Part III: The Pillar of the Lateran

There is a sense in which the highest object of historical learning is to unlearn history. At least, it is the object to unthink it or unimagine it. The point is what is called a paradox; but it is one well worth pointing out. We do not realise what the past has been, until we also realise what it might have been. We are merely imprisoned and narrowed by the past, so long as we think that it must have been. For that is only the provincial presumption that it must have been what it was, because it had to produce what it did; that is, our own precious and priceless selves. It is difficult for us to believe that the huge human thing called history might actually have taken another turn and done without us. The most pathetic part of it is that it would never have known what it had lost. Mr. Brown, of Brixton, has been taught to call himself the Heir Of All the Ages; but, as a mere matter of detail, the Ages never made any last will and testament actually mentioning Mr. Brown. There is far more philosophy, to my mind, in what seems to some the fantastic speculations of the mediaeval

Schoolmen, when they argue for pages about what would have happened to the plants or the planets if Adam had never eaten the apple. They at least had the immense and mighty imagination of which I speak; they could unthink the past. They could uncreate the Fall. With a reverence which moderns might think impudence, they could uncreate the Creation.

In other words, we must say first to the historical student, not only " Where were you when the foundations of the world were laid? ” but " Where would you be, if anywhere, if the foundations had been laid a little differently? ” And this applies not only to absolute foundations like the Creation or the Fall, but to the main foundation-stones of secular history such as the Roman Empire or the Reformation. We have to stretch our minds to conceive a world in which Rome had never come westward, let alone touched the Atlantic isles, or in which England were still as Papist as Ireland. Until we can retrospectively remove these enormous things, as if they were enormous obstacles, we cannot even really understand the difference they have made to the landscape. The historian needs a destructive imagination as well as a creative one; even in order to create. He must have the imagination to unimagine. Otherwise, the mere necessitarian will always be narrow; for such a man will really be working upon the insane notion, or obsession, that he is necessary.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something. In the same way the human race, like the human being, does not really appear out of the abyss until we have in the abstract abolished it, Until we can fancy that the great human events did not happen, we cannot really feel that they did happen. So long as we only take them for granted, we do not take them at all; and certainly do not take them in their enormity and entirety. We must realise that, in the mind at least, Athens might never have been built, the Jews might have been exterminated in the first fight with the Canaanites, all Europe might have become Moslem or no civilisation existed except the Chinese. I am sure that the right way to the realisation of history is through this sort of imaginative destruction; but when it comes to the case before me, and I consider that it is ourselves and all our own history that has thus to be imaginatively destroyed, I despair.

In short, we forget the hinges of history, and above all, that hinges move freely. “ For all we have and are,” as somebody said, I fear in a more limited connection — most vividly and literally, for all we have and are, we are indebted to that dark hour in the very midnight of the Dark Ages, when Rome, under the rule of the Popes, turned for the second time towards the West. Rome was not now overpowering the West with her strength, but rather calling upon the West in her weakness. Rome was not sending forth legions like Caesar; she was rather borrowing or drawing down legions from Charlemagne. But because she was Christian Rome and no longer Pagan Rome she was not afraid of the paradox; and verified the maxim that the weak things of the earth will confound the strong. For what actually followed on that appeal of the Pope to the Franks is an episode so extraordinary, so symbolic, so determining and at the same time so mysterious and apparently so brief, that all subsequent centuries have in some fashion remained staring at it. But it was certainly one of the most practical and productive things in Christian history; and it became almost more practical by changing from history to legend.

I suppose every sensible person, unsophisticated by Nordic nonsense, can see the obvious fact that Rome originally civilised the North and that otherwise it would have remained uncivilised. Otherwise the North Sea Islands would have been pretty much like the South Sea Islands. In that sense Julius Caesar was as adventurous, and almost as accidental a discoverer as Captain Cook. It is less self-evident, but it seems to me pretty clear, that the North would have been lost again to civilisation, and much of the West as well, when the Caesars of the last days so resolutely marched eastward for their Empire. It was saved by the fact that the Popes did not march eastward with the Caesars. It was especially saved by the fact that the Popes came at last to defy their Eastern Caesars; and it was saved most of all by the fact that the Popes finally dared to set up Caesars of their own. That they came at last to quarrel with their Western, as they had quarrelled with their Eastern emperors, was but an example of their permanent policy of being independent of any earthly power when it was really powerful. But it was not until centuries afterwards that the new Holy Roman Empire was in any final sense very powerful; and the miracle of the renewal of hope in the very moment of the worst Western decline belongs rather to a manifestation which was, in the immediate sense, as broken and brief as it was splendid. But it made such a difference that men were never able afterwards to express the difference it made; and had to suggest it somehow in symbol and poetry.

