Читать книгу More Italian Yesterdays - Mrs. Hugh Fraser - Страница 8

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If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look down from the spot where St. Peter was crucified, you will see, rounding up in the low-lying heart of the city, a dome, white, huge, uncrowned, standing out from the darker buildings round it like an enormous mother-of-pearl shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the air, taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the Pantheon, and thus it has stood, reflecting every mood of the Roman sky, since the days of Hadrian, who became Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the magic dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the gigantic lettering on the pediment over the portico. Ninety years before his time, Marcus Agrippa, the intimate friend and (for his sins!) the son-in-law of Augustus, erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths which still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of which my brother has told the touching story in “Ave Roma Immortalis.” Agrippa must have forgotten to properly propitiate the gods; we moderns should say that he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple was soon struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to restore it.

This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had done with it, the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” “all-holy”) must indeed have dazzled the eyes of the beholders, for the dome was entirely covered with tiles of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it seem a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The gilt tiles were stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor, Constans II, who took them away to Syracuse, whence the Saracens successfully looted them a few years afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-pearl is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead, when the heavens have looked on it long enough, may become a thing of life and beauty. When Hadrian had finished his building there was nothing left of Agrippa’s original one except the portico; but Hadrian, with rare moderation, left the original founder’s name on that. The Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most perfect pagan monument in Rome,” seems to have been, in its beginnings, unfortunate, for only sixty-four years after Hadrian’s death it again stood sadly in need of repair, if we may believe the magniloquent inscription left on its front by Septimus Severus and his son, Caracalla, when they had carried out their pious designs of further restoration.

But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place where the winds of heaven may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the sun has shone, and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the vault of heaven above.

But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun and winds had their way in the stupendous empty fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same that guard it now (and perhaps this and a few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer, should be remembered to his attenuated credit), preferring to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a church of the Lord.

Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now and then to surprise us by some memorable action—said the Pope was right, and gave him the building to do with it as he liked. And then Boniface carried out the great plan which must have been simmering in his brain for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the seven planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies of the Saints and be consecrated to the one True God, under the title of “St. Mary of the Martyrs.” Under that perfect dome of exactly equal height and diameter (142 feet) he would finally lay to rest all the sacred remains which were still buried in the Catacombs all round the city. But there was much to do first. The rich architectural disposition of the interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a High Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would not close; when dust and rubbish were cleared away the material preparations were over, but the tremendous ceremony of purification and consecration had yet to be accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of such profound meaning and glorious diction as remains matchless in the annals of the Liturgy.

We can only see it now with the eyes of the spirit, but, even while trying to do that, we must not let the magnificence of the external function make us forget that which the Church so lovingly and repeatedly impresses upon us—first, that there is but one Sanctuary worthy of the Most High, His Throne and dwelling in the inaccessible light of the Fixed Heaven, round which all universes that the human mind can grasp revolve, like starry spindrift round a living sun; and, secondly, that the home God has built for Himself on earth and loves with the most passionate tenderness is the heart of the Christian, where He will abide for time and eternity if it do not cast Him out.

The chief object of ecclesiastical architecture is to symbolize the grandeur of the union between the soul and its Creator; as such, and as the storehouse and dispensary of graces, the banqueting-hall where He feeds us with Himself, the arsenal where He arms us for the combat and trains us for His soldiers, where, in His surpassing love and mercy, He deigns to remain in the adorable Eucharist, the consecrated Church is the crown of human production, and rightly do we strain every nerve to make it rich and noble and fair.

When that is done, and all that men can give has been lavished on beautifying and enriching it, it has to be cleansed from every blemish of earthy contact before it can be offered to the service of God. When we wander through the Cathedrals of the world, Westminster Abbey, Strasburg, Notre Dame, Milan, asking ourselves how mere men ever attained to the production of such beauty and grandeur, do we ever stop to think that those towering walls were washed from vault to pavement, within and without, with holy oil, on the day of consecration?

The Cathedral was the symbol of the soul, and every act and prayer of the ceremonial depicted for our fore-fathers—so well instructed in the truths we first take for granted and then forget—the processes by which God confers on us the gift of immortality. On the eve of the great day all left the building, the new doors were closed, no step sounded on the pavement, no voice might break the stillness of the place. It was a dead thing waiting for life, as the soul that is not united to God waits, under its inherited burden of sinfulness, for regeneration.

