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invisible. These he found not: there was but the weary wandering of the

tourists, and the bustle of the prelates conducting the young priests to

the obligatory stations; while the vesper service continued in the

left-hand chapel, nought of it reaching the ears of the visitors save,

perhaps, a confused vibration, as of the peal of a bell penetrating from

outside through the vaults above.

And Pierre then understood that this was the splendid skeleton of a

colossus whence life was departing. To fill it, to animate it with a

soul, all the gorgeous display of great religious ceremonies was needed;

the eighty thousand worshippers which it could hold, the great pontifical

pomps, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, the processions and

_corteges_ displaying all the luxury of the Church amidst operatic

scenery and appointments. And he tried to conjure up a picture of the

past magnificence--the basilica overflowing with an idolatrous multitude,

and the superhuman _cortege_ passing along whilst every head was lowered;

the cross and the sword opening the march, the cardinals going two by

two, like twin divinities, in their rochets of lace and their mantles and

robes of red moire, which train-bearers held up behind them; and at last,

with Jove-like pomp, the Pope, carried on a stage draped with red velvet,

seated in an arm-chair of red velvet and gold, and dressed in white

velvet, with cope of gold, stole of gold, and tiara of gold. The bearers

of the _Sedia gestatoria_* shone bravely in red tunics broidered with

gold. Above the one and only Sovereign Pontiff of the world the

_flabelli_ waved those huge fans of feathers which formerly were waved

before the idols of pagan Rome. And around the seat of triumph what a

dazzling, glorious court there was! The whole pontifical family, the

stream of assistant prelates, the patriarchs, the archbishops, and the

bishops, with vestments and mitres of gold, the _Camerieri segreti

partecipanti_ in violet silk, the _Camerieri partecipanti_ of the cape

and the sword in black velvet Renascence costumes, with ruffs and golden

chains, the whole innumerable ecclesiastical and laical suite, which not

even a hundred pages of the "Gerarchia" can completely enumerate, the

prothonotaries, the chaplains, the prelates of every class and degree,

without mentioning the military household, the gendarmes with their

busbies, the Palatine Guards in blue trousers and black tunics, the Swiss

Guards costumed in red, yellow, and black, with breastplates of silver,

suggesting the men at arms of some drama of the Romantic school, and the

Noble Guards, superb in their high boots, white pigskins, red tunics,

gold lace, epaulets, and helmets! However, since Rome had become the

capital of Italy the doors were no longer thrown wide open; on the rare

occasions when the Pope yet came down to officiate, to show himself as

the supreme representative of the Divinity on earth, the basilica was

filled with chosen ones. To enter it you needed a card of invitation. You

no longer saw the people--a throng of fifty, even eighty, thousand

Christians--flocking to the Church and swarming within it promiscuously;

there was but a select gathering, a congregation of friends convened as

for a private function. Even when, by dint of effort, thousands were

collected together there, they formed but a picked audience invited to

the performance of a monster concert.

* The chair and stage are known by that name.--Trans.

And as Pierre strolled among the bright, crude marbles in that cold if

gorgeous museum, the feeling grew upon him that he was in some pagan

temple raised to the deity of Light and Pomp. The larger temples of

ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious

columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and

vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was

destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other

basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him. First one found the

Christian Church quietly, audaciously quartering itself in a pagan

church, as, for instance, San Lorenzo in Miranda installed in the temple

of Antoninus and Faustina, and retaining the latter's rare porticus in

_cipollino_ marble and its handsome white marble entablature. Then there

was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan

edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of

contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of

the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire

identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive

faith. Then, too, there was the Christian Church, typified by that of

Saint Agnes-beyond-the-walls which had been built on exactly the same

pattern as the Roman secular basilica--that Tribunal and Exchange which

accompanied every Forum. And, in particular, there was the Christian

Church erected with material stolen from the demolished pagan temples. To

this testified the sixteen superb columns of that same Saint Agnes,

columns of various marbles filched from various gods; the one and twenty

columns of Santa Maria in Trastevere, columns of all sorts of orders torn

from a temple of Isis and Serapis, who even now are represented on their

capitals; also the six and thirty white marble Ionic columns of Santa

Maria Maggiore derived from the temple of Juno Lucina; and the two and

twenty columns of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, these varying in substance,

size, and workmanship, and certain of them said to have been stolen from

Jove himself, from the famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus which rose

upon the sacred summit. In addition, the temples of the opulent Imperial

period seemed to resuscitate in our times at San Giovanni in Laterano and

San Paolo-fuori-le-mura. Was not that Basilica of San Giovanni--"the

Mother and Head of all the churches of the city and the earth"--like the

abode of honour of some pagan divinity whose splendid kingdom was of this

world? It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a

profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve

colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining

the approach to the master of the gods! And did not San Paolo, lately

completed, its new marbles shimmering like mirrors, recall the abode of

the Olympian immortals, typical temple as it was with its majestic

colonnade, its flat, gilt-panelled ceiling, its marble pavement

incomparably beautiful both in substance and workmanship, its violet

columns with white bases and capitals, and its white entablature with

violet frieze: everywhere, indeed, you found, the mingling of those two

colours so divinely carnal in their harmony. And there, as at St.

Peter's, not one patch of gloom, not one nook of mystery where one might

peer into the invisible, could be found! And, withal, St. Peter's

remained the monster, the colossus, larger than the largest of all

others, an extravagant testimony of what the mad passion for the huge can

achieve when human pride, by dint of spending millions, dreams of lodging

the divinity in an over-vast, over-opulent palace of stone, where in

truth that pride itself, and not the divinity, triumphs!