It is when a fact is thus too big for history that it overflows the surrounding facts and expresses itself in fable. Nay, it is when the fact is in a sense too solid that its very solidity breaks the framework of ordinary things;

and it can only be recorded through extraordinary things like fairy-tales and romances of chivalry. Everybody felt that merely saying that one Carolus or Carl had lived and died at a certain date, and had a palace at Aix, and fought such and such campaigns against Saxons or Saracens, was wholly inadequate to explain what had happened. Nothing short of saying that Charlemagne was ten feet high, or that he lived for two hundred years, was at all upon the scale of what had happened. For what had happened was that in the dead and deserted lands on which the world had turned its back, in the densest and blindest forests of relapsing ignorance and decay, there had come a vision; a vision of light and loyalty and order or the wild possibility of these things; white against the darkness, the face of a great king; a face never to be forgotten. It is impossible to describe, or perhaps even to conjecture, exactly how these things affect mankind. Wherever they occur, they become the legends that are larger than history. Such has been the tradition of King Arthur in Britain. Such has been the tradition of St. Patrick in Ireland. But these great men were in their time inevitably more localised; they were not in a central position to represent the whole world, like an Emperor crowned by a Pope. Yet this had happened relatively at the ends of the earth where no man expected it. It may be compared to a miracle if only by a metaphor. For it was a Sunrise in the West.

Men had to imagine Charlemagne; it was inadequate merely to record him. But being imagined is not the same as being imaginary. It is sometimes the wildest effort of imagination for a man to imagine what he actually sees. But in historical retrospect the paradox I have noted remains. In order to imagine him, we have first to unimagine him. We have to realise the difference that his disappearance from history would have made. I believe myself that, but for this episode, our Western world would at best have developed quite differently, and most probably not developed at all. From the Carolingian episode comes the whole of that conception of Chivalry, which has become the secular morality of the West; and a thousand times more so because the glory from which it comes is not only glory but in some sense defeat. Chivalry is in itself a new and Christian view of defeat. Charlemagne, like Arthur, owes his everlasting success to the fact that he did not succeed. He did not heal the barbarian wounds of the West, but he showed men a sort of hope of their being healed. In the story of Roland, and in all the stories since derived from that origin, there is exactly the same secret of defeat that is not despair.

To tell the tale of how that idea flowered and unfolded would simply be to tell the story of Gaul and Britain and Spain and all the rest from the night of the ninth century to the present hour. But the immediate interest of the matter for me, and the reason why I have dwelt upon it here, is the curious coincidence of its origin. It all really began with that old stubborn priest beside the Tiber, and the rally of the Roman authority against the Byzantine power. It began, as much as anywhere, in that squabble of the fanatics from Asia Minor declaring war upon the statues of Italy. It was the Italian instinct, as well as the Papal authority, that felt itself at that moment the defender of solid and human and reasonable things, and knew that the zeal of the Isaurian was a wind from the desert and not only a light from the dawn.

We have seen that Byzantium endeavoured to reduce Rome to a provincial town; and that Rome refused to be provincial, and roused herself once again to be imperial. But in this first of the Roman revivals touched upon here, she became imperial in a rather new and revolutionary fashion. Instead of trying to continue the line of local Csesars, when it had died out, she had looked frankly westward for an Emperor of the West; thereby doing what she has more than once done, as even this rough outline would indicate; meeting the immediate need

THE PILLAR OE THE LATE RAN of the time, in the largest and boldest spirit, but laying up other troubles for other times, to be taken in turn as they came. The Popes preferred the risk of crowning a barbarian Caesar to the risk of bowing down before a Byzantine one. Fortunately, in the principal case, the barbarian was not a barbarian. He was not only a genius but a man of mainly Gallic origin and Roman culture; but he was near enough to the barbarians to have been turned into a German after he was dead. When this idea of a Western Emperor reappeared in the West, it had really and truly become a German thing; and the Popes seem to have felt something vaguely barbaric about it, in spite of the distinction of many of its individual princes. Anyhow, there followed that long war in the West between Pope and Emperor which is the next great phase in the history of Rome. It may be remarked that the history of Rome, between the death and relative failure of Charlemagne and the rise of those who claimed to be his successors, was an interlude of deep depression and degradation. It was the ninth century, the midnight of the Dark Ages; the North and West was swallowed as if in a sea-mist by the Danish raiders from the sea, and would probably never have reappeared but for two things; the gallant defence of Paris and the heroic pertinacity of Alfred the Great.

TEE RESURRECTION OF ROME

But these heroes were at the outposts. There were precious few heroes in the high places of Christendom. The palace revolutions of the Papacy seemed subject to mere barbarian caprice; and puppets were put up and pulled down for the sport of almost savage princes. There were Popes who were mere boys, yet who managed to gain the reputation of matured blackguards. There never was a moment when Christian civilisation seemed so obviously at the very moment of dissolution as in this dim distraction of the ninth century; yet here also Rome and the Papacy weathered the storm, and all the scandals only accumulated to be swept away in the next of the great Roman resurrections; when there arose towering above the Church, in the first twilight of the true Middle Ages, the greatness of Gregory the Seventh.