Outside the precincts a great tent has been erected, and here, all through the night, the Bishop and his assistants have been praying the prayers of David the great penitent. All night long the penitential psalms have been going up, beseeching the Lord to wash away the sins of His people, His exiles on earth who are waiting without the camp and entreating Him to take them into grace and bring them to their Father’s home. With the first faint light of dawn the prayers cease, the supplicants arise, and the Bishop puts on his vestments, one by one and with a special prayer for each, because he thus figures the Son of God putting on the garment of our humanity. And because Christ, as man, prayed to His Father and ours, the Bishop comes forth from the tent and prostrates himself before the steps of the church in fervent prayer, with all his clergy kneeling around him.

Now the natural soul is cold and blind, and closed to Grace; so the church stands, unlighted and with fast-closed doors. And because the Spirit of God is all gentleness and mercy, and condescends to most patient stratagems to capture the heart He covets, the Bishop goes three times round the great building, praying and knocking softly at its doors, while the clergy follow him and pray too, as the angels pray for us. At last the first barrier falls; the doors open, reluctantly as it were. The Bishop crosses the threshold saying, “Peace eternal to this House, in the Name of the Eternal.” The procession passes within, the shadows swallowing up the gold and crimson of the vestments that had been sparkling in the sun.

A strange sight the empty church presents now. On the pavement two broad paths of ashes traverse its entire length and breadth, in the form of a Greek cross. The assistants stand in silent groups while the Bishop, slowly moving down from the apse to the entrance, and then across from one transept to the other, traces in the ashes the Latin and Greek alphabets with his crozier. Why? Because the first need of the soul is instruction. “How shall they know except they first be taught?” And since God will not take possession of a soul without its own concurrence and consent, it must know Him before it receives Him.

Knowledge brings the desire for purification from sin, original or actual; and now the church, the symbol of the soul, must be purified. The Bishop mingles wine with water, to denote the Humanity and the Divinity of Christ; to these he adds ashes to commemorate His death, and salt as an emblem of His resurrection; the mystic flood is poured in waves over the altar, and thence all down the pavement of the church, while hundreds of acolytes scale the ladders placed against the walls and the mystic liquid runs down them in glistening sheets to mingle with the mimic ripples on the floor. Let it run. When it has drained away the holy oil flows golden and fragrant over the carved and gleaming walls, and pious hands are applying it to the exterior of the building—sometimes even to its roof—in copious floods.

Now indeed the church is ready for its destiny, even as the Christian emerges from Baptism ready for his God. The chants swell louder and sweeter, the Alleluia rings out triumphantly from a thousand hearts, the incense sends up its first perfumed spirals to hang among the fretted arches of the deep vault; the sub-deacons approach the Pontiff and offer for his blessing the rich vessels and vestments which are the wedding presents of the Faithful to the new-born Bride of Christ—the House is ready for the Master and His guests.

The guests are waiting still in the exiles’ tent, with Knights and Prelates for their Guard of Honour. Such nobility could not be entertained save in a spotless mansion. Their names? Oh, they had many—Greek and Latin and Persian and Armenian—besides the “wonderful new names” that had been given them in heaven, for these guests were Holy Martyrs, and their relics were to be placed in the stone of the High Altar, because the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must always be offered on them to-day, even as when the fervent yet trembling Christian knelt before their tombs in the catacombs, and the doomed priest asked the Lord to accept the sacrifice in honour of those whom perhaps he had laid there an hour before.

Oh, the adorable continuity of the Church! In my eyrie in the Rockies, one of the loneliest spots on earth, there came to my door quite unexpectedly one summer evening—it was June 28—a missionary priest, very tired. He had driven some hundred and fifty miles to get to us; his game little horses, his buggy, his coat—everything about him was covered with dust, but his eyes beamed with benevolence as he said, “I have come to say Mass for you.” We could have kissed his feet. The next morning, very early, in the sitting-room that was a bower of wild flowers, my son and I knelt and watched him prepare the altar. From his worn portmanteau the first thing he drew out was a square of white alabaster of which the centre had been removed, replaced, and sealed with a cross sunk into the stone. Very reverently he slipped it under the white linen “corporal,” lighted the blessed candles on either side—and began “Introibo ad altare Dei.”

ROME. THE PANTHEON.

The alabaster square contained relics of the Martyrs;—and our humble home-made altar was, through them, His friends, as worthy of Him who was about to descend upon it as the High Altar of St. Peter’s on that morning of his Feast in Rome.

When St. Boniface cleansed and consecrated the Pantheon, he showed, in the name he gave it, that it was to be the shrine of many valiant ones, a shrine of which, more truly than of any of our battlefields, it could be said:

“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground

Their silent tents are spread,

And glory guards, with solemn round,

The Bivouac of the Dead!”

But one almost doubts whether the Pontiff himself appreciated the magnitude of the task he had undertaken. In person he went through the many catacombs, for he was resolved that no smallest, humblest hero of the Lord should miss his share of the final triumph. He had had great cars prepared, decked with all possible richness, to convey the precious remains, which had so long held the outposts of the city, to the Pantheon in its very heart; but when he had gone through all the dark, intricate passages of the underground cemeteries, tapping at the walls and examining every atom of surface that might conceal a once-proscribed tomb, I think his artificers must have had to build more chariots for the returning army than they had expected, for it was very great.

At last, however, all was ready. It was May 13, A.D. 609, and a glorious morning, when the converging processions set forth, met, and entered the city in triumph. The Pontiff in his splendid vestments led the procession, swelled as it went along by all the inhabitants of Rome. Long, serried ranks of prelates, priests, and monks followed him, carrying tall lighted tapers that gleamed but faintly in the Roman sun; the air was sweet with fragrances that grew stronger as the convoy passed along the flower-strewn streets, and the perfume of hundreds of censers swung up on the bright air. Rome was poor then, but the Romans had still found blue and crimson tapestries to hang from the windows, and every portico and window was crowded with eager onlookers who, as the procession approached, took up the roar of welcome with which the city greeted its dead.

But I think a hush fell when the dead came into sight at the turn of the street or the entrance of the square, and the enormous cars moved nearer, their dear terrible burden piled high above the sides, and covered with silks and flowers through which here and there showed just enough of a coffin’s outline to wring the heart and let loose a rain of tears. “Twenty-seven great cars filled with the bones of the Martyrs did Boniface the Pope bring to the Pantheum now consecrated to the service of God and the honour of the Blessed Virgin.”

Truly may that splendid temple, open to the sky, claim its title of “St. Mary of the Martyrs,” and rightly did the Pontiff and his followers, as they brought them in, raise the triumphal shout, “The Saints shall rejoice in their beds! Arise, ye friends of God, and enter into the glory He has prepared for His elect!”

After all these great names it seems strange to have to record a very humble one, that of a poor working-man, in connection with the Pantheon, but I can never pass the famous church without remembering a certain Giovanni Borgi whose memory was held in great benediction in Rome in my young days.

During the preceding century the city was really in a fairly peaceful and prosperous condition, but the many institutions of charity which flourished under Gregory XVI and Pius IX had not reached the point where they could provide night refuges for its many waifs and vagrants. There were numbers of poor boys—street Arabs, as we should call them—who wandered about in the daytime, earning a little here and there, but subsisting chiefly on charity and having no fixed dwelling-place of any kind. To these the broad steps and portico of the Pantheon offered at least shelter from the weather, and they used to gather there in crowds after dark, and sleep—as boys can sleep—on the stones.

Now there was in Rome, towards 1780 or thereabouts, a poor mason called Giovanni Borgi. He belonged to the “opera di San Pietro”—that is, he was one of the workmen engaged for life by the administration of St. Peter’s for the maintenance and repair of the Basilica, the Vatican Palace and its many dependent buildings. The “opera” was a close corporation and included artisans of every necessary craft, from mosaic workers to bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters. Of course the privileges were largely hereditary, the Italian traditions of Guilds leading the son to follow the trade or profession of his father whenever possible, but high character and a blameless record were also indispensable qualifications for every appointment.

Giovanni Borgi, though poor and almost illiterate, had worked all his life in the holy places and was regarded by his fellows as very nearly a saint. While he worked he prayed, and when working hours were over he went regularly to the great Hospital of Santo Spirito in the “Borgo” and sat up late into the night nursing the sick and comforting the dying. The only reproach ever addressed to him was that he sometimes got sleepy over his work the morning after some unusually long vigil by the bedside of some sufferer who had entreated him to remain with him. Everybody loved the queer little man, and he loved all the world but himself. To this person he never gave a thought. Heaven had made him short and stumpy—but he could walk as well as the youngest; he had but one eye—but its sight was perfect; a funny bald head—but somebody had given him an old wig to cover it with; what was there to complain about? So, being empty of itself, his heart had room for others, and he took his fellow-beings’ wants and sufferings very seriously.