And to think that after long centuries that gala colossus had been the

outcome of the fervour of primitive faith! You found there a blossoming

of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has

thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and

ruinous luxury. It would seem as if the absolute masters successively

ruling the city brought that passion for cyclopean building with them,

derived it from the soil in which they grew, for they transmitted it one

to the other, without a pause, from civilisation to civilisation, however

diverse and contrary their minds. It has all been, so to say, a

continuous blossoming of human vanity, a passionate desire to set one's

name on an imperishable wall, and, after being master of the world, to

leave behind one an indestructible trace, a tangible proof of one's

passing glory, an eternal edifice of bronze and marble fit to attest that

glory until the end of time. At the bottom the spirit of conquest, the

proud ambition to dominate the world, subsists; and when all has

crumbled, and a new society has sprung up from the ruins of its

predecessor, men have erred in imagining it to be cured of the sin of

pride, steeped in humility once more, for it has had the old blood in its

veins, and has yielded to the same insolent madness as its ancestors, a

prey to all the violence of its heredity directly it has become great and

strong. Among the illustrious popes there has not been one that did not

seek to build, did not revert to the traditions of the Caesars,

eternising their reigns in stone and raising temples for resting-places,

so as to rank among the gods. Ever the same passion for terrestrial

immortality has burst forth: it has been a battle as to who should leave

the highest, most substantial, most gorgeous monument; and so acute has

been the disease that those who, for lack of means and opportunity, have

been unable to build, and have been forced to content themselves with

repairing, have, nevertheless, desired to bequeath the memory of their

modest achievements to subsequent generations by commemorative marble

slabs engraved with pompous inscriptions! These slabs are to be seen on

every side: not a wall has ever been strengthened but some pope has

stamped it with his arms, not a ruin has been restored, not a palace

repaired, not a fountain cleaned, but the reigning pope has signed the

work with his Roman and pagan title of "Pontifex Maximus." It is a

haunting passion, a form of involuntary debauchery, the fated florescence

of that compost of ruins, that dust of edifices whence new edifices are

ever arising. And given the perversion with which the old Roman soil

almost immediately tarnished the doctrines of Jesus, that resolute

passion for domination and that desire for terrestrial glory which

wrought the triumph of Catholicism in scorn of the humble and pure, the

fraternal and simple ones of the primitive Church, one may well ask

whether Rome has ever been Christian at all!

And whilst Pierre was for the second time walking round the huge

basilica, admiring the tombs of the popes, truth, like a sudden

illumination, burst upon him and filled him with its glow. Ah! those

tombs! Yonder in the full sunlight, in the rosy Campagna, on either side

of the Appian Way--that triumphal approach to Rome, conducting the

stranger to the august Palatine with its crown of circling palaces--there

arose the gigantic tombs of the powerful and wealthy, tombs of

unparalleled artistic splendour, perpetuating in marble the pride and

pomp of a strong race that had mastered the world. Then, near at hand,

beneath the sod, in the shrouding night of wretched mole-holes, other

tombs were hidden--the tombs of the lowly, the poor, and the

suffering--tombs destitute of art or display, but whose very humility

proclaimed that a breath of affection and resignation had passed by, that

One had come preaching love and fraternity, the relinquishment of the

wealth of the earth for the everlasting joys of a future life, and

committing to the soil the good seed of His Gospel, sowing the new

humanity which was to transform the olden world. And, behold, from that

seed, buried in the soil for centuries, behold, from those humble,

unobtrusive tombs, where martyrs slept their last and gentle sleep whilst

waiting for the glorious call, yet other tombs had sprung, tombs as

gigantic and as pompous as the ancient, destroyed sepulchres of the

idolaters, tombs uprearing their marbles among a pagan-temple-like

splendour, proclaiming the same superhuman pride, the same mad passion

for universal sovereignty. At the time of the Renascence Rome became

pagan once more; the old imperial blood frothed up and swept Christianity

away with the greatest onslaught ever directed against it. Ah! those

tombs of the popes at St. Peter's, with their impudent, insolent

glorification of the departed, their sumptuous, carnal hugeness, defying

death and setting immortality upon this earth. There are giant popes of

bronze, allegorical figures and angels of equivocal character wearing the

beauty of lovely girls, of passion-compelling women with the thighs and

the breasts of pagan goddesses! Paul III is seated on a high pedestal,

Justice and Prudence are almost prostrate at his feet. Urban VIII is

between Prudence and Religion, Innocent XI between Religion and Justice,

Innocent XII between Justice and Charity, Gregory XIII between Religion

and Strength. Attended by Prudence and Justice, Alexander VII appears

kneeling, with Charity and Truth before him, and a skeleton rises up

displaying an empty hour-glass. Clement XIII, also on his knees, triumphs

above a monumental sarcophagus, against which leans Religion bearing the

Cross; while the Genius of Death, his elbow resting on the right-hand

corner, has two huge, superb lions, emblems of omnipotence, beneath him.

Bronze bespeaks the eternity of the figures, white marble describes

opulent flesh, and coloured marble winds around in rich draperies,

deifying the monuments under the bright, golden glow of nave and aisles.

And Pierre passed from one tomb to the other on his way through the

magnificent, deserted, sunlit basilica. Yes, these tombs, so imperial in

their ostentation, were meet companions for those of the Appian Way.

Assuredly it was Rome, the soil of Rome, that soil where pride and

domination sprouted like the herbage of the fields that had transformed

the humble Christianity of primitive times, the religion of fraternity,

justice, and hope into what it now was: victorious Catholicism, allied to

the rich and powerful, a huge implement of government, prepared for the

conquest of every nation. The popes had awoke as Caesars. Remote heredity

had acted, the blood of Augustus had bubbled forth afresh, flowing

through their veins and firing their minds with immeasurable ambition. As