Hildebrand, the hammer of the S im o nis ts and the false and venal priests of his time, was in his own person an embodiment of this recurring theme of the Resurrection of Rome, The disputes about him rather resemble those about Mussolini; for in the same way, a modern man may disapprove some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve. His two great campaigns, of course, were that against the corruption and anarchy of ecclesiastical discipline and that against the secular power of the German Caesars. Many Catholics who approve the first as necessary, criticise the second as excessive; but I think he was a thousand times right to refuse the secular domination of the German Emperor, as his fore' bears had refused that of the Greek Emperor. Anyhow, he himself had certainly no doubts about it; there never was a man who was more all of a piece; and from his first peasant beginnings to his death in a strange land, everything he did or said had a sound like iron. I know nothing finer in its way than his last bold piece of irony and even parody of Scripture: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”

So far as I have any right to an opinion on so tangled a story, my own politics are entirely Guelph. I think it was a visible divine blessing upon the Papal policy that most of the wealth and grandeur and the great feudal aristocracy was on the other side. There was of course any amount of ambition and general anarchy and wickedness on both sides. But on the whole the Popes were on the side of the people; of the little republics; of the cities where men were citizens. I know that Dante was a Ghibelline politician, 1 and I think he was a good deal too free with his hell-fire in the support

1 I know this is now disputed; at least he was an Imperialist, or more so than many Guelphs.

of his own particular brand of politics. Doubtless there was a great deal to be said for his great vision of the double empire of Csesar and Peter; but, after all, it had already failed when Caesar was a highly cultivated Greek and I doubt if it would have permanently succeeded, when the Caesar was translated into the Kaiser. Certainly Frederick the Second, with all his talents, was a mere enemy of Christendom; much more of an enemy than Mahomet. I hope it is true, as I have seen it stated, that it was really the Emperor Frederick who first began to bum heretics. I should like it to have been invented by an atheist.

Eventually, of course, the feud of the Guelphs and Ghibellines trailed itself into such a tangle that no rational person could trouble any more about it; but by that time the particular phase of the Papacy, which we call the War of the Investitures, had ended in the essential victory of the Pope. As I say, I do not claim to be an authority; but I am glad. I think the Holy Roman Empire might have turned into a very Unholy Roman Empire. And, like the men of the mediaeval republics of Italy, I am a Nationalist; and I think it a good thing, on the whole, that Europe, which when Pagan had had one realm and many religions, should when Christian have one religion and many realms

Rome is too small for its greatness, or too great for its smallness, or whatever the word may be; there is from the first an element of concentration amounting to congestion. Though it seems superficially a city standing in the flattest and most open sort of plain, there is not in fact any sense of that centrifugal spirit we now associate with a city. Everything looks inwards and not outwards; and everything runs down to a centre, even to excess. It is partly (as I have said) that a city of seven hills is naturally one of several valleys; and standing on any such hill, like that of the Pincian Gardens, we have a sense that the valleys are like chasms; that they are cloven down into the depths like the canyons of the Western mountains. We feel that the hills, though covered with houses, are not Rome but rather the walls of Rome; and we are eternally drawn towards that leap and plunge that proved fatal to the brother of Romulus. Something in the lines of that stony landscape is as centripetal as a splendid whirlpool; and the whole is a movement always returning to its own centres. For that reason there is so much stratification in the place, and the piling of one period on another; there is nothing that corresponds to the scattered fringe and litter of little Norman and Gothic churches through the countrysides of the north. All roads lead to Rome; and towards the end, they seem in a hurry to get there. Thus, Medievalism. is merely buried in Rome, as if it were a period like that of the cave-men or the lake-dwellers. Too much has been piled on top of it, and in too much of a hurry; and the chief city of antiquity is not even sufficiently antiquated. A platform of Pagan Rome has been preserved, but preserved as a sort of open-air museum; deliberately preserved as something dead and detached, with which men have no more to do. But Christian Rome has crushed Christian Rome, one vigorous Christian epoch trampling down another, in a perpetual pagoda of revolution and conquest; indeed nobody could look at that tower of inventions and novelties without realising that Christianity has been the religion of revolutions. But the disadvantage of this congestion is that the thing submerged has been submerged too much. A man need not be a mad mediae valist, or have a narrow devotion to the narrow and devotional arches of the Gothic, in order to feel that much of Rome would be more real if its architecture were less theatrical; and if some of the things that were significant to St. Catherine or to Dante had remained as they were; like the cathedral where Thomas Becket was butchered or the cathedral where Joan of Arc led the King. I do not know exactly what was the architecture of St. John Lateran in the early thirteenth century; not certainly

Northern Gothic; I suppose something more analogous to that of Giotto’s tower; but a man standing before the church would still like to imagine it toppling like the Tower of Pisa, as it did in the great Pope’s nightmare. It would be possible of course to imagine the present structure falling; I have even known fastidious critics who would be glad if it should fall. But it is not the Church that Innocent and Francis saw; and there are not enough things in Rome that are as the mediaeval men saw them. It is needless to add that this sort of creative congestion, or the blocking of old things with new, is still native to the place and has gone on into our own time. The great glaring monument of Victor Emmanuel is quite a good piece of work of its kind, just as the Renaissance temples and fountains are quite good pieces of work of their kind. There is really nothing to be said against it, except that it is in the way. It is a bad thing when the mind, called on to criticise any artistic creation, thinks first of an object as an obstacle. That is what has been the matter with Rome for four centuries; too many of the things are obstacles to other things. The recent past has got too much in the way of the remote past; to such an extent that in some cases men must go underground to find it. This is, or may be, a defect; but it is not a defect of death, but rather of a riot and extravagance of resurrection.

The last chapter was largely concerned with St. Peter’s; if only as a sort of background for meditation on the primal mystery of the Papacy and the importance of the early Popes. If we considered that matter in the light and shadow of St. Peter’s, we might well go on to consider the next historic phase in the second great church of St. John Lateran. In both cases, of course, the environment is suggestive rather than strictly historical. In the concrete sense, naturally, there is nothing Early Christian about St. Peter’s except its name and (as some think) its nature. It is pure Renaissance; and for those who find such Renaissance effervescence is merely frothy, St. Peter’s dome will only be the very biggest soap-bubble in such a world of froth. Similarly, I shall not blame such a gentleman, with his prejudices, if he finds something rather soapy about St. John Lateran. That also, with some exceptions to be mentioned later, is quite the reverse of a reminder of the next epoch of mediaeval Rome. But then there hardly is any reminder of mediaeval Rome. And it may seem a somewhat dismal paradox to devote this chapter on Rome to something that cannot be found there.

And yet this classic facade of the Lateran will always be, for some of us, more alive with the Middle Ages than Notre Dame. For it was here that the same Innocent III made momentary contact with that strange man who made or remade the Middle Ages, and whose flaming figure still burns where their brightest colours have grown dark. Francis of Assisi lacked his heels here like a beggar and spoke so as to be mistaken for a madman; but the Pope to whom he had spoken dreamed, it is said, in the watches of the night when sleep had softened the watchful guards of his gigantic common sense, that he saw the whole Mother Church of Christians stooping terribly out of heaven like a deluge of ruin; and only the lean figure of the lunatic upholding it and preventing its fall. It is very likely that Innocent really saw in his dream, without understanding, the secret of the Middle Ages.

It would therefore seem somewhat harder in Rome for the mediaeval Popes to rise from the dead; and the excessive concentration of northern culture on Dante has left an exaggerated impression that they would rise from the damned. Yet mediaeval civilisation was great in Rome as it was great everywhere; and I suppose the supreme moment of the purely mediaeval Papacy might be put somewhere about the time of Innocent III. It is true, of course, that the mediaeval rebirth of civilisation could never be quite so striking in Italy as elsewhere; simply because what was reborn had never so completely died. Learning and the arts

IIO THE RESURRECTION OR ROME had been more like an aged invalid, when elsewhere they were like a new-born child. Even the Dark Ages were not so completely dark; Italy was in the moral what Norway is in the material world. It was the Land of the Midnight Sun. But if in those southern cities the sun had never completely set, it gave them in some ways an emotion of endless evening rather than morning; and prevented some morning energies of medievalism from doing themselves justice. That is why there is really no good Gothic in Italy. For a long time the South had only long memories of preservation; while in the North there were only memories of renewal, or rather of building which was not even recognised as rebuilding. So that if we wish to find, in Rome itself, something suggestive of the greatness of the great age of Innocent III, we must approach the matter indirectly, and even look for the reflection of the mediaeval in the modern mind. Innocent III, though but a small temporal prince, towered over the most terrible of the princes of his day. He mastered like a lion-tamer the lion brood of the Plantagenet; he defeated in statecraft even the deep strategy of Philip Augustus, and all the great and growing power of France; he broke the chain of the Holy Roman Empire; he was the arbiter of Christendom. Y et if we seek for this great Papal epoch in the Papal city, we are in practice driven tb look for it in a later memorial; and in the belated but powerful effect of that epoch upon our own.

There is a silly habit in some travellers of ignoring everything that is Modern. It is especially common among Modernists. It is generally the very people who tell the Church to live up to the lofty standard of the twentieth century, who pride themselves on shutting their eyes to everything she has done after the twelfth. The motive is almost vulgarly obvious. It is simply their way of insinuating that the cult of Jesus Christ passed away at some particular date, like the cult of Jupiter- Ammon. Many methods have been employed for achieving or announcing that destruction; and the world having sent against the sanctuary armies of soldiers with spears, and anarchists with torches, has lately sent an army of antiquaries with spades. But even where this bitter and bigoted motive does not exist, there is in any case a curious modem fashion for seeking out only what is old-fashioned. By this limitation the full logic of the story is entirely lost. There is a story of a man who persisted in reading the Greek Testament aloud because he wanted to know what happened to Peter. Nobody who refuses to follow the story to modem times has the least notion of what happened to Peter. The man who only reads the guide-book reads a story that begins without an ending; just as the man who reads only the newspaper reads a story that ends without a beginning. And the Modernist is a man who does, in spirit at least, read only the guide-book at one end and the newspaper at the other. What he misses in between is the gigantic modern development of ancient things; developed in so direct a fashion that without understanding the ancient, we cannot understand the modern. Treated as an inscription on a tomb, it is an almost undecipherable inscription; and treated as a news item in the newspapers, it is quite meaningless news. What we want is the bridge between the two; and again we find something symbolic in the title of Pontifex the bridge-builder.

I will take two examples from the Church of St. John Lateran, one of the recognised sites both for pilgrims and for sight-seers. Both these things are modern and therefore neither of these things is pointed out to modern people; certainly not to tourists and I have my doubts even about pilgrims. Yet one of them stands for the Mediaeval world and the other for the Modem world in an aptness of antithesis as plain and pointed as an epigram. Nobody who readily neglects the first is really interested in the Middle Ages; though he impale himself on pointed arches or is struck “ mute ” for ever, attitudinising before Botticelli. Nobody who readily neglects the second really cares a rap about the story of modern times, though he be smothered in newspapers telling him about the patriotism of Mr. Snowden or the spirituality of Mr. Hoover. They are there in the world-famous Lateran Church; and I doubt whether one man in fifty will even know to which two objects I refer.

It is the more interesting because the Lateran Church is full of interesting objects; but of different sorts that interest different people. I need not describe the only too tempestuous statuary that stands all down the middle; in the last, and possibly the worst, but at least the most boisterous stage of the Baroque. The general impression is that the Twelve Apostles always preferred to stand in a draught, but that they inhabited a curious country where the wind blew in all the opposite ways at once. Perhaps some such licence might be allowed to the supernatural wind of Pentecost, which was truly a wind of liberty in the sense of a wind of isolating individualism; bringing different gifts to different people; a good wind that blew nobody harm. But the actual effect on the senses, in this cold marble corridor, is merely that the bewildered Christians have got into a heathen temple of the winds. All this sort of criticism is trite, but it is true. Moreover, when all allowance is made for a right revaluation of

Hr the Baroque, there is a vast amount of stuff that is merely sweetstuff. It amounts to no more than leaving the gilt on the gingerbread and using chocolate-boxes for ceilings and walls. We must not altogether forget that sweetstuff is a childish taste; and of such is the kingdom of heaven; but I think it is fair to say that some of the children of the Church were allowed to eat too many sweets. Next, in the midst of all this pink sunset of the Renaissance, there appear quite abruptly bright and bracing glimpses of the hard white morning of Christianity. The restoration of the antiquated apse, with its almost Byzantine stiffness and simplicity, looks for an instant like the glimpse into the lost heaven of another and older religion. Its gold is not gilt on any gingerbread, but is of the same substance as the sun. Only it is the remote and quiet sun of a sort of everlasting sunrise. It does exactly express in design and colour what Mr. W. B. Yeats has admirably expressed in metre and words, in his recent poem called "Sailing to Byzantium," about the starkly intellectual appeal of the old Greek Christian art:

0 sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall.

And indeed a man might have sailed a long voyage in a ship, when he takes the few steps from the gilding of the railings to the gold of the apse. He has come suddenly to a strange country, where stags stand stiffly beside an almost crooked cross and saints are of different sizes, as if all planes of perspective had met. Something in the very distortion belonging to the half dome of an apse lends to such fine archaic design a sort of extra mystery; it almost recalls the shameless mysticism of Professor Einstein, when he says, “ All space is slightly curved.” This Christian mysticism is felt in an absolute form in the apse; in a relative and realistic form in the fine picture of Giotto which hangs in the church, witnessing to the more human, but still childish, vigour and sincerity of the true Middle Ages. When I w r as young the most advanced art critics would have said that the Byzantine mosaic represented the darkness before the dawn and Giotto the true daybreak of art. Now the most advanced critics will probably say that the archaic apse holds the last glow of art and Giotto is the dusk of its disappearance, which seems to have begun rather early. But I will leave them to fight it out; it is evidently essential to advanced critics to be always going further and further back.

But though St, John Lateran contains things good by the ordinary Renaissance rule, and two things very good which are exceptions to the rule, they are not the two things of which I speak. Tourists will certainly be told to stop before the Giotto; and even to look at the apse, with some metaphysical blindness to the altar. But there are on each side of the altar two things to which I fancy that foreigners are blinder still; because they are entirely modern. Only I am a little interested in them, being modern myself. I believe that I belong to a Church that is still alive; anyhow I know I belong to a world that is still alive; and those two modern monuments testify to two movements of the modern world. I am not less, but more interested, because the monuments themselves are of recent date. They link themselves with the living Italy in the streets outside; and if anybody does not know that Italy is living, he had better come and see.

The first monument was erected by, and the second monument erected to, the great Pope Leo XIII; the builder of the bridge between modem democracy and the Church. The first monument was at his direction designed and dedicated to that mediaeval man who was his hero and whom he made in some sense his model; the famous Innocent III, who played so determining a part in the central problems of the Middle Ages; the Crusades; and the Franciscan movement. The sculptured tomb is very good of its kind, like many of these neglected modern works in Rome. But it is not for that sort of merit that I pause beside it, or ask the reader to consider it. The whole form and character of it, as compared with this Renaissance church where it stands, is a singularly compact and complete statement of something rather rare in Rome, though common in Romanism and in the whole Romanised world. It is the modem resurrection of Mediaevalism. It is as important in history as the Renaissance resurrection of Paganism. I will say something in a moment of its social and spiritual meaning, of which its critics are curiously and almost comically ignorant. But the immediate point is that the modem Pope has not only entombed the mediaeval Pope, but has gone as far as possible towards giving him a mediaeval tomb. Within the square framework, with its black marble picked out with stars, necessitated by the scheme of the whole building, is a sort of secret grotto of the Gothic and a sepulchre that might have been made for Hugh of Lincoln or Thomas of Canterbury by his own followers and friends. Here, lying flat in the patient and pious posture of a humbler age, is the Pope who first blessed the Poor Brothers and sat in judgment on the Kings. Here a great modem mind, one of the greatest of modem minds, has deliberately made a modern tomb as a mediaeval tomb. That, if we consider it, is a notable and significant sequel to that long series of Papal tombs to be found in St. Peter’s; the Popes of the sixteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; rioting, one may say, in every technical trick and dancing balance of the Baroque, using to the full all that modern science and ingenuity can teach of tilted poise or muscular equilibrium; in these artistic matters at least turning their backs for ever on the past. With this monument we have the last great modern return to the past. This, among the last of such sculptured figures, has literally lain down with his fathers; with his remote fathers of the days of Dominic and the Poverello. On his right is an armed figure emblematic of the Crusades, on his left a figure of Wisdom as she cried aloud in the streets of mediaeval Paris and Oxford.

In this rough study, which is devoted to resurrections, it is well to pause and remember how much the whole modern movement has been a return of the mediaeval movement. The thing has been repeated too often to be a coincidence or a romantic mistake. One generation, if seeking no more than picturesqueness and adventure amid the rising rigidity of Utilitarianism, found it in mediaeval romance, if chiefly in mediaeval ruins; in Melrose by moonlight or Torquilstone in flames. Another generation, seeking only earnest Churchmanship in a Protestant Church, found its models in the Saxon Saints and Gothic monkeries of the Oxford Movement. Yet again a generation, generally speaking the next generation, seeking some decorative scheme to dignify and beautify the brutal ugliness of manufacturing England, found it in the illuminated texts and coloured chronicles of William Morris studying Geoffrey Chaucer. And now yet a fourth generation, seeking for some social principle, in economics and politics, that shall be a human alternative to the individualistic muddle of Manchester and the insane centralisation of Moscow, has found it at least generally indicated in the nature, and even proclaimed in the name, of the great guilds of the Middle Ages. These things are not coincidences; seldom has one whole period like the present fed so repeatedly and persistently on one whole period of the past.

The modern world has already been medirevalised. It is too late for our simple friends to cry out against going back to mediaeval things. For nearly a hundred years we have done nothing else. Because even Scott among Scottish Puritans could see that Melrose was beautiful, therefore even to-day the Baptist Chapel is built in bad Gothic and no longer in bad classical architecture. It is too late to hide the fact that there is still such a thing as Exeter Cathedral and no longer such a thing as Exeter Hall.

Because even Oxford dons could see that Saxon Saints were in earnest, as eighteenth-century Bishops were not in earnest, nobody now proposes to wear a black eighteenth-century gown instead of a surplice. Because people in peg-top trousers sitting on horsehair sofas were hideous and knew that they were hideous, they could not resist the new scheme of natural decorative dress and furniture which William Morris had learned from the study of old missals and mediaeval tapestries. And because mediaeval society was at least a society, with social institutions, even an atheist cannot be such a fool as to talk any longer about enlightened self-interest or the individual standing alone. I might even agree that, in a sense, the modern world has been mediaevalised enough. But those who say it cannot be medisevalised died some decades before they began to say so.

There was not room in the small and crowded city of Rome for another Renaissance. There would indeed have been something like an earthquake, if the modem medievalists had tried to rebuild the Rome of Innocent, where so many Popes had tried to rebuild the Rome of Augustus. The traveller strolling through the town will see few nooks and corners in which to place the Cathedral of Beauvais or the great tower of Salisbury. But intellectually something like such a renaissance did take

THE PILLAR Ob' THE LATERAN I2x place and is exactly represented by the Pontificate of Leo XIII. The Papal support of the Trade Union movement, with its clearly defined principles for association within the State, owed almost everything to the study and understanding of the great mediaeval associations. It would be easy to mention a score of matters in which the Catholic justification of the Trade Union was based on the justice of the Guild. But of all that mediaeval movement in the modern world nothing plastic and tangible remains in Rome, except this one recumbent figure and almost Gothic canopy in the monument of Innocent III. For the most part the pure lovers of the Gothic wander through Rome not only hungry, but starved. It seems to me all the more worthy of note, therefore, that the Pope of the modern popular movement planned, not without severity, the one mediaeval tomb.

It is all the more remarkable, I might say amusing, because he was not allowed to play any such mediaeval tricks with his own tomb. The monument of Leo XIII himself, which stands on the other side to balance that which he built for his predecessor, represents what I can only call a riotous relapse into the Baroque. Leo XIII is not even represented as ritually blessing the faithful with the almost menacing vigour of the figures in St. Peter's. He is merely waving his hand to them with almost hilarious benevolence; as if he were saying, " So long! " or “ Ta-Ta! ” rather than “ Benedicat.” There could hardly be a quainter contrast than that between the modest but manly figure that he made of Innocent and the rollicking rococo figure that other people made of him. Which may be used by some as an argument to show that the spirit of the Baroque has taken final possession of Rome and is not to be expelled, but breaks out again at the first opportunity in spite of precept or example; dancing even on the grave of a medisevalist the moment he is dead. Only there happens to be something else on the monument besides the buoyant and almost breezy figure of the benevolent Pontiff. On one side is a figure of Christendom bowed down like a widow and holding only the plain primitive cross of timber that covers the widest delimitation of Christianity. And on the other is a labourer leaning on the tools of his trade, and lifting a hand in salutation of him who wrote, across the open optimistic pages of modem economists of the manufacturing age, the words not to be forgotten; that the rich of our time have laid upon the toiling masses of mankind a yoke little better than slavery.

