Part II: The Story of the Statues

When falls the Colosseum Rome shall fall,” All have read the statement in elegant extracts; a few in Byron; fewer still in St. Augustine who, I am told, first records the proverb. I do not believe it; not even to please St. Augustine, let alone Byron. The Colosseum could fall without killing Rome, or even the Romans, though not (it is pleasant to think) without killing a large number of American and other foreign tourists, mostly rich. I should escape callously, for I do not haunt the Colosseum, least of all by moonlight. I am not, and never was, a ghost. As already noted, there is almost a contradiction between seeing Rome and seeing the sights of Rome. There are bold and brilliant adventurers who can do both; but the one does not necessitate and hardly helps the other. The Roman sights could be taken from Rome and put inside Ramsgate, and they would still be sights, but they would not be Roman. The Colosseum might be rebuilt on the site of Olympia, an appropriately classic name for a competitive arena. The Baths of Diocletian might be moved to Bath or Baden, or other places where the Roman Bath would be really appropriate enough. But it is not only obvious that West Kensington would not look like Rome; it is even more obvious that, without these or thirty other famous buildings, Rome would still look like Rome. This common quality that really colours a town, and makes it a contrast to other towns, is never easy to define. But broadly speaking, what bulks big in the eye of a visitor to the Italian capital is all that incidental magnificence, of pillars and public fountains and round Roman gateways, which seems sprinkled everywhere between the recognised sights of the sightseer. These secondary splendours are nearly all of one period and in one style. They are in that florid form of the classic which filled Europe, with increasing luxuriance though often with lessening merit, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. These are the things that stamp Rome as the Gothic stamps Rouen or Nuremberg; a man who likes this sort of thing will probably like Rome; a man who heartily dislikes it will heartily dislike Rome; and I shall not think the worse of him for saying so.

On nearly all these civic monuments or trophies, the stranger will soon see in old but large and lucid lettering, very widely spaced and very majestically designed, at least some fragment like the phrase, " Pontifex Max.” and the more sensitive Puritan will once more find himself in the presence of the subtle machinations of the Pope. The Papal conspiracy is not perhaps quite so covert or underground as he has been given to understand. In these very large letters there is some failure in Jesuitical discretion; and, before the end of his visit, he will probably find himself abusing the Popes for exactly the opposite reason to his old one; a change of attack to which Popes have grown somewhat accustomed from of old. He will feel most probably, and not unnaturally or unreasonably, that there is something quite appallingly pagan and presumptuous about this brazen blazoning everywhere of the title of a Vicar of Christ. I can quite understand that feeling, and I am not making fun of it. There is an answer; but there is a question, and it is on the face of it a fair question. A great part of this book will necessarily be devoted to answering it. But at this stage I am not merely impatient with the Puritan for being shocked. Rather do I desire to lead him by the hand into inner circles of the city, where he will be more shocked. I wish him indeed to begin at the other end and the very extreme of what he finds shocking, in the central temple of Papal Rome, where the dreadful pontiffs seem to be demonstrative even in death. We talk of things silent as the grave; we can hardly say of these graves that they are even silent. And I put the paradox here, because I wish the critic to consider first a certain special type of art; and especially of sculpture. Many have said that architecture is frozen music. I would suggest a sort of statuary that is like frozen rhetoric.

I will leave the True Christian to labour a very obvious contrast between St. Peter’s and St. Peter. As a matter of fact, like many laboured and obvious things, it is not so true as it looks. Simon Peter was probably a simple man; but men often dislike pomp or splendour because they arc not simple enough to like it. No notes were made at the time about the great Fisherman’s taste in architecture, his friends being otherwise employed on matters which they (being also simple men) fancied to be more urgent. But if he had any particular admiration for any particular building, I should say he is as likely as not to have been thrilled, in a deplorably theatrical manner, by the florid Corinthian magnificence of the Herodian Temple, And if to-morrow morning a Neopolitan fisherman, fresh from the nets and in exactly the same childlike spirit as Simon of Galilee, made his first journey from the sea to Rome, I strongly suspect that he would throw up his hands in wonder as Michael Angelo intended him to do. For all art is sensational, since it aims at producing some sort of sensation. There are other examples of the fact that the simple may see subtle things, even after the subtle have so long lectured and laid down the law about rather simple things. It is a simple and self-evident thing, for instance, that the great shrine of the Fisherman is " inlaid with gorgeous marbles ” or " encrusted with gold and many-coloured stones.” It is perhaps less simple, but even more true, that in spite of this luxurious licence and variegation, a common tone is somehow kept, which is at once predominant and yet quiet. A scheme of colour in itself temperate and simple, a sort of pearly grey picked out with a singular sort of dark chocolate red, does manage to master and unify the whole building and make the gaudiest of the incidental colours merely incidental. Secondly, the same severe northern critic will certainly criticise the Tombs of the Popes with all the more severity because he does not know which is which, and has probably never heard of any of them before. He sees the Holy Fathers are all gesticulating in a turbulent Italian fashion, and enjoys all the advantages of not having a notion of what they are gesticulating about. But even he would think it odd if Richard the First, waving a sword at Westminster, were jeered at by a savage who had never even heard of the Crusades; or foreigners pointed at the baton of Wellington without even knowing that it might be pointed at Waterloo. And if the critic will condescend to examine the admirably carved reliefs in the entablatures before the tombs (all of them fine pieces in craftsmanship of their own kind) there will gradually dawn, upon his dizzy and reeling senses, the suggestion that the Popes of Rome have really had to do with rather important incidents in the history of the world. He will find one presiding over the terrestrial globes and the great geographical explorations that made the modern world; another establishing buildings and galleries that are still the glory of the world; and one of the last, and most pathetic, praying to Our Lady to lift up the Holy Child over a grim and graven background of the whole dim pandemonium of the Great War. We may agree or disagree with these posturing pontiffs, but they were not provincial or even private; they had rather a way of being in the middle of things. Lastly, there is a quality about this posturing, if you call it posturing, which it is quite vital to understand if we are to understand anything about Italy or the Italian spirit. In some aspects it is called vivacity. In this aspect, and for my purpose, it is perhaps most true to call it oratory. These Popes are orators in stone, and all this sculpture is rhetorical sculpture. And those who dislike it, or dismiss it, go off and gaze with owlish reverence at the old pagan Forum; and buy large brown photographs of the Forum which make it look much larger than it is, to hang in their drawing-rooms. And it never once occurs to them to remember that the old Romans were Italians; or to ask what a Forum was for.