One evening, before going to the hospital, he was accompanying a religious procession through the streets, when he noticed the dark forms of a little crowd of sleepers on the steps of the Pantheon. Coming nearer, he found that they were boys of various ages, ragged and forlorn, huddled together for warmth, and sound asleep. A little farther on, under the tables where fowls were sold in the daytime, more of these waifs had taken refuge. The sight grieved the good mason deeply. He could not pass on and leave them thus. Rousing some of them, he asked many questions and learnt that not one of them had a home or a guardian. Orphans, runaway boys from the hill villages, waifs of one sort and another—here was one of those collections of abandoned children who would later become criminals unless some kind hand were stretched out to save them. Giovanni did not hesitate for a moment. He bade the little crowd follow him to his lodging. There was one of those great ground-floor rooms only used for storing properties or cattle—no Roman will sleep near the ground if he can help it, for fear of fever—and in this barn-like place Giovanni bestowed his ragged guests after giving them whatever he could beg or buy for their supper.

I do not think he went to the hospital at all that night. I fancy he sat long in the brick-floored room, staring at the three wicks of the “lucerna” and begging Heaven to show him what to do next. In the morning he had to let his flock out, promising them some supper if they would come back at nightfall, and exhorting them to be good meanwhile. The poor little creatures needed no second invitation and turned up faithfully, their numbers swelled by others to whom they had spoken of their good luck. Giovanni saw that he would soon have a community on his hands, and went to tell some priests, who were his friends, that he must be helped to teach and govern as well as to maintain the forsaken children. For their food—breakfast and supper—he begged, and the kind-hearted neighbours responded generously. His first care was to teach them the catechism, sitting among them in the evening and getting them to talk about themselves; he also taught them what little he knew of reading and writing; but it hurt him sorely to turn them out to face all the temptations of the streets during the daytime.

Very soon the priests and some other charitable persons raised money to rent a part of an old palace, somewhat in ill repair, but providing luxurious quarters in comparison to the church steps and the fowl market. The priests offered to devote their evenings to teaching the boys, and found their efforts well rewarded, for the waifs, under the kind, firm rule of old Giovanni, were eager to make the best of their wonderful new advantages. He very soon solved the question of occupation during the daytime by placing them out in a number of workshops, where they could learn useful trades and earn something towards their own maintenance. He sent them out in the morning, giving each a loaf of bread to take with him for dinner; then he went to his own work at St. Peter’s. During the dinner hour he would rush round from one workshop to another to see that his “children” were behaving themselves and that none had played truant. Then in the evening he would go and fetch those of whose steadfastness he had any doubts, and by nightfall the whole big family was safely housed in the corner of the old Palazzo.

Whatever they had earned during the day had to be rendered up to “Tata Giovanni” (Daddy John), as they had come to call him, and very dearly they came to love their queer, kind protector. Old people used to describe his taking them all out to Villa Borghese on holidays, and said it was wonderful to see the old fellow flying round, playing ball with the rest, his wig all awry and his mighty laugh showing how happy he was with his children.

His good work had found friends and supporters from the beginning, and being brought to the notice of Pius VI, the pontiff bought the Palazzo Ruggia as a permanent home for it, and constituted himself its chief protector. Thus encouraged, Tata Giovanni started on a crusade which had for its object nothing less than the reclamation of all the good-for-nothing boys in Rome! He used to seek them out and follow them up, and if persuasion proved unavailing the dogged old man would seize them by the arm and march them off to his “Asilo” without more ado. Vagrancy, mendicancy, gambling roused his ire to such an extent that his name became a terror to all youthful evil-doers, and they would fly at the mere mention of it.

Life at the Asilo was conducted on lines of military precision. The youngsters rose early, heard Mass, got a good breakfast, and marched away to their work, where, as I have said, their guardian looked in on some of them—and they never knew which it would be—during the course of the day. When the Ave Maria rang they all came home, and as they passed into the house, Tata Giovanni stood at the door with a bag in his hand, and into this they had to drop their earnings—not a baiocco was to be spent on the way or kept back!