I have deliberately dwelt upon these two entirely modem sculptures (competent and effective like nearly all these Italian sculptures, but not of any special importance or originality in the world of art), because they illustrate the moral which I most strongly desire to draw. That unless a man understands that Rome is a modem city, he does not understand that it is an eternal city. Refusing to look at its modern monuments is but a way of saying it is a dead city. Yet anyone who visits it with the notion that it is a dead city will find it a city most monstrously miraculous; a city in which the dead can walk. The truth is that nobody who will not follow its recent and real development will be able to make head or tail of it; not even, as I have said, if he seeks its head in the Capitol and its tail in the stop-press news. To understand it we must not be content with the present or the remote past. We must remember what most men instantly forget; the recent past. We must understand the whole meaning of a period like that covered by the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIII. For that reason, and merely as a part of the argument, I have paused before his monument; but I admit it is with other and deeper and quite indescribable emotions that I have paused before his grave.

The Reformation is always described as a protest against the power of the Pope. I should rather describe it as a protest against the impotence of the Pope. It did not come in a time like that of Innocent III, when the Pope was really powerful. It came at the end of a long trail of tragi-comedy and bathos, in which the central power, so far from being too central, had been hopelessly decentralised and divided. It was not until people had had the absurd experience of having three Popes, that they completed the absurdity by having three or four religions. In short, from the high moment of the Middle Ages, about the time of Innocent III, there was a long decline of mediaeval strength and unity; which went step by step with the decline in the dignity of the Pope. From the first, of course, there had been some disadvantages in the Papal position, even at its best; there had been some weaknesses that belonged to its strength, some misunderstandings that arose even out of its understanding. Perhaps the most practical was this; that the Pope naturally tended to regard Christendom as one nation; to treat it as one nation; and (unfortunately) to tax it as one nation. He assumed that all the children of the Church would equally uphold her in a just war with the Empire; and, for that matter, of course, the Empire professed to be quite as cosmopolitan as the Church. What the Churchman did not see, perhaps what nobody could yet see, was that the different parts of Christendom were already very different. In England especially there was a feeling against the Roman tax, quite untouched by any heresy about the Roman religious authority, which made so very mediaeval (one might say so very mad) a Catholic as Simon de Montfort yet set himself vigorously against the exaction. But this new growth of national sentiment was strongest in what was really the first of the nations, the oldest of the nations, and then and always the most national of the nations. France, the leader in chivalry and courtesy, the creator of the Crusades, was also the creator of that passionately patriotic Europe which is still unchanged, or only very faintly changing. The Pope regarded the Emperor as a natural rival, being a power on the same universal model; he regarded all kings as secondary people like nobles and knights. Yet history saw the strange irony that the international Pope, when he had overthrown the international Emperor, was suddenly overthrown by one solitary national king. The King of France had intervened more and more in Italian quarrels, seizing the vacant place of the defeated Kaisers, and eventually, as everyone knows, did a deed which was a prodigy without precedent and perhaps without end in its effect. He carried the Pope away bodily from Rome and set up the Papacy at Avignon; a place technically just outside French territory but under the immediate shadow of French power. That was the first great step in the modem degradation of the Papacy; and it happened hundreds of years before the Reformation. But it was also the second great proof that the genius loci was not to be defied; for nothing but disaster and derision, intolerable at last to everybody, followed the attempt to separate the Roman Pontiff from Rome.

There is neither need nor space to tell the story here; of the scandal over which Petrarch lamented and which a greater genius than Petrarch brought to an end; when the great St. Catherine of Siena, one of the heroines of humanity whom even humanitarians have been driven to admire, speaking as directly when she counselled the Pope as when she consoled the murderer, succeeded at last in persuading the powers to put an end to an international anomaly and brought back the Roman Bishop in triumph to the Roman town. It is only important here as another example of the principle here roughly traced through history; the principle that Emperors and Kings and all the powers of the earth have striven in vain to break the thrice glorious chains of Peter, which bind him to his palace even as they did to his prison.

And then, like a thunderclap, came the strangest ending of the strange story that began long before when the Pope turned his back on

Byzantium. As we have noted, he not only turned his back on civilisation, when he turned his back on Byzantium; he also turned his face to barbarism. He made a treaty with the tribes of the wild North and West and eventually erected among them a new half-barbarian empire, to balance in some small degree the over-powering prestige of the New Rome in the East and the great Patriarchs of the great Greek cities, ruling the rich and cultured lands under the crown of Constantine. The wild Western experiment, in the person of Charlemagne had been an empire almost as brief as a revolution. There seemed, on the other hand, no reason why the calm and stately court of Constantinople should not go on for ages like the empire of China. Only, as already hinted, something had happened; something that can always happen and can never be expected. A man named Mahomet had lived and died and become a destiny and a driving storm in the souls of men, that began to pour across the great Greek world like a deluge. The rich lands and cities were submerged; the great golden Patriarchs were chased out like beggars; the whole of that civilisation that had sought to overpower the Papacy, in the war of the images, was itself overpowered; and (by a queer irony) overpowered by more simple and violent image-breakers. The Tconoclasts of the desert slew the Iconoclasts of the city. At last, after a long agony of heroic resistance, the city itself fell. The last of the Greek Caesars died sword in hand; and since that day the New Rome, the name that was a spell on the whole world, has been a rather dirty town of the Turks.

