Part VI: