Part 12 (1/2)

But if they were unlettered and superst.i.tious were the people in those days better than now? The comparisons we sometimes hear urged are not really fair for two reasons. There is to be found in Rome to-day among the lower and the half educated cla.s.ses all that want of moral equilibrium which a revolution of ideas brings with it. Moral Italy has yet to be made, as the moral unity of Italy is also as yet only in the making. Before 1870, on the other hand, those who were faithful to the standard then put before them, were faithful to what was never better than a poor and low ideal of conduct, sentiment, and religious duty. The papal standard required no refinement of feeling, no education of the conscience: no one was scandalised that a shop should display the barbarous notice ”_Qui si castrono per la cappella papale_,” or that the popular story ran that when Guido Reni was painting his picture of the Crucifixion before a living model attached to a cross, he killed him at the last moment in his frenzy to see and seize the death struggle, and fled the city; but that the holy father had absolved him because, as you who go may see, it is a _capo d'opera_. And the poor man killed to make a fine picture of Him who endured death to teach us pity for each other? _Ebbene, poveretto_....

The pope is like Nemesis, like the blind forces of nature, like an avalanche, a falling mountain, or an earthquake--not a moral force, but a weight of authority. As you can see for yourself if you go to San Lorenzo in Lucina the work is a _capo d'opera_ and the pope knows better than you. Moral judgment is silent before the weight of authority.

My narrator, who only wished to magnify a great picture, not to raise a moral problem, always carried with him a paper blest by the pope, and of extraordinary efficacy, that is it was Spanish and was covered with writing, every corner had something pious in it, and no one who carried it could die unabsolved. The proof was set forth in the blest paper itself, for one man _did_ die unabsolved, they cut off his head in fact; but the head was not to be brow-beaten, it simply went off to the nearest town--and in these cases, as the witty Marquise du Deffand said to Gibbon, _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_--and found a priest (what priest ever shows himself the least _deroute_ in such circ.u.mstances?) who at once confessed the head, and there the matter ended.

Rome before 1870 was not even externally what we see it now. An old world city of tall palaces, the windows in the lower story grated, of monasteries and churches, of ruins in unconscious beauty, of fountains of waters, of cabbage gardens and _orti_, of orange and lemon gardens which at every turn surprised and delighted the eye. The main streets straight as Roman roads, the piazzas, in contrast to these, full of sun, intolerable from May onwards at noonday. A city of narrow squalid streets huddled together, in which the domesticities are carried on unrebuked and unabashed--in the poorer quarters every third house appeared to be a washerwoman's, the linen hung across the road on lines stretched from window to window. And everywhere an unpromising door, an open gate, may reveal a little picture, a cool garden and fountain, orange and lemon trees, a bend of the river, a view of the Janiculum or the Aventine. A Roman smell pervading everything and sufficiently characteristic to make you sure, if you were suddenly set down in any part of the town, that you were in Rome: and at night another smell, the smell of the ages, unwholesome, penetrating, coming up from the soil, or the freshly turned earth, and making one shut the windows hastily on the loveliest of moonlit evenings. A wealth of street cries, varying with the season, and the nocturnal serenades, a.s.sist that atmosphere of noise for noise' sake and movement which are essential to the Italian, the noise of the shabby two-horsed carriages grinding along on the paved streets and driven by the bad Roman drivers with a continual cracking of the whip and a constant application of the squeaking break, of wine carts lazily winding their way across the streets of the eternal city with that sense of infinite time and s.p.a.ce born of long colloquies with the sun by day and the moon by night across a deserted _campagna_, a score of little brazen bells, perhaps, clanging and jingling at the driver's ear--the constant noise by day and night of a life-loving, loquacious, complaining, gesticulating, rebellious and keenly observant people. A city of priests and dependents of priests, here there are no industries, no great machines are set in motion every day, no factories open with daylight to give employment to hundreds of skilled workmen. Every one who is not a priest works for priests or for the monasteries. The little workshops may be seen in the Borgo of S.

Peter's, in Campo Marzo, in the arches of the theatre of Marcellus--every little doorway contains a cobbler, the _piazze_ which lead to the big churches are crowded on _festas_ with vendors of religious pictures and rosaries. The convents of women make their own habits, but there is a great industry for providing the thousands of priests, the seminarists, canons, monsignori, cardinals and cardinals'

retainers, and Vatican functionaries with ca.s.socks, robes, uniforms, hats, berrettas, stocks and pumps. In the centre of this life, which is ecclesiastical even for the layman, it seems right that when we notice a stir and turn round with the rest, we should see the papal _cortege_ and the Pope round whom all this life revolves; the centre of this city of churches and ca.s.socks, because he is the centre of a far larger world. For Rome is what it is because its sovereign bishop is the cynosure for the eyes of that Christendom which counts the largest number of adherents on the face of the globe, and their Mecca is his city, Rome.