Then came the lessons, followed by the rosary, and supper, this last the crown of the day for the tired, healthy young people. The old ideals still found many followers in those days, and it was not at all unusual to see some great Cardinal “gird himself with a towel” and trot humbly a score of times between the kitchen and the refectory to wait on the boys. There were a hundred of them by this time, and great was Daddy John’s preoccupation as to their morals. Long inured to shortening his hours of sleep, he would pace the dormitories all night long to see that all was as it should be, only sleeping himself for a short hour in the morning; and certainly Heaven blessed his efforts, for as years went on, and his waifs grew old enough to go out into the world on their own account and others took their places, not one that I ever heard of brought discredit on his education.

The sick at the hospital were not forgotten amid all these new labours and responsibilities; Tata Giovanni (no one ever called him anything else) went to them whenever he could, and when he could not he would send some of the older boys in his place, thus teaching them the lesson which had been the moral of his whole life—that no one must live for himself alone, and that the poorest and most ignorant can always find some sufferer to cheer and console. He died at last, the good, humble old workman, fifteen years after he had strayed from the procession to inspect the ragged sleepers on the steps of the Pantheon. He passed away on June 28, 1798. The whole city mourned for him, and his boys were broken-hearted. His work of love had become a public institution, and, incorporated with another of the same kind, lived till a few years ago, when it was swept aside and swallowed up with hundreds of other beneficent foundations in the “indiscriminate brigandage” of Rome’s latest rulers.

Several years after Tata Giovanni’s death a young gentleman of noble birth, who came from Sinigaglia, was appointed the director of the Asilo. It was not a distinguished appointment by any means; of course no salary was attached to the position—it was not till the recent laicization of charity that any but unpaid volunteers attended to the wants of the poor in the Eternal City. That made no difference to this handsome young man, for he came of a wealthy family, but his father, who had had great ambitions for his son, was by no means pleased to see him buried in an orphan asylum. The young man himself was suffering under great despondency. He desired with all his heart to be a priest, but his health was so bad that the Bishop did not think it wise to ordain him. As a child he had suffered a severe shock from falling into the water and narrowly escaping drowning, and ever since his early youth he had suffered from sharp attacks of epilepsy, terrible in themselves and yet more terrible in the constant dread that hung over their victim, who never knew when he might be struck down by the fearful visitation.

Very gladly did Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti of Sinigaglia accept the charge of the Asilo which he had already constantly visited as a helper and instructor. And here, for four years, he who was to become Pius IX lived with the orphans, subsisted on their rough fare and devoted all his powers to making forsaken lads into good Christians and useful citizens. Workshops were now installed in the Asilo itself, and the higher arts went hand in hand with humble trades, each boy’s talent and inclinations being carefully observed and consulted.

Many good artists and good workmen were given to the world by the orphanage which had such humble beginnings, but for many of us its chief interest lies in its connection with the Pope, to whom it furnished the first opportunity of developing those gifts of organization and command that later served humanity so well. Here he waited, a humble postulant on the threshold of the priesthood; here he prayed, as we know, those fervent, almost heart-broken prayers that God would remove the infirmity which darkened his life and barred his way to the Altar; it was to his little room in the Asilo that he was brought back one night, apparently dying, having been struck down by one of those fearful attacks in the street. From here he used to go, day after day, to one or another of the city’s holy places to pray for relief or resignation; from here he started on the pilgrimage to Loreto, where the first light broke across the darkness and he received the divine assurance that his prayers were heard, that the affliction was about to pass away.

It was, finally, in the little Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami (St. Joseph of the Carpenters) close to the Orphanage of Tata Giovanni, that he said his first Mass, on Easter Sunday, April 11, 1819. It was a very quiet affair, only a few near relations and his beloved orphans assisting at it. His uncle Paulinus, who was a Canon of St. Peter’s and who had been his tutor in sacred studies, stood beside him all through, for the Pope had only consented to the young man’s ordination on condition that he would never celebrate the Holy Mysteries unless accompanied by another priest. This command the Pontiff rescinded soon afterwards at Father Mastai’s earnest request. He felt assured that his malady would trouble him no more, and Pius VII, in reply, said, “I also believe that, my son.” From that moment, during his long and eventful life, Giovanni Maria Mastai never suffered from any recurrence of the attacks which had, to outward seeming, saddened so many years of his life, but in reality had preserved and prepared him for his true vocation.