As I shall mention more than once, I know all that there is to be said against the rococo quality of the Renaissance. It did marvels in statuary, or sculpture in the round; but many may feel that the statues are rather too round. It blinded the world with a blaze of white marble, that was like so much frozen and solidified light. But many wish it were no more solidified than snow, and that all the marble gods might melt with the Snow Man of Michael Angelo. I am not now debating or defending these things; I am trying to disentangle a certain element which is not debated or defended or even often detected but which is of the soil and is dug up like the marble in the mountains of Italy. We all remember the carelessness which Macaulay carelessly attributed to the ancient Romans:

The stone that breathes and struggles,

The brass that seems to speak

Such cunning they who dwell on high Have given unto the Greek.

It would be truer to say that they have given it to the Romm Tt ia a much more correct description of the art to be found in Rome. The Venus of Milo does not struggle; and it is the very power of her presence that she hardly seems to breathe. There are of course in all these things complexities that confuse generalisations. But the Greeks began, as we know, by proclaiming that there must be severe statues, and ended, as we shall see, by saying that there must be no statues. There ran through all Hellas, even in its most humanistic moment, a certain stern simplification, and a calm like waking sleep, which may have been affected by lying so close under the shadow of the erect and rigid gods of Egypt and the East. Anyhow “ the stone that breathes and struggles ” does not describe even the Elgin Marbles, which are full of trampling horsemen and wrestling centaurs. But it does describe the Papal Tombs in St. Peter’s at Rome, though they deal with holy and hoary men dead and at rest in the Lord, but exhibit them alive with thunderous brows and hands uplifted as if with thunderbolts; as positive as despots, as passionate as demagogues. The stone breathes and struggles and breaks out into great cries almost audible down the ages; for these are the statues of the sacred orators of Italy; the speakers of the Word that is given urbi et orbi; the men who spoke as princes to the city and as priests to the world. “ If these were silent the very stones would cry out.”

I know it is not easy for my countrymen to seize this aspect. They have heard of Alexander Borgia, and deduced that all Cardinals have been commonly occupied in poisoning each other. They have never heard of Francis Borgia; or of countless Popes who were quite as humble and simple as Francis Borgia. They do not know that many, even of these Papal patrons of the Baroque, whose sculptures swelled into clustering grapes and capering cupids, were themselves men of pure manners and of abstemious diet; living like hermits in comparison with many a British merchant, or even Baptist minister, whose London was a nightmare of chimneys and chimney-pot hats, but whose own mahogany groaned under all the luxuries that greed or gluttony could demand. The Popes fasted and made their city beautiful; the Puritans feasted and left their city hideous. This may be one-sided, but it is the side we turn to the wall. The rococo temple may be vulgar; but even this tawdry trifle of Michael Angelo is not much uglier than the brick Bethels and Emmanuels of Manchester built after two hundred years of further intellectual progress. And if, alas, civilisation means luxury, it sometimes means taste; and not all advantages are with the taste of tea and muffins. Anyhow, the Pontiffs were great patrons of sculpture. Each one who st'md's here a 'statue ordered the «?tatue. of another, leaving a stone pedigree like a procession of statues. One of them was responsible for raising, or trying to raise, that incredible army of statues, which was to occupy the city like a multitudinous invasion of the gods; and of which one or two remain, not altogether unnoticed, like monsters after a flood; such as that strange horned and bearded god or monster, to whom his great maker gave the name of Moses. And yet I am not thinking of the statue-makers or the patrons of statuary, but of one who long before, in dim and distant centuries, stood at the beginning of the story of the statues.

My mind goes back, amid all these marble monuments, to another Pontifex Maximus, who I suppose has no such monument; certainly no such prominent monument. And yet he stands in history as the founder of this great city of the statues, and, after that monumental fashion, the maker of Rome. But for him, and those who maintained his policy, this town that teems around me with lively imagery, good, bad and indifferent, would now be as naked as a Pyramid and as featureless as a Quaker burial-ground. And because this story of the stand he made, and its creative consequences, is very little known even in educated England, I propose to pause upon it here. I should like to do a little justice to those stiff archaic pontiffs who, when all our own world was as yet practically undiscovered, determined the course of history and saved us before vve were born. For all this sculpture, which is here called oratorical, is in very truth the reverberations of a voice. All this struggling stone, all these marble masks “ that seem to speak,” do indeed depend through all ages on a spoken word; and the priests who look down on us like judges are here through a single judgment long ago.

If we could undo the past... if that word could be unsaid, then indeed all this too, too solid marble would melt and flow back to the mountains, and the columns wilt like withered stalks, and the City of the Fountains dry up and disappear. That image of an imageless town, and Tiber unvisited, must be my excuse for selecting here one example out of many; the debate on Images which shaped Christendom and therefore the modem world. It may seem odd that the story of our culture should begin with the Image-Breakers and end with the Imagists. But it is not for nothing, even in literature, that we Europeans talk always of imagery and of figures of speech. It is not for nothing that even those who blame Image-Worship praise Imagination. Anyhow, here is the story, and it proves one thing at least. When the world was fanatical, the Church was moderate. Or (if you prefer it so) when the Church was fanatical, the Pope was moderate.

T)p

5o

M R. H. G. WELLS had the misfortune to write an Outline of History, having in his heart two hearty detestations; a hatred of Pagan Rome and a hatred of Christian Rome. Were I to step out of my common course and write an Outline of Science, being consumed with a contempt for the subjects of Matter and Force, or an Outline of Darwinian Evolution, having an exquisitely balanced loathing for monkeys and men, or an Outline of Chemistry when I could not contain myself for fury at the very thought of oxygen or hydrogen, or any of the chemical elements, my misfortunes in these various fields would certainly be far worse than his. He is in that sense to be congratulated on having come through so triumphantly, and written a most interesting book in spite of his disgust with nearly all the most interesting things in it. The double disgust in this case is somewhat unusual. Some rather narrow Catholics have exaggerated the horrors of heathen Rome, but even the narrowest had a broad field of human sympathy among the very varied saints and doctors of Christian

Rome. Some even more narrow sceptics, of the type of Gibbon or Middleton, have similarly exaggerated the Christian faults; but these were generally the very men who delighted in stately salutations to the stoical heathen virtues. To make a quintessence of narrowness, out of the intersection of these two narrow views, has been reserved for that modern man of genius who is never tired of telling us to cultivate a wider outlook and stretch out " to something larger than all this.” He has rather the appearance of being pushed towards this blank future by a process of elimination; though it seems possible that it is the future that will be eliminated. A traditionalist will be tempted to ask of many Futurists, " If a man does not love men whom he has seen, how shall he love Supermen whom he has not seen? ” These matters, however, are not in question here; and I will only claim to write of Rome in so far as I think I can understand heathens better than he can Catholics. But his name and example occurred to me in connection with the idea of an Outline of History; because I had a sense of penitence or relenting towards him, and a disposition to unsay much I had said, when I found how frightfully difficult even a small section of an Outline is to draw. I feel it specially difficult in relation to the historical incidents in the quarrel of Rome and Byzantium, on which depended.

