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Ebook has 691 lines and 52985 words, and 14 pages

Many of the Roman nobles had private theatres in their houses; they were great collectors of books, bronzes, tapestries, and mosaics, and the Roman private galleries of pictures and statues are unsurpassed. The Borghese alone possessed four Raphaels as well as their famous collection of statues. At the same time they were generous to the city of their adoption. They threw open their beautiful parks and villas to the people, they admitted the public to their galleries museums and libraries, and they endowed hospitals asylums and orphanages. The Roman ladies had always patronised and promoted works of charity. Nevertheless the later custom, which persists to this day, of personally visiting the poor and the hospitals began with Gwendoline Talbot, the daughter of the last Catholic Earl of Shrewsbury, who as the wife of Prince Borghese was the first of the Roman ladies to walk alone at all hours, intent on her errands of mercy. The wit which made her present a gold coin to a man who on one occasion followed her, was the talk of the city. Her name is still a household word in Roman mouths, and her tragic death when only twenty-four years old, leaving four little children, one only of whom, the present Princess Piombino, survived the infection which killed their mother, moved an entire population.

Many of the Roman palaces are as big as barracks. The Palazzo Pamphili-Doria can accommodate a thousand persons; but this was none too large for a patriarchal style of living which in a modified form survives to the present day. Much space was taken up by the great libraries, museums, picture galleries and reception and state banqueting halls. A small army of officials were housed within the walls--steward, bailiff, major-domo, secretaries, accountants, all the underlings necessary to the management of great and distant estates. A wing would be set entirely apart for the Prince Cardinal, a cadet of the house; the domestic chaplain would require a set of rooms; he would say the daily mass in the private chapel of the palace but would not dine with the family. The sons of the house would require tutors, the daughters governesses and companions.

The great double gates of every Roman palace which are securely locked and barred at night, lead into a central court. Round it are open colonnades, sometimes in two stories, and in the centre a fountain splashes amidst ferns and palms. A porter presides over the palace gates, magnificent in a cocked hat knee breeches and long coat trimmed with coloured braid into which are worked the heraldic devices of the family. His rod of office is a long staff twisted with cord and crowned with an immense silver knob. This personage is the descendant of the janitor who in ancient Rome watched the house door day and night and whose fidelity was ensured when necessary by chaining him to his post.

Though the state coaches, the running footmen, much of the pomp and ceremony have disappeared, some curious relics remain of an order of things fast passing away. Every Roman prince has the right, should he wish it, to be received at the foot of the great staircase of any house he honours with his presence by two lackeys bearing lighted torches; and these should escort him to the threshold of his hostess's reception room. This ceremony is still observed for cardinals on state occasions.

The distinction again between the patrician and the noble is one that is not understood by the foreigner. A patrician belongs by ancestral prescriptive right to the governing class of his province. The names of the patricians are balloted annually, and one of the number is chosen as Prior or Governor of the province. He is in fact and history of senatorial rank. Among the districts of Italy some have and some have not a patriciate. Spoleto possesses one, but Todi, next to it, has never had one.

The nobles, on the other hand, often owed their titles not only to the Pope but to their respective Communes, which, until the one fount of honour was defined to be the sovereign, frequently bestowed titles on their citizens. This privilege was enjoyed by the abbots of Monte Cassino in the thirteenth century. The popes have always conferred titles of nobility, as did the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir in this matter the Pope claims to be. At present an Heraldic Commission is sitting in Rome to regulate the use of titles, many of which have been assumed for generations without any warrant. Henceforth every one will be called upon to prove his right to the title he bears, and it will be illegal for the Communes to describe any one who has not done so with "a handle to his name." Foreign titles, and among them papal titles, will in all cases have to be ratified and allowed by the sovereign of Italy.

ROMAN RELIGION

Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable, for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony. The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity--as the catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"--he will always require gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to assist his imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense, to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence, and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service conceived in the spirit of the mass, with its mystical renewal enacted before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate; but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal element.

The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.

At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--"the voice of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew history.

The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his Kingdom of God on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience. Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral considerations connected with Abel.

