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Roman Holidays and Others, a non-fiction book by William Dean Howells |
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Chapter 6. Roman Holidays: 11. In And About The Vatican |
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_ CHAPTER VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS: XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope's attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others. To the passing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun. But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching. Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine. One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: _"VV. la Repubblica"_ (Long live the Republic), and the other: _"M. ai Preti"_ (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere. Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other. I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of. There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power. One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy. Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house--if we choose so to think of the Vatican--has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome. We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with joy. It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name. I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds in March as in April at New York. But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate. _ |
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