I think, not only our own destiny but even our own existence.

Very broadly, however, the determining events were these. The Empress Helena, like several Roman ladies, was a Catholic by private conversion and undoubtedly by the most personal conviction and devotion. She persuaded her son Constantine the Great to become a Catholic; but, although the whole matter is disputed, it is not unfair to say that it was probably less of a personal and more of a political conversion. By which I do not mean a vulgar sneer, in the style of the modern imitators of Gibbon, to the effect that he was a humbug with an axe to grind. I mean rather what many such moderns would regard as a compliment; that he was thinking rather more of saving his empire than of saving his soul. He was a soldier and a statesman and not a humbug; and if he had an axe to grind, it was at least the ancient axe of the Fasces of Rome. And yet it came about that he deserted Rome because he was so very Roman.

The riddle is read thus. Two needs or tendencies were apparent to him; on which his curious double action was taken. The first was the feeling which the wiser Stoic Emperors must have had; that the queer patchwork world, which was now one realm, really needed one religion; probably combined with the feeling of how perfectly hopeless for that purpose was the religion of the Stoic Emperors and the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius rides the high horse with his high ideals on the high place of the Capitol. But when I saw his head against blue sky I knew I had seen that profile in many Ethical Societies. I respect it and him, but you cannot get a corporate confession and communion out of that woolly-headed, woolly-bearded, woolly-witted moralist. The religion must be a religion, and not a philosophy; at the same time it could not merely be a cult, for the cults were all local and many of them lawless. To quote Mr. Wells again, if men are like Gods, we would like to know which Gods; and whether man is to be Moloch the murderer or Mercury the thief. And the second element which affected him and all his time was what may be called, in a modern political phrase, the Drag Towards the East. As the Roman Empire solidified into one civilisation, it became apparent that the East was the more civilised end of it. The rich ruins of Egypt and Babylon counted more than the German forests or the remote British islands. But there was something much deeper than that in the oriental trend. Men did not then use such words of it; but the East was powerful because the mind of man was once more becoming mystical. It was not in itself necessarily an improvement. The best men and the worst men are mystics; and the innocent materialist is better than the last, as worse than the first. And the Mystery out of the East might have had too much of the wisdom of the Serpent rather than the purity of the Dove. But what the Augurs saw was the Dove turning back the Eagles.

Anyhow, Constantine under this oriental influence did two very strange and symbolic things; things that have changed the world and will be remembered to the last records of men; but perhaps remembered rather than understood. First, of course, he proclaimed the New Religion in Rome. He accepted, or half accepted, like a man dazzled by new light, the vision that advanced towards him out of the East, which had stricken Saul prostrate upon the road to Damascus and sundered Augustine from the ancient schools of Athens. This was in itself a thing to stagger the stars, for all those who knew how deep in that deep rock was the old civic religion of Rome, and how every detail of life in antiquity was interlaced with rituals and guarded by gods. A Roman might more readily have understood an edict establishing a new sun and moon, or proclaiming that henceforward winter must come immediately after spring, as imagine that his piety and his pride were no longer to revolve round the Temple of Vesta or the thunderous god of the Capitoline rock. The thing is done for ever, and no man born will ever now realise how strange it was. But the other thing that Constantine did has always seemed to me even stranger. And it is part of something not only mystical but enigmatic, in the whole matter, that these two acts were done by one man in one reign; and it is possible that as the one was the beginning of all Christian triumphs, so the other was the beginning of all Christian tragedies.

He did not only welcome this eastern mystery as it moved westward towards the rock of Rome. He conceived the extraordinary idea of moving Rome eastward, as if to meet it halfway. He conceived the idea of tearing up the rock and moving it like a rolling stone towards the sunrise and the strange deserts where the New God had been bom. It was almost as if the oriental influence had blown upon Rome of the stubborn stones and landmarks, the fenced fields and the sacred walls, something of that nomadic and wandering spirit that belonged to the desert peoples. He seems to have fancied that he could shift the palace like a pavilion and lead forth the immemorial Capitol like a caravan. Romans had known the city built of brick and the city built of marble, and now they were almost commanded to fold their tents like the Arabs. There must have been some unearthly atmosphere of unrest everywhere that made the notion seem possible. As the Three Kings came out of the East bearing gifts of gold and incense, the greatest King of all the kings of the earth might have been represented in some painted parable as coming out of the West bearing gifts of marble and mighty bronze; holding in one hand the Arch of Titus and in the other the Temple of Vesta. For though he did not move such things materially, this is in truth what he did morally; he uprooted and transplanted Rome. He took away all that made the sacred city sacred in its pagan past; the great palace and the Senate and the Legions and the golden eagles of Caesar. And he set these things up again in a strange land towards the sides of morning, upon the Golden Horn in the far country of the Greeks. He left behind no tiring except the chains of Peter, to clank in a forgotten prison.

Like so many men who live near the end of a whole civilisation, he was full of the notion of founding a new world. So we have countless Utopias and ideal republics scattered over the new countries, at the very time when the republican idea has grown old and even corrupt in its own European home. The very idea of going somewhere else to start a perfect scheme is a sign of growing imperfection. While men are virtuous, and especially while they are vigorous, they like to be vigorous at home. Many an American millionaire fills larger and larger foreign palaces with his fatigue, who once filled a little wooden frame-house with his energy. But despite any such underlying weakness, we must not neglect the apparent public utility and even personal hopefulness of the Eastern experiment. The practical and political arguments for it were strong; and the practical and political results of it were triumphant and apparently, for a long time, enduring. It was not until long afterwards that the Empire found that, in the bustle of moving, it had left behind the only thing that could endure. For all practical purposes at the time, the oriental experiment was in a special sense oriental; in the rare sense in which that word, so often used for what is old and decadent, stands in truth for what is fresh and new; Ex oriente lux and the new palace rose upon the Golden Horn like a new sunrise. It was indeed to be the beginning of what seemed, and in some ways was, an epoch of glory. From that palace Justinian was to send forth the Pandects which were to repave all Europe with the firm and equal pavement of the Roman Law; from that palace Heraclius was to go forth to victory, overthrowing the great Empire of Persia at Ispahan. In the train of that great trek from Rome to Byzantium there followed all that would naturally follow the real movement of the Monarchy; all fashion, all culture, all courtesies and social rituals; the scholars; the poets; the builders and artificers. They erected that monumental Byzantine art; austere, mathematical, majestic; which, so long neglected by more sentimental schools, has begun of late to find approval in an age of intellectual ultimates and extremes. To all mortal appearance, Constantine had done the trick. He had actually succeeded in moving the centre of the earth. He had made the whole solar system of society revolve round a new sun, leaving the old sun as cold and hollow as a moon. The whole world turned on the new pivot, and even, it would seem, the unworldly in so far as they had to recognise the world. We find a man like the Venerable Bede, a Saxon monk far away on the cold coasts of Northumbria, dating and arranging his documents by the changes of the court of Byzantium. How far Constantine himself knew what he did, or expected his immediate success, it may be difficult to prove, but I think he realised very much of it. I think he felt there was going to be a fresh start; a New Rome along with a New Religion. He may well have seen the rise of the New Rome out of the e^rth almost »s hopefully as St. John saw the descent of the New Jerusalem out of the skies. But there was a difference. St. John interposed between himself and his perfect township an incidental detail or condition, called the end of the world. It is the custom of the small-headed prigs who explain away the Christian origins to scoff, in an amusingly lofty manner, at the poor Early Christians, because in their superstition they imagined that the end of the world was coming. The Early Christians were much nearer the truth than Constantine.

