Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

There were not many people in St. Peter’s that afternoon, so that I could give undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement at one point and grinding the marble smooth with a slow, secular movement, as if he were part of its age-Ions:  waste and repair.  Another day, the last day I came, there were companies of the personally conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the lectures in several languages, which no more stirred the immense tranquillity than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy of the temple:  you were vaguely sensible of the one and of the other like things heard and seen in a drowse.  It was a pleasant vagueness in which all angularities of feeling were lost, and you were disposed to a tolerance of the things that had hurt or offended you before.  As a contemporary of the edifice, throughout its growth, you could account for them more and more as of their periods.  Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came, however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or little instructed.  If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the whole baroque keeping?  Possibly this consideration made you go away much modester than you came.  “After all,” you may have said, “it is not a gallery; it is not a museum.  It is a house of prayer,” and you emerged, let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.

VII

CHANCES IN CHURCHES

If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was none.  Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the instinct of imperial Rome for ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in the innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other.  This position will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I may be driven in, especially by travellers who have seen the churches I did not see.  I took my chances, they theirs; for nobody can singly see all the churches in Rome; that would need a syndicate.

If imperial Rome was beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to imagine the things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the beauty of its religious aspiration—­that is, if it was the Goths who invented Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was.  Anyway, there is said to be but one Gothic church in Rome, and this I did not visit, perhaps because I felt that I must inure myself to the prevalent baroque, or perhaps from mere perversity.  I can merely say in self-defence that, on the outside, Santa Maria sopra Minerva no more