THE ROMAN CARDINAL

What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests, because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by Peter, at whose instance "the seven" were first instituted . To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of the Roman district who came in time to assist the Pope at the great ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find "bishops" presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans.

Their position before 1870 was however a very different one. Then they enjoyed large incomes and their comings and goings were attended with a certain measure of regal state; and in the preceding centuries when the Hat was often conferred, like any other secular distinction, on mere youths and on laymen, their wealth and the luxury and magnificence of their style of living was unsurpassed in Rome, while the power and position of some cardinal nephew or relative of the Pope was second only to his own.

At another secret consistory, the Pope first closes the mouths of the newly created cardinals and then pronounces them open with the words: "I open your mouth that in consistory, in congregations, and in other ecclesiastical functions, you may be heard in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost."

The cardinal's hat, at one time an article of attire, is now only a symbol. It is of red cloth with a wide brim and shallow crown, and on either side hang fifteen red tassels, the number denoting the ecclesiastical rank of the wearer. From the day of its presentation the hat is put by until its owner's death, when it is brought out once more to be hung up in some side chapel of his titular church, where it remains until it falls to pieces with age.

One of the first duties of a new cardinal is to take possession of his titular church, and in old days this was another occasion for pomp and display, and the Pope's guards attended in full dress uniform. Now the cardinal drives quietly in his sombre closed carriage. At the church door he is divested of his cloth cloak and hat, and in flowing scarlet silk he walks up the nave bestowing benedictions on all sides. He seats himself on his throne in the chancel and the vicar of the parish reads to him an address in Latin to which he replies, he is then saluted by all the clergy of the parish in the order of their precedence ending with the acolytes, and the "taking possession" is over. He must however present the church with his portrait painted in oils which is hung with that of the reigning pope in the nave; and with a large escutcheon of his heraldic coat, emblazoned in colour and surmounted by the red hat and tassels, which is placed over the main entrance to the building, and which side by side with the papal arms is the outward and visible sign of a titular church. As princes of the Church, cardinals enjoy the princely distinction of displaying their coats of arms in the halls of their houses, affixed to the wall and sheltered beneath a silken canopy. Further they must have a throne and throne room, but unlike the secular princes of Rome who are entitled to the same privilege, their thrones are turned towards the wall, and are only reversed during a vacancy of the Holy See, when they may be used by their owners, who, for the time, become sovereigns and rulers of the Church.

No great church ceremony is complete without a cardinal, who by his very presence makes a function, but except for such occasions as these little is seen of the Roman cardinals by the casual visitor to the city. Their heavy carriages, painted black, drawn by black horses their harness unrelieved by brass or plating, pass unnoticed in the streets. Only occasionally on the Janiculum or outside the city gates on fine afternoons, a cardinal may be seen taking a walk, his servant at a discreet distance behind him, and his carriage following at a foot's pace. Before 1870 the streets of Rome were enlivened by the cardinals' brilliant equipages. A cardinal possessed two or three coaches to be used according to the degree of state required. He drove to the Vatican on grand occasions with all three to convey himself and his retinue of attendants, and his gala carriage drawn by six horses with postilions and standing footmen was of brilliant scarlet and was so magnificently gilded and painted that it cost over a thousand scudi.

The most responsible and arduous duty of the College of Cardinals is the conclave when the election of the future head of the Church depends upon their united vote. With the death of a pope their position changes on the instant from that of subject to ruler, and for the time being the destinies of the Church lie in their hands. They receive deputations and state visits seated upon their thrones, they drive in their carriages alone upon the principal seat, no companion being of sufficiently exalted rank to sit beside them, and the first among them, the Cardinal Chamberlain, is attended by a detachment of the Swiss guard and affixes his own seal to papal documents.

ROME BEFORE 1870

THE ROMAN QUESTION

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.

Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of God 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 principalities 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.

When we speak of the servitude of the Pope in the King of Italy's dominions, we forget that Catholic princes have always found themselves obliged to restrain the papal arm, and to propound from time to time laws protecting the minor against the major clergy, the prelates against the pretensions of the papacy, the people against the publication of obnoxious Bulls, and the public peace by subjecting the correspondence between the Pope and the bishops to scrutiny. Thus the disciplinary canons of the Council of Trent were not published--and were never accepted--in many Catholic states. Canon law has been the constant butt of civil legislation which has denied one by one the immunities of ecclesiastics and abolished the existence of ecclesiastical courts for the trial of clerical offenders. The abstract question of the popes' relation to civil rights and to temporal power cannot be viewed apart from the sober teaching of history.