Old Rome was left behind almost like a ruin; it is a symbol but hardly an exaggerative one to say that grass grew in the streets and even in the temples. The decline was long masked by the balancing of Eastern by Western Emperors; but the Eastern eventually extinguished or annexed the Western. Those acquainted with popular history, who talk of the two great periods of Rome’s material and moral empire, the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes, are often oblivious or unconscious of this curious interlude of the widowhood and desertion of Rome; of the weedy neglect and provincial stagnation. As men say that the jungle makes a silent invasion of a dead city, so the vast vague savagery of Western Europe, still in a great degree nameless and nationless and nomadic, drifted through and wasted and discoloured this dead city of the Tiber and the Tarpeian Rock. Perhaps, by way of another symbol, we may say that Rome above ground might have rotted, but Rome underground remained; the Catacombs or the prison of the martyrs. But the broad historical fact, on which turned such immense destinies of history, can be stated simply enough. The Emperor of Rome had left Rome; but the Bishop of Rome had not.

Anybody can see, in this strange situation, what silent question was really put to the world. Caesar, moving eastward, had taken the whole world with him. If anything was left, like a ghost in an empty house, it was something not of the world. The purely practical claim of Rome against Byzantium was so futile, on the face of it, that it is hard to find a parallel. But suppose that, to-morrow morning, the Dean of Winchester were to announce that his town was of larger importance than London, and was the one great political centre of the whole British Empire, he would be rather in the position of the Pope pleading for the Old Rome against the New Rome. Winchester once really was the capital of England; but most English-men have forgotten the fact for some little time. The actual present resources of Winchester, for sustaining the part of London, are not large. But English towns are all close together and in a compact mass of civilisation. Rome and Byzantium were divided by seas and deserts and bounded to the west by a world still wild and unknown, only partially regulated by Roman roads and camps. All the forces were in favour of Rome becoming not only provincial but even barbarous. And even Rome itself did to some extent become barbarous. One small fact, out of many that might be given, may serve to illustrate a relative condition now so hard to imagine. When the later disputes arose between the Western Pope and the Eastern Patriarchs, one of the latter Greek doctors (if I remember right, the Patriarch of Antioch) offered himself in a very noble Christian spirit as a peace-maker, and tried to induce the other Patriarchs to treat the old Roman priests with respect. And the argument he used was, almost in these words: "You must not be angry with the poor Romans; they are rude and ignorant and have never had our advantages; it is not as if you were arguing with educated people.” That is how the merely cultural and social relations stood. And all the time, there was something underneath; something that was neither cultural nor social; something that never ceased to repeat, with stubborn and almost sulky repetition, the name of Peter. And even as morning, noon and night the brazen and the golden trumpets gave forth to the four corners of the world the unchallenged proclamation, " Ubi Caesar, Ibi Imperium," there came out of the deserted town and the deep places, deep as the dungeon of the chains, the unvarying answer, “ Ubi Petrus, Ibi Ecclesia.”

But as time went on, something began to be seen in Constantinople that had never been foreseen by Constantine. Something took hold of the New Rome which would never perhaps have taken hold of the Old Rome. Old Rome had been weakened by Asiatic luxuries and sometimes inflamed by Asiatic sects; but there was something behind these superficial things, something that the old Roman would never have understood; things more intangible and more terrible and perhaps more evil, which can only be called Asiatic abstractions. The Roman, whatever else he was, had never been a nihilist; and there was something of nihilism in the night of mysticism which covered some of the Eastern mystics. The creed of Mani and Zoroaster was not the particular sort of Persian apparatus which Horace had ever had occasion to dispense with. But it was in some ways a very scientific apparatus; and systems of this rather hard and inhuman sort were already pressing upon the Eastern frontiers of the Empire, and the Church. Perhaps tins tendency can now be seen best in the convention and compromise in the Greek Orthodox system, by which an ikon may be a fat picture but must not be a solid sculpture in the round; and the rather quaint effect of this compromise, according to which the halo or nimbus, supposed to be merely a space of light or a ring of fire, can be carved so as to stand out in solid golden horns and hoops, more prominent than any human features, while the human featured face has to remain as flat as a shadow and as superficial as a diagram. Whatever the reasons given, or even the contributory causes operating, we can all feel in this the presence of a certain spirit, awful and negative and not without grandeur; the Greek in the last days flattening the faces of his gods. For indeed this strange story had a stranger culmination and sequel. It was out of this Byzantine temple, as out of some purely Moslem mosque, that there burst a few centuries later the fury of the Iconoclasts. It is indeed a weird ending to one of the most wonderful stories of history. It was finally the Greeks who went forth to destroy all the statues of the world.

In the path of this whirlwind of fanaticism stood Old Rome ruined and the Pope. He had never in theory lost the power to protest or even to condemn. I can here only roughly summarise a story complicated with endless controversies; but it is true to say that the neglect or desertion of the Roman Pontiff had never been anything but practical and political; one might almost say fashionable. In matters of theorj' and theology, he had never ceased to claim his authority; and in matters of theory and theology nobody had ever, in any clear and convincing way, denied his authority. But his practical position was weak; and the practical position of the great Patriarchs surrounding the golden throne of Caesar was very strong. They had behind them not only the whole power of the Sacred Emperor, but the resources of rich, ancient and highly civilised lands; they stood for Alexandria of the Greeks and the Egyptians, for Jerusalem of the Jews, for all that could be inherited of the greatness of Babylon and Assyria, of Sidon and Tyre. All this greatness lay to the East; nothing lay to the West but a wilderness of half-civilised Gauls and uncivilised Goths. This is the situation to be understood if we are to appreciate the point, I might say the shock, of what followed.

