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 promised an inner beauty
than Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the
power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches
sometimes have.
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