Such was the end of the first and seemingly the most successful attempt to move Rome from Rome. Naturally it left the Pope, restored to his own see, in an entirely new position towards the Patriarchs his rivals; who were now Bishops without sees. It has also been said that the crash scattered the Byzantine scholars and artists and so stimulated the Renaissance; and there is something in it, but less than is often supposed. The real roots of Renaissance Rome were Roman.

Meanwhile the interregnum had ended in what seemed like a reign of Antichrist; because it was the reign of Anti-Popes. A Pope could be established in Rome, but another claimant could continue his Papacy at Avignon; and at one time there was even a third claimant somewhere else. This intensified the nationalist split in Europe, one nation following one Pope and one another; and the confusion of ecclesiastical authority, among other shameful accidents, cast a momentary but mortal shadow upon the shining figure of Joan of Arc. But it had another effect less easy to describe. The

Papacy shrank; men began to regard the Pope with a new feeling that he was a local prince instead of a universal priest. The scandal of rivalry was stopped; but the Councils which stopped it tended rather to restrict the Papacy. The Pope who returned to Rome returned to the Roman City but never again to the Roman Empire. He had hardly returned before the last agony of Christendom began; and all that preceded the vague and yet violent restlessness of Luther. At the time the far more pressing peril of Christendom appeared in the last onslaughts of Islam; the new Moslem invasion which stretches broadly from the great disaster of Mohacs to the great rescue of Lepanto. The Reformation has been called many things, good and bad; and there was certainly much in it both defensible and indefensible. But that is the thing about it which I, for one, find it hardest to forgive. It was a Christian mutiny during a Moslem invasion.

As the Popes narrowed as pontiffs they did in a sense broaden as princes; they did at least strengthen as princes. Their kingdom was smaller and yet it was more imperialistic; if you will, their kingdom was more of this world. But at least it was as wide as this world; in the sense of stretching out to the arts and sciences of this world. The fighting Popes who

Tn led armies, and set up the castles of the Campagna, were often men who opened their gates to the greatest artists of history and their minds to the profoundest problems of philosophy. Their wickedness has been considerably exaggerated; there was only one of them who was very wicked, and he was mostly wicked because his favourite son was wickeder. Alexander Borgia may indeed be regarded as a highly pious and orthodox argument for the celibacy of the clergy. But it is true that the Popes were political and in the wrong sense local. It was about this time that most people became suddenly and vividly conscious that the Pope was an Italian. A large number of previous Popes had of course been Italian, though many had been of other nations, Spanish, French or English; but men had thought of them as European. Or if they thought of them otherwise, it was not as Italian but as Roman; and that because it was more universal to be Roman than to be European. But Rome was now a principality, and rather a small and struggling and jealous principality; its religious scope had been rather diminished by Basle and Constance long before Worms and Spires. Thus, viewed in one aspect, and possibly the highest aspect, we may say that the Roman bishopric at the end of the Middle Ages was at the lowest ebb of discredit and dubious transformation, Tt had suffered endless humiliations; had been trailed in the mire across Europe, had been put up to auction by upstarts bidding against each other, and was close to the final crash when whole nations should be lost in the night. And yet in that last and darkest hour, it did after all do something. It made Rome; it built the mighty city that we see; it filled the sky with the dome of St. Peter’s and heaved against the clouds the limbs of the last giants of Michael Angelo; it showed, at the last and worst, how gigantic are the things that can be done in a little space. But above all it effected another and a new sort of resurrection, which will be noted in the next chapter.

But though this marks the emergence from the Middle Ages, which in Rome remain only as one of its long but dark and buried tunnels, I am still dreaming of the dream of Innocent III; and of that other whose absence haunts me like a presence. It was but a moment, as it were, that he lingered under the pillars of that portico, speaking to the Pope, who mistook him for some ragged herd from the hills; he went back swiftly to his own Umbrian uplands, with his own light and impulsive movement, and there amid the shrines of Assisi he still stands in a native and mediaeval air. They lately erected a fine statue of him in front of-the church in Rome; but in the interval the associations of his name have hardly been specially Roman. But I cannot forget the deeper reality of the dream; and I see him as Innocent saw him, not so much in front of the church as under it; one of the pillars propping a falling house. I can almost fancy that he is now literally under it, buried with so much of the Middle Ages in the very vaults of Rome; the greatest and most glorious of mediseval men sustaining like a column the whole work of the after ages and the later arts, which have in some sense crushed or buried him; St. Francis still upholding the Church as Atlas upheld the world. He at least would be a very Gothic pillar to uphold all that Classic and Baroque architecture; with his hairy rags as of a goatherd and eager pointed beard and face fanatical with forgiveness. Stevenson speaks of unfrowning caryatids bearing the falling heavens; and no caryatid so unfrowning as Francis could be found to bear those seven heavens of ever sinking stone. The vision of Innocent was true in more ways than one. The personality he met for a moment not only saved Catholicism at a moment when it might have gone down before Islam and a hundred heresies; but he has been in history the support of all the building and painting and carving that came after him; and has truly established the Church, even the modern

Church of St. John Lateran. That is why it is necessary to sketch here, however rudely, the interlude of Roman medievalism, so important in history, so invisible in Rome. And therefore St. Francis still stands as a statue that is also a column; the living pillar of the Lateran.

IV

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