The sequel of Constantinople was the result of a separate secular Christian State removed from Old Rome of the martyrs and the memories. Exactly what had happened to it is not easy to describe. There pass, from time to time, over the mind of man certain vast and mighty moods which make the movements of the world; and one of them passed just then over the whole world that was the Byzantine Empire. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note of it is to say that it was the same movement, of which the complete and conscious and consistent form was the religion of Mahomet. It is an instance of the irony of history that many Byzantine Emperors, who resisted the Moslem invasion with splendid victories or sacrificial deaths, were themselves half Moslems in this deeper movement of the mind. It was rational as the Moslem monotheism is rational. It was fanatical as the Moslem destructiveness was fanatical. It was perhaps something a little like what we call Puritan. But it had more in it of Greek subtlety than Puritanism implies; it was rather as if the Greek genius, which had sought out so many inventions and imaginations, now desired to retire from them and to five only in the mind. It was also affected, as we have seen, by the proximity of the Judaic elements and origins of Christianity. It was probably affected, more indirectly, by the pessimism and negation of the Manichees and the mystics of Asia. Much of it seemed logical enough; but I fancy it is not unfair to say that Eastern Christianity was a little too Eastern to be quite Christian. Considering the sense always given to the antithesis of Hebraism and Hellenism, it is odd that the end of the Empire that was most Hellenic was most Hebraic. The stem simplicity of Moses and Mohamet became the ideal of Greeks, the subconscious ideal even of Catholics; and the quarrel came to an issue over this matter of whether graven images could be allowed to Christians. A reaction alm ost rationalistic had set in against the idols of paganism, and with it against the images of Christendom. Perhaps where the Moslem had a faith, the Christian had only a doubt. But it was a doubt that hardened more and more into a denial.

Nothing is so hard on the world as the world. Generally, in comparison, there has been much more mercy and moderation in the Church. Nothing is more inhuman than humanity itself to human habits, affections or weaknesses, when they happen to be unpopular for particular reasons at a particular moment; and they are likely to be more ruthlessly treated by a craze than by a creed. Thus Prohibition was not invented by priests, and is generally rather opposed by priests. Prohibition was promoted by a modem political democracy; or rather a plutocracy, which is still more modem. Very much as the secular power of a whole continent formally forbade all drinks, so the secular power of the great Greek Empire formally forbade all dolls or carved images. And Rome refuses to join in the old veto, as in the new. Just as the Pope would say now that abstinence might be good, but moderation must be innocent, so the Pope said then that images might be abused, but refused to say that they must never be used. Iconoclasm was in the air then, as teetotalism is in the air now; it was the way the world was going and a man might go with it without becoming a Moslem, j ust as a man can now go with the centralising sort of social reforms without becoming a Socialist. Men often associated image-breaking with zeal and austerity and the things then most admired; as we associate “ temperance reform ” with hygiene and science and all the talismanic words of the modern system of magic. It is interesting to note that the Moslem, the real man of that moment, destined to be the conqueror of that epoch and especially of that empire, did actually combine both the ancient and modern veto. Wine as well as statues seemed wicked to him; he was not only as much of an Iconoclast as the Isaurian but as much of a Prohibitionist as the President of the United States. It is all part of the same mood; and man left to himself is a victim of moods. This mood of prohibition is always a mood of compulsion, of conquest and the cleansing of the earth of every trace of the temporarily detested thing; that sort of man must always crush the human world in order to sift it. But the Church is not of this world, and can be Hnder to it

Popular history contrasts the Roman with the Greek, and always in one aspect; representing the Greek as graceful and humane but excitable and unstable; the Roman as hard and stolid but orderly and reliable. English writers repeat this so often that they really seem to have forgotten that the Romans were Italians. In fact, they sometimes seem to suffer from the illusion that the Romans were Englishmen. In neither case, of course, was the character so simple as that. It would be easy to contradict flatly the legend of the solid Roman and the lively Greek. It would be easy to make a case for the Greek being more harsh and the Roman more amiable. It would be easy to show that the abstract beauty of Greek statues is the beauty of blind and cruel gods; and that, in comparison, the portrait busts that abound in Old Rome are as human and humorous and kindly as a row of portraits by Raeburn or Reynolds. It would be easy to point out that even that early Roman history, represented as so rigid, is really as full of gestures as a gesticulating Italian organ-grinder. It was surely an Italian who shook his robe angrily against the jeering crowd of Tarentum; an Italian who thrust his right hand furiously into the fire of Lars Porsena; an Italian who swore on the uplifted sword a great vengeance on the tribe of Tarquin; an Italian who hurled the head of Hasdrubal into the camp of the Carthaginians. We might add that, while men forget that the Romans were Italians, they also rather curiously forget that the Spartans were Greeks. The theory and practice of Lacedaemon was far more harsh and inhuman than anything in the most savage days of Rome, back to the very lair of the wolf. But this method tends to a superficial and special pleading; and the truth is more deep and therefore more delicate. So far as I can guess at it, the truth is this. Both Greeks and Romans were peoples with something in them that seems, by a northern comparison, at once ardent and radiant. They had a store of heat and light, which they used both well and ill. But there was something in the Greeks whereby the rays always struck outwards at some ideal or art or science or object of curiosity. But the Roman radiated inwards, so to speak; he was most himself when he turned back to some interior and intimate relation; his religion was fundamentally domestic; his gods were household gods. Therefore he believed profoundly in modesty and in dignity; and therefore he did seem rigid and respectable, compared with a company of Greeks running naked after beauty and philosophy. And this domestic warmth can still be seen in the warm Italian character; and naturally in none more than in the religious, even when they appear to have forsworn domesticity. Nuns are not mothers, but they never seem to be unmotherly. And there were always Vestal Virgins in Rome; but what they guarded was a flame.

Now I think it is true that, as compared with this, the abstract artistic Greek spirit had something hard about it. In one aspect, there was almost as much that was hard about the Republic of Plato in ideal as about the Republic of Lycurgus in reality. It was frigid in the sense that some found something frigid in Fabianism and the social ideal of Mr. Bernard Shaw. For Bernard Shaw is sometimes as stern as Plato, just as Plato was sometimes as flippant as Bernard Shaw. Similarly, the brutality of the Spartan was not domestic and rustic, like the brutality of Brutus. It was a scientific and sociological brutality, like that of those who would model the state on a beehive or an anthill. The Ideal was the curse of Hellas; for the ideal can be more hardening or even more brutalising than the real. The Roman mother and child, huddled under the rude wooden Lar, were very real; but Plato dealt with babies in batches like the statisticians of Birth-Control. None of these generalisations, or rather guesses, can cover the field or the many exceptions. But when we remember that the great poet Plato (as he must be called) banished poets from his Republic, we have a glimmer of why the great

Greek Emperor banished sculptors from his Empire.