Let us follow a pedestrian who is starting on his afternoon walk, one bright day in April, from the neighbourhood of Santa Maria dell' Orto on the other side of the Tiber, and see Rome before 1870 with his eyes. Like all good Italians he is curious, and he crosses the street when he sees a man with a large oblong box covered with some black waterproof stuff ring at what is apparently a convent door--and the meanest door in Rome may give access to the scene of busiest monastic life. The door is opened by the convent porteress, and when the lid is removed our friend sees the _ostie_, the hosts for the use of the convent, which are brought round every week or every fortnight to the monasteries and churches, a hundred here, twenty there, according to the need. As he pa.s.ses the convent of Santa Maria in Capella he gets a glimpse of the beautiful cool cloister garden with its lemon trees and sees the _cornette_ of the ”Daughter of France” whose application for permission to remain and work on French soil was immediately granted at a time when so many companies of priests monks and friars applied in vain. While crossing the river by the island of the Tiber, he meets a procession from the church hard by with its Franciscan friars who walk next after the confraternity of the quarter in their well-known red ”sacks” or gowns; the priest in his short surplice and stole is followed by the men bearing the bier, all carry lighted torches and chant the _Miserere_ or the Gradual psalms. Leaving the Ghetto well to the left he takes the street which pa.s.ses the famous Roman house of the Oblates of Tor de' Specchi, and crosses in front of the Capitol and the steps of Ara Coeli. He meets many priests, monks, and friars, but the numerous _suore_ to be seen in the modern city are conspicuous by their absence. The nuns, of course, are never seen, the Oblates occasionally drive in large closed landaus like those in which the cardinals progress to-day; but new communities of women find it difficult to obtain authorisation, and a constant supervision, no longer feasible, checks the mushroom growth of ”active” congregations.

Just beyond he hears a bell and guesses, rightly enough, that the Viatic.u.m is being brought from the neighbouring parish church of San Marco to some sick or dying paris.h.i.+oner--in a moment he sees the little familiar procession, the acolytes with incense and bell, the priest carrying the host enveloped in the humeral veil under the _ombrellino_, the women and men who were in or near the church at the time following with lighted candles, and stopping beneath the windows of the sick man while his Lord visits him--if it were wet a little dark knot of people under umbrellas would be waiting, and would accompany the host with candle and umbrella just the same. Is it for the same sick person, he wonders, that the gala carriage of Duca Torlonia next pa.s.ses him carrying the _Bambin Gesu_, the little wooden painted doll from Ara Coeli. If the person whom it visits is to live the _Bambino_ will turn red, if he is to die he will turn pale.

Our pedestrian crosses the Forum of Trajan and as he mounts the steps he encounters a man of the people who tells him as he hurries breathless along that he is going to fetch Monsignor B., one of the episcopal canons of Santa Maria Maggiore, to _cresimare_ his baby, three weeks old, who is dying. He and the mother are bent on their baby going to paradise with all the glory of the added sacrament. A baby of three weeks old ”confirmed” will sound strange in English ears. It must be borne in mind therefore that the rite of confirmation in the English Church is a new rite unlike that in use in any ancient Christian Communion. In the Roman Church the rite of chrism is the ancient sacramental rite complementary to baptism, which always included the imposition by the bishop of the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized, ”for a type of the spiritual baptism.”

As such it is not properly a separate ceremony at all from the baptism with water. Our friend turns to the left and as he reaches the piazza before the Quirinal palace he sees the papal _cortege_ approach. The Pope (it is Pius IX.) is coming--not in his state carriage with the gilt angels, which we may still see at the papal stables on the way to the Vatican museum of sculpture or the papal garden--but in the carriage he uses every day. Every one kneels, and a mother who holds up her baby for the apostolic blessing secretly ”makes the horns” with her free hand, for Pius IX. is reputed to have the evil eye and to cast the _jettatura_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE

The great facade of the Liberian basilica, the first church in the city to be dedicated to the Madonna. To the right is the Military Hospital of Sant' Antonio. The house was until 1870 the residence of the Camaldolese nuns, and here S. Francis of a.s.sisi was received when he first arrived in Rome. The site is presumed to be that of the Temple of Diana. The column facing the basilica is one of the eight Corinthian columns which supported the vault of the basilica of Constantine. See pages 34, 60, 145, 231, and interleaf, page 252.]

But it is drawing towards the _Ave Maria_, the sunset hour, and it is rather free and easy even in a monsignore's servant to be abroad after that late hour. We will therefore leave our pedestrian in the Via del Quirinale, first noticing with him a group of seminarists on their way to pay their evening visit at the church of the _Santi Apostoli_; they raise their hats as they pa.s.s the door of the _Sacramentate_, opposite the palace, where the host is constantly exposed, and then hurry on to see the Pope and receive his paternal blessing. We, however, will turn down at the Four Fountains, and follow a priest who mounts a narrow staircase to the apartment occupied by a canon of the basilica of _Santa Maria in Trastevere_ in an old granary of Palazzo Barberini, which has been converted into dwellings for faithful retainers of the princely house. It contains all that is necessary for his wants--a chapel where he says his daily ma.s.s, the kitchen regions and some slips of rooms where his food is prepared and eaten in company with the two orphan relatives who, at his invitation, arrived at his door hand in hand one winter's evening many years ago, two little girls of ten and fifteen, who had come alone all the way from a northern town.

They communicate at his daily ma.s.s, but their generous guardian, who sees to their moral training, carefully hides away his copy of the Scriptures as a perilous work for two young souls. The sisters enjoy an incredible distinction among their _commari_ and _compari_--their neighbours and gossips--for in the canon's chapel there is a _corpo di santo sano_. Besides the chapel he has a bedroom and sitting-room, communicating--they are decorated with full length Magdalenes grasping skulls in evident deprecation of their want of apparel, of crucifixes painted on canvas, and of pictorial compositions consisting of a crucifix hung with a rosary, flanked by a couple of guttering church candles and enlivened with a book, a death's head, or an hour gla.s.s.

These are his own handiwork, and no intimacy with the works of art in the eternal city enlighten him as to their relative merits. The priest enters the sitting-room first, and finds six or seven men, all priests, on their knees, in the various corners of the room. Presently the door beyond opens, and a priest comes in and kneels down by a vacant chair. Another rises enters the bedroom and shuts the door carefully behind him. Our canon is a favourite confessor among his brother clergy, and it is the general custom for priests to be confessed at the houses of the religious or secular clergy they select as confessors, the rule about the use of the public confessionals in the churches applying especially to the confessions of women. The men kneeling in the first room are preparing for their weekly confession or making their thanksgiving after it.

When the poor canon died, leaving his orphan kinswomen unprovided for, the _corpo di santo sano_, which might have fetched something, was taken away at once because it was against ecclesiastical rules for them to keep it, but the pictures, which could fetch nothing, continued to gaze on the struggles of the little sisters, reminding them of the poor canon and also of the fickleness of the public taste in _articles de virtu_--for during his lifetime these pictures had received their full meed of respectful admiration.

As our pedestrian enters his own house door, which is covered with _immagini_ and texts serving as charms--among which S. Anna the mother of the Madonna is not absent as a house-patron, and the faded rose brought from the festa of the _Divin Amore_ figures conspicuously--he may indeed have a vague sense that the _annus Domini_ will soon be too strong for the life he has just been witnessing, but he will hardly be disturbed by any speculation as to the elements which have conspired to form the atmosphere surrounding the first Bishop of Christendom in this his capital once the capital of the world. He will not think of the apotheosis of the emperor in ancient Rome, of the orientalism which crept into Western Christendom through Byzantium, imposing things which especially here in Rome were alien to its religious genius; he will scarcely remember that the Pope's temporal sovereignty added a diadem to his tiara, for he has never distinguished the temporal from the spiritual arm, or discerned the part which the former has played in determining the manifestations of the latter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARCH OF CONSTANTINE

Erected by the Senate in his honour A.D. 312. Eighteen years later he retired to Byzantium, leaving the Roman Bishops in virtual possession of the eternal city. See pages 32, 42, 237.]

CHAPTER XII

THE ROMAN QUESTION

I. _Before 1870_

The ”Roman Question” represents the only ”religious” question in Italy. The problems which agitate other lands leave the Italian unaffected, uninterested. He has no genius for reforming, and no genius for sect-making, he is as tolerant of abuses as of diversities.

So it comes about that the one and only ”religious” question in Italy is a political question--the rights and wrongs of the situation created for the papacy when it was despoiled of its temporalities.

It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great future for Italy were not confined in the ”forties” to the Italian _unita_ men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's ”_Speranze d'Italia_”

and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by Gioberti's ”_Primato morale e civile degli Italiani_” in which ”the majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy” were set forth as mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil.

There he read that ”Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world,” and there he gained his notion of an Italian federation under the civil heads.h.i.+p of the Pope. That this idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist.

He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of the _Syllabus_. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the ”forties” and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the civil heads.h.i.+p of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and has not been undertaken since.

Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fas.h.i.+on to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth--self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception does not correspond to facts. We all know that the ”Donation” of Rome to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the great European states with the absorption of the small princ.i.p.alities and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their rights--efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the ”pre-eminent domain” which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed between the final destruction of all ”home rule” in the papal states and the loss of the temporal power.