That mute but eloquent parable in stone is the real synthesis of the history of the papacy--the episcopal palace by the tomb of the Apostle, in the first Christian church, at one end, and at the other the fortress which was once a pagan emperor's mausoleum, with its dungeons and its history, secret and open, of crime and bloodshed; and between these the covered way along which the popes pass and repass from one to the other, symbol not of the separation but of the fateful conjunction of spiritual and temporal which has haunted their history.

There is, moreover, a curious and subtile, but perfectly comprehensible, tie between Italy and the popes, to which expression was given by the priest-philosopher Gioberti in his book on "The Primacy" already quoted. The Italian who never goes to church, nay the Italian who believes in no Church--and in Italy he is not at all necessarily the same person--contemplates the papal primacy with pleasure and pride, and considers with approval the phenomenon which brings the rest of Europe to kiss the foot of an Italian. He is perfectly aware, on the one side, that the Christian primacy--which is an Italian primacy--adds lustre and a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the city and the land which was the cradle of modern civilisation; and in some undefinable, yet I think definite, way he sees in it a compensation for the glory which has departed from his land of glories, a tangible pledge and earnest of that world-mastery whose sceptre is now wrenched from his hands.

The modern ultramontane has accustomed the modern simple faithful to an historical picture which has had, as we see, no existence in fact: the Vatican standing solemn and decorous, at its Bronze Gate the Swiss Guard; the papal sovereignty and the papal troops--disbanded, these latter, by evil men in 1870--guaranteeing to pope and cardinal the freedom of their sacred ministry both within and without the papal confines. It is only since 1870 that such a picture can be seen, in miniature, and within the walls of the Vatican, under the respectful tutelage of a united Italy which now surrounds the solemn and decorous palace, certainly not the least turbulent centre of Europe before 1870.

In the thirty-four years that have since elapsed, the millennium has certainly not come in Italy, nor is everything better than it was before. But at least everything has a chance of being better. Some of the things which the popes were asked to concede, especially as regards penal procedure, are not bettered to-day, for the Italian laws though in certain departments they are ideal schemes of legislation are in practice very frequently dead letters--and some of the crimes which made old Rome hideous have ceased owing to the very simple expedient of lighting the streets at night.

It is difficult to suppose that we are near a conciliation between the Pope and Italy, or that there is still time for a satisfactory coalition between the conservative forces of law and order in the country and the moral forces of Catholicism against the inrush of the subversive forces of socialism and political radicalism. Many of the best men on the Italian side would indeed deplore any reconciliation with the Pope at present on the ground that it would involve a check to the civil progress of the Italian people. Meanwhile the Italians are certainly not becoming more religious under a system which assumes that if you are a good citizen you cannot be "a good Catholic," and it is for the popes to determine whether the irreligion of the people is or is not too heavy a price to pay for the upkeep of their protest against the events of 1870. The consequent alienation of some of the better religious elements in the country is, at least, doing serious harm in that it makes the abler men outside doubt whether the religious elements which remain are worthy to be regarded as in any sense a moral force which could be invoked to co-operate with the best modern secular forces.

Index

Abruzzi, Abruzzese, 153, 155, 188

Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, 221

Accoramboni, Vittoria, 167

Acilii Glabriones, 45

Adelbert, S., 8

Adonis, 90

Aeneas, 2, 130

Aesculapius, 7, 8

Agap?, 46

Ager , 1, 15, 70-1, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90

Agricultural colonies, 11, 76

Agrippa, 20, 22, 30

Alabaster, 27

Alaric, 37

Alba Longa, 1, 2, 15

Alban hills, 17, 23, 70, 78

Albani, 171

Alexander Severus, 22, 32, 63

Altar, 19, 20, 35, 186; position of priest at, 36, 186

Altieri, 172

Amphitheatre, 22, 31, 33, 163

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