As Hellas when heathen had wished its philosophers to be entirely philosophical, so Hellas turned Christian wished its theologians to be entirely theological. Something at once strict and subtle in its intelligence made all its dialectics as intangible as mathematics. It was as if the world was to be saved rather by the figures of Euclid than by the figures of Phidias; but chiefly by that sort of Super-Euclid in which there can be no figures at all. The Greek intellect in its last days, in what is loosely called its decline, worked miracles of mental arithmetic in moral and religious matters; it produced definitions and distinctions that are quite as much the masterpieces of their kind as is the Parthenon or the Pindaric Odes. It split hairs quite as perfectly as it had sculptured heroes; but it no longer desired to sculpture heroes. But in Italy there had long been a ruder but a much more rooted tradition both of sculpture and of hero-worship. Only the point was, as I have said, that most of the hero-worship was home-worship. There was therefore in any case something ancestrally and antecedentally appropriate about the fact that the Pontifex Maximus stood up for the Western traditions, which had been'.human”even when^they were heathen; and in that dark day of invasion the bridge-builder defended the bridge. It was Italy of the household gods that was given up to the fuiy of the Iconoclasts. Only those household gods had now taken on a new meaning, and with it a new mystery; they were no longer the fables of infancy but the truths of the true religion, calling to the manhood of the world; and that is why it is worth recalling here how the priest by the little town of the Tiber played the part of a man. Christ and Mary had become the greatest of Household Gods. For the West also had to make its contribution to universal religion; they say the East is the home of religions; but in the West is the religion of the home.

This is what we must realise if we are to realise the rather dramatic turn of the second great emergence of the Italian spirit. We might almost call it the second rise of Rome against the predominance of Greece. As the doctrinal differences deepened between the Pope and the Patriarchs, they came of course upon other and more theoretical differences than that between the icons of Greece and the statues of Italy. The tremendous and tragic scruple upon the Filioque became the formal issue of controversy, along with other matters that now seem rather disproportionate to the disaster of schism; such as the temporary habit of the Westerns of fasting on Saturday; a point on which there is now no longer any difference at all. But I take this quarrel about idolatry, and the affair of the Iconoclasts, partly because it is profoundly typical of the two spirits at work; partly because it is easier to handle as a popular parable turning on a practical action; and partly because I think it had huge historical consequences that have been rather neglected even by the great historians. At the time I speak of, at any rate, the situation was this: The Master of the World, the King of Kings whom even the Christian revolution had hardly made to seem less than a god, leaned his imperial sympathy and protection to this new and naked Hebraism in the East; and supported the new Puritans against the Papacy. It was with Csesar and civilisation behind them that these men went forth to break the Italian statues, as if they were idols of some barbarous Asiatic borderland condemned by a Caliph of Islam.

A man writing these words in Rome stops almost with a start and looks around him. He sits in a city crowded with churches, with every church crowded with statues. The streets are blocked with fountains wreathed with tritons and columns surmounted by saints. But it is especially in the great churches, designed like classical temples, that we have that exuberance of classical realism which possesses everything except classical repose. To some, especially those who love the Northern mysticism of the

Gothic, there is something positively oppressive, even repulsive, and as it were indigestible, about these tumultuous and multitudinous marbles; a white nightmare of waving arms and fluttering draperies; something that is cold and colourless and yet boiling and bubbling like one of its own fountains. I have known men who came to hate it so much, that it seemed as if the city were plague-stricken with a white leprosy of marble; with the figures of giant lepers writhing and crying out as if possessed. But these men were narrow and nearly mad; and it is worth noting that those who hate the classical revival, quite so much as this, are generally medievalists but not Catholics. The Catholic becomes a little more Catholic. The fair way of stating it is that the Renaissance overdid it, as most things overdo themselves; and the things it did are too big to be a detail, too energetic to be a background, and too recent to be a ruin. But these things are largely a matter of mood; and a more masculine mood may yet recover the appetite of our fathers for the stony athletics of these leaping saints and dancing apostles. Whatever they are, the sculptor has made them Muscular Christians. The point here, however, is the strange contrast between Rome Christian and Catholic, as it has come to be to-day, in the course of history, and the mood of that feud of the image-breakers in the Dark Ages. Many a man to-day has felt that there are rather too many statues in Rome. Many a meek tourist may have been tempted to be an Iconoclast. The feeling was stronger about thirty years ago, when Nonconformist tutors and schoolmasters went about carrying Ruskin instead of Baedeker. But that, it might fairly be said, only proved that the statues of the sixteenth century might be more alive than the men of the nineteenth. Anyhow, this prodigious outcrop of sculpture, which some think heathen and which is certainly very human, was in history the crown of Christian Rome and the final flowering of the power of the Papacy. And it is curious to remember that, in those first dim days, it hung on this one thread of a theological distinction in the disputes of the Dark Ages. 1

Theological distinctions are fine but not thin. In all the mess of modem thoughtlessness that still calls itself modern thought, there is perhaps nothing so stupendously stupid as the common saying, “ Religion can never depend on minute disputes about doctrine.” It is like saying that life can never depend on minute disputes about medicine. The man who is content to say, " We do not want theologians splitting hairs,” will

1 The distinctions were so fine, and even faint, that I am forced here to shorten and simplify a most complex story — and envy and admire Mr. Wells. Everybody wavered under the wind of Iconoclasm; but the Western Church stiffened against it — and so prodnrwi arid fh** 'RArr<»t«®' 1 TK*® doubtless be content to go on and say, " We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs.” It is the fact that many a man would be dead to-day, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilisation would be dead to-day, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine. Nobody will ever write a History of Europe that will make any sort of sense, until he does justice to the Councils of the Church, those vast and yet subtle collaborations for thrashing out a thousand thoughts to find the true thought of the Church. The great religious Councils are far more practical and important than the great international Treaties, which are generally made the pivotal dates of history. Our everyday affairs at this moment are far more affected by Nicaea and Ephesus and Basle and Trent than they are by Utrecht or Amiens or Vienna or Versailles. For in almost every case, the international peace was founded on a compromise; the religious peace was founded on a distinction. It was not a compromise to say that Jesus Christ was Perfect God and Perfect Man; as it was a compromise to say that Dantzig should be partly Polish and partly German. It was the enunciation of a principle, of which the very completeness distinguishes it from the Monophysite on the one side and the A rim on the other. And it affected, and does still affect, the general state of mind of thousands of Europeans, from admirals to apple- women, who do think (even vaguely) of Christ as something human and divine. To ask the apple-woman what are the present practical results for her of the Treaty of Utrecht would be less than fruitful. Now our civilisation is simply made up of these old moral decisions; which many think minute decisions. On the day which ended certain metaphysical disputations about Fate and Freedom, it was decided whether Austria should look like Arabia or whether travelling in Spain should be the same as travelling in Morocco. When the dogmatists drew a fine distinction between the sort of honour due to marriage and the sort of honour due to virginity, they stamped the culture of a whole continent with a definite pattern of red and white; a pattern which some people may not like; but which all people recognise when they revile. When men distinguished between lawful lending and usury, they created an actual historical human conscience, which even the enormous modern triumph of usury, in the materialistic age, has not yet wholly destroyed. When St. Thomas Aquinas defined true property, and also defined the abuses of false property, the tradition of that truth made a real recognisable breed of men, to be recognised to-day in the mob politics of Melbourne or Chicago; almost always differing from the Communists in admitting property; yet almost always, in practice, in protest against plutocracy. In short, these thin distinctions grew up into very thick and thorough-going principles and even prejudices. If such a theological distinction is a thread, all Western history has hung on that thread; if it is a fine point, all our past has been balanced on that point. The subtle distinctions have made the simple Christians; all the men who think drink right and drunkenness wrong, all the men who think marriage normal and polygamy abnormal, all the men who think it wrong to hit first and right to hit back; and, as in the present case, all the men who think it right to carve statues and wrong to worship them. These are all, when one comes to think of it, very subtle theological distinctions.

But the case of the statues has a special importance in the argument here. It is true, as I have said, that many of these, the finest and the most fruitful distinctions, have been made by the recognised Councils; by those armies of sacred diplomatists drawing up the Treaties of Truth, or at least the Truces of God. But the same fact is even more striking when the whole future depended upon a single distinction, and the single distinction depended upon a single man. Whatever the reader may think, in a theological sense, about the function claimed by the

Pope, in relation to the functions of the Council, as of the Bible or any other authority, he should have enough historical imagination to feel that there was something historically momentous about that lonely man and that large and spreading destiny. It was the Pope alone, for all practical purposes, who stood out upon the fine distinction between imagery and idolatry. It was the Pope alone, therefore, who prevented the whole artistic area of Europe, and even the whole map of the modem world, from being as flat and featureless as a Turkey carpet. Indeed we may well compare it to a T urkey carpet; for it would soon have been a carpet for theTurks.

May I pause here to say, to the impatient, that many people visiting Rome might just as well have visited Ratcliff Highway, because they will not stop to consider historical stories of this kind. They themselves may happen to be without a theology, or even without a religion. So I am myself, I deeply and bitterly regret to say, without a mythology. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to possess a nice complicated Pagan mythology. But if I were studying the shrines of Pagan mythology, I should not complain because it was complicated. Living Rome was built upon theology; as much as dead Rome was built upon mythology. Nobody can understand dead Rome, or even dead Pompeii, without some familiarity with the

8o THE RESURRECTION OF ROME branching fictions and fantastic pedigrees of gods and demigods in whom he does not believe. Whatever his opinions may be, surely he need not avoid the legends of living Rome, merely because they are still living. And unless he tries to understand the moral and mystical principles, thousands of years old, which are the roots of the living Rome, he will make no sense of its flowers of sculpture and decoration; and least of all where the flowers are a little florid.

In those days there was no question, of course, of such sculpture in that emptied and provincialised Italy. I suppose it was a matter of a few archaic dolls; stiff and naive images that might be thought suitable to nurseries rather than shrines. But all things begin in the mind; and that Pope was defending Donatello's George and Michael Angelo’s Moses; and because he stood firm in Rome the great David stands gigantic over Florence, and the little Della Robbias have crept like scraps of sky and cloud into the palace of Perugia and the cells of Assisi. He was saving something destined to be a sign and a splendour and, most valuable of all, a scandal. The wholly humanised emblem of humanity, the figure in the round, was indeed to become the test and the standard and the stumbling-block; by which our enemies know us and we know ourselves. And if the images were then, and if they sometimes still are, like dolls meant for children, that also is an allegory and one not without authority. Even in this story of a remote pontiff and his statues it is not irrelevant; for he called on children to defend them.

To read the riddle of Rome in that hour we must strip it of all these rich accumulations of its policy; we must dismiss or dispel all this mob of marble figures, all this white cloud of witnesses to its patronage of art and antiquity; we must see it as the little walled Italian town it must have seemed in the seventh century, with bare brick or meagre Byzantine mosaic, and beyond it, as the traveller went northward, less and less of even that limited culture to lift the villages or break the line of the hills. Beyond the Alps were the hardly won conquests of Caesar; beyond the Rhine was the formless world of forests which even Caesar had hardly condescended to conquer. And from those forests, and across that river, were now trickling a thin stream of tribes; men from the ends of the earth to be an omen of the end of the world. Heavy hairy men, who had never known even the outlandish Celtic culture of Britain and Gaul, waded the fords and crawled across the fields; and found the Roman road and took even the island town of Lutetia. Some of these were called Franks and, though few in number, somehow gave their name to the land; they became Christians in some fashion, and of

Fw one of their savage kings the noble story is told, that when he heard the tale of the Crucifixion, he grasped his rude weapons and cried " Had I been there with my Franks 1 ” Broadly, however, he and his like came from a barbarous world into a half-barbarous world; and had no more notion than their own cattle of the questions that were debated by the Greeks and the Italians under Byzantine arches or Egyptian obelisks. The great hills that hung over Italy like thunder-clouds were, after all, the outposts of an outer world of stormy savagery and gloom. And to these hills the High Pontiff lifted up his eyes; the hills from whence came his help.

In a momentous hour, weighted not only with the doom but I think with the very existence of all of us, in an hour which so changed the balance of the world that without it we should not have been, the Pope began a new policy. He attempted the paradox of a new orientation away from the orient. In that hour he turned his back upon the sun; upon the sunrise and all the light and learning that was associated with the sunny lands; now in the possession of some mad Manichean autocracy. He appealed to the uncivilised against the overcivilised; he even appealed to the unconverted against the relapsed. With this occasion there begins most clearly the very common Papal policy of appealing to friends who were far off against enemies who were near. The Father of Christendom decided to awaken the West. He decided to raise up the new and as yet nameless nations; to raise up France and Britain; to raise up you and me. He troubled the waters of those vast stagnant inland pools; he stirred up the mud and started the stream that was to be our own story; he began the movement which was to make our Western Europe the head of the world. Without the religious element, in the curious interlude that followed, I see no reason to doubt that Goths would have gone on being Goths to the crack of doom, as Red Indians went on being Red Indians to the coming of Columbus. The North had indeed been planted out to some extent with monas-teries and missions that maintained the Catholic name; but they were perpetually being washed away again by heathen invasions; they would hardly have played the first part in the world blit for the fact that followed. The fact was that the Pope began to make a new Roman Empire. In the phrase invented for a smaller matter fifteen hundred years later, he did, if ever a man did, call in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.

The first stage of the story concerned this business of the Iconoclasts. When those fanatics went westwards they were caught in a new whirlpool of the West. The Pope, already embroiled with the Lombards, called in the Franks who had already crossed the Alps as they had crossed the Rhine. In the battles that followed, the breaking of the image-breakers was at least as vigorous as their own breaking of the images; and of this particular fever of fanaticism Italy was soon swept free. But it was the beginning of a policy, and the end of that policy was far more important and impressive. The King of the Franks, however little he may have understood of the help he was giving, was not a man without Latin and civilised connections; and the son he left behind him was in practice a Gaul who was more than half a Roman. He was also one of the most remarkable men in the history of the world.

A collision came; the great Greek Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had issued a universal proclamation, commanding every single subject in the whole Roman Empire to swear to his hatred of images and his acceptance of Iconoclasm; Pope Gregory III rose up and excommunicated the Iconoclasts. The Emperor called a Council of the Church, which supported the imperial view. The Pope condemned the Council. It would be impossible to bring into sharper outline and conflict the claims of the two powers. But in practice, those who knew them to be incompatible felt them to be incommensurate. It is impossible, as I have said, to recreate after all these ages and alterations; the huge disproportion that seemed to exist between the broad daylight of the Empire and the faint shadow in the West. I have compared it to Winchester challenging London; it was more as if the York diocese defied the modem financial position of New York. New Rome seemed as prosperous and promising as New York. It seemed as central and civilised as Paris. It seemed as natural a seat of new experiments as the real New Rome of to-day. The Emperor had on his side councils and colleges and the bishops of big cities, and the whole tone and talk of society, and the prestige of the past and the promise of the future. The Pope had on his side deserted streets and barren provinces and frontiers broken by barbarians and the support of rude and uncertain tribes; the Pope had on his side savagery and stupidity and ignorance and desolation; and the Pope was right.

He was right thoroughly; he was right a thousand times; he was right by the creative Christian principle, in which the devil cannot make but only mar; he was right equally by every modem test or taste in beauty and the liberty of the arts; he was right against the Csesarian fad of flat portraits as much as against the Moslem monomania of monotheism; he was right by the whole power and spirit of the wide culture that was already dawning darkly behind; he was as right as the oldest gargoyle of Chartres or the last statuette of Cellini; he was right with the unconscious prophecy of all that has here covered him with the flamboyance and the splendour of Rome; and he was right when everyone else was wrong. Realise only that one forgotten fact about that one obscure Pontiff; and then come back to consider afresh, with what detachment and independence you will, the impression that at first puzzled you; the impression that this temple of St. Peter is built to assert rather the firmness and authority and even audacity of its hierarchs than their softness or simplicity or sympathy as holy men. Realise that for many millions of mankind, including those who made this city and this shrine, it is really true; the same thing that happened in the matter of the Iconoclasts has happened again and again, and in the awful silence after some shattering question, one voice has spoken and one signal has saved the world. Never mind whether you believe this or not; fully and fairly realise that they believe it; and then for the first time you will be at the beginning of all comprehension of such a statuary and such a dome. You will begin to know what is all that any art critic needs to know; what the artist is driving at; and why he drove in this direction and not in that. You will understand why the building is almost oppressive in its hanging curves, almost homeless in its vast and glimmering floors, why so many dead Popes seem to hang above us thunderously like judges or point suddenly like accusers. For this is not the place where we come nearest to the charity and burning tenderness of the Heart of Christ; we can come far nearer on the gaunt and arid rocks of Assisi. For the rocks of Nature are gentle compared with the rocks of Michael Angelo. This is not the place specially designed to express that element of twilight and a reverent doubt, the spirit which at once accepts the mystery and gives up the riddle. That is far better conveyed in many grey vistas of the Gothic, following in their very tracery the long winters and uncertain skies of the north. What the architect or sculptor was driving at here, what he was set to do and finally and magnificently did, was to carve something that should in some dim degree express the Certitude of Rome. The Popes are not here laid prostrate with folded hands, in the more pious mediseval manner, because religious art in this phase is not thinking of them as men, now peacefully dead, but as men who on this or that occasion were terribly alive. It is thinking of them as orators who spoke certain words, as judges who made certain decisions, like that one decision I have already noted as the origin of all such massive and many-sided sculpture.

The motto emblazoned round the great dome is not, as a very thoughtful Unitarian once complained that it should be, the words of Peter acknowledging Christ; but the words of Christ establishing Peter. But this is all in the same line of purpose, when once we have understood the purpose. There are places and shrines enough, thank God, in which all people, Popes and all, can testify to their infinite insignificance in the presence of Jesus Christ. But this is the particular place where is to be asserted, rightly or wrongly, the certitude of a certain person or persons that they do in deadly fact possess a special warrant from Him. This is where the claim is made; with trumpets and under a banner as in a mediaeval castle. The scroll that surrounds the dome is flamboyant, for it is a flame; it is defiant, for it is a banner; it is sensational, for it is a proclamation to the whole people. Once get these two ideas of Certitude and the Spoken Word into your mind, and you will begin to understand St. Peter’s, even if you never like it. No case of the Spoken Word could be clearer than this I have chosen; where the Pope upheld the sculptors against the Empire and the world. No place could equal St. Peter’s as showing how confidently and audaciously men went forward in that word.

Because of his single word the Statue stands central and erect in Christendom; the type of reality; facing all ways and to be seen from every side. The flat face of the oriental ikon is really by comparison that of a ghost. For it is in a special sense an appearance; which is also called an apparition. Seen aslant, from another standpoint, it is distorted or disappears. A picture may in a true sense be a vision, but it is still in one sense an illusion; when we pass behind it, it is gone. And this is truly a type of something much deeper in the doctrine of the ikons; we might say something much deeper in their shallowness. There was something in it of that hollow and heartless mysticism, which the Pope and his predecessors had felt in the earlier heresies. Between him and them was all that deep quarrel with the Gnostics, and those who held that Christ had indeed gone about like a shining shadow, that his appearances were only apparitions; and even that a horrible wraith or hallucination had hung and cried upon the Cross. Behind it was all that evil purity and unearthly refinement, that were so much more blasphemous than the manly materialism of St. Thomas, which Christ hon-oured with a proof. A profound Christian instinct made the early Popes bury all such visionaries like vampires; and set up on their graves this pillar of sanity, the Statue, something as solid as it is stupendous.

They speak more truly than they know, who say that the sign and scandal of the Catholic Church is the Graven Image. The Church forbids us to worship it save as a symbol; but as a symbol it is most solidly symbolic. For it stands for this strange mania of Certitude, without which Rome will remain a riddle; it stands for the intolerant and intolerable notion that something is really true; true in every aspect and from every angle; true from the four quarters of the sky; true by the three dimensions of the Trinity. We turn from it and it does not vanish; we analyse it and it does not dissolve; at last, after long and laborious experiments in scepticism, we are forced to believe our eyes.

THE PILLAR OP IRE LATEKAN