quite recently exposed. The tower is octagonal. It resembles the structure of the lighthouse at Ostia, already mentioned as in the Torlonia gallery. But why a lighthouse here? It is true that to the south of Nimes was lagoon and marsh, with islets and strips of dry land scattered about among the tracts of water, all the way to the sea, but one hardly supposes such a lighthouse would have been raised to guide the _utriculares_ on their skin-sustained rafts. Yet for what other purpose it can have been raised it is hard to imagine. It stands on very high ground, and commands a most extensive prospect. It has long been, and is likely to remain, a hard nut for antiquaries to break their teeth upon.
The cathedral of Nimes has been, not so much restored as transformed internally, so as to void it of much interest, but it must have been a curious church at one time. Externally, at the west end, is a most wonderful frieze, a band of rich sculpture representing the story of man from the Creation to the drunkenness of Noah. In one chapel within is an old Christian sarcophagus utilised as an altar, on it our Lord is represented as teacher surrounded by the apostles. S. Paul is a modern church good in proportion, with an admirable central octagonal tower and spire. The only fault to be found with the church is in the details. S.
Baudille is a pretentious Gothic church, with two asparagus shoots as western towers, it has a square east end, with a really marvellously ugly east window. The new church of S. Perpetue is beneath criticism.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Cathedral of Nimes.--Part of west front.]
There are two Roman triumphal arches at Nimes, but neither is remarkable.
In front of one I found a man exhibiting a cage of canaries. He had a little table before the cage on which small cards, each numbered, were set out. Then he sold among the bystanders tickets with corresponding numbers.
There were eighteen numbers, and each card sold for a sou, and the whole const.i.tuted a lottery for a chain and some seals that the fellow dangled before the eyes of the little circle of lookers-on. The lots were taken up after a little persuasion and chaffering. Then he opened the cage door; out hopped a canary that trotted up and down the little table, and finally picked up one of the cards. ”Number nine,” called the proprietor of the canaries. ”Which monsieur is the happy possessor of card number nine?”
A soldier stepped forward, presented his tally, and received the silver watch-chain. Then all those who had been unsuccessful restored their cards, and the same process was repeated, this time among women, for a silver thimble.
Nimes struck me as one of the very brightest, pleasantest towns I have ever visited, and the one in which, if forced to live out of England, I think I could live most happily in. I have said not one word about the museum at Nimes, which is within the Maison Carree, and yet the museum contains some objects deserving of attention. There are two altars with wheels carved on them, both small, the largest only two feet three inches high, and that has on it not the wheel only, but the thunderbolt. These are altars to the Gaulish G.o.d of the sun. The second bears an inscription ”et terrae matri.”
It was dedicated doubtless to the ”sun and to the earth mother,” but the first portion of the legend is lost. In the Avignon Museum is a statue of a Gaulish Jupiter in military costume, with his right hand on the wheel, and with the eagle on his left. [1]
[Footnote 1: Others at Treves, Moulin, and Paris.]
Moreover, in the Nimes museum are some bronze circular ornaments, found in 1883 in the caves of S. Vallon in Ardeche, representing the wheel. On the triumphal arch of Orange are Gaulish warriors with horned helmets, and wheels as crests between the horns. The wheel, as symbol of the sun, was very general everywhere, in the east as well as the west, among the Germans as well as among the Gauls, but among the latter it a.s.sumed a very special importance, and it is due to this fact that in the French cathedrals the west window is a wheel window. At Basle there is a round window in the minster with figures climbing and falling on the spokes, and Fortune sits in the midst. It is a wheel of Fortune. It is the same at Beauvais, at Amiens, and elsewhere. At Chartres is a representation in stained gla.s.s of the Transfiguration; and Christ is exhibited in glory in the midst of an eight-spoked wheel. A curious statue at Luxeuil, now lost, represented a rider protecting a lady whilst his horse tramples on a prostrate foe; his raised hand over the woman is thrust through a six-rayed wheel. On the Meuse a similar peculiarity has been noticed in a fragment of a sculptured figure, it is a hand holding a four-spoked wheel. In the Museum Kircherianum at Rome are bronze six-rayed wheels, the spokes zigzagged like lightnings, found at Forli, others at Modena. All these were symbols of the sun. Now when Constantine professed to have seen his vision, which was in all probability a mock-sun, he thought that the rays he saw formed the Greek initials of Christ, and he therefore ordered these initials, _forming a six-rayed wheel_, to be set up on the standards of his soldiers. The only difference between his ”Labarum” and the symbol of the Gaulish sun-G.o.d was that his upper spoke was looped to form the letter P. No doubt whatever, that his Keltic soldiers hailed the new standard as that of their national G.o.d, and that when they marched against Maxentius and met him at Saxa Rubra, eight miles from Rome, they thought that they, as Gauls, were marching to a second capture of the capital of the world, under the protection of their national G.o.d.
Among men of note that have been a.s.sociated with Nimes is Flechier, born at Pernes in Vaucluse in 1632, who became Bishop of Nimes in 1687. He was the son of a tallow-chandler. From his eloquence he was much regarded as a preacher, but unfortunately his discourses contain very little except well-rounded sentences of well-chosen words. He was a favourite of Louis XIV., who respected his integrity and piety. One day a haughty aristocratic prelate about the Court had the bad taste to sneer at him for his origin.
”Avec votre maniere de penser,” replied Flechier calmly, ”je crois que si vous etiez ne ce que je suis, vous n'eussiez fait, toute votre vie--que de chandelles.”
CHAPTER XVI.
AIGUES MORTES AND MAGUELONNE.
A dead town--The Rhones-morts--Bars--S. Louis and the Crusades--How S.
Louis acquired Aigues Mortes--His ca.n.a.l--The four littoral chains and lagoons--The fortifications--Unique for their date--Original use of battlements--Deserted state of the town--Maguelonne--How reached--History of Maguelonne--Cathedral--The Bishops forge Saracen coins--Second destruction of the place--Inscription on door--Bernard de Treviis--His Romance of Pierre de Provence--Provencal poetry not always immoral--Present state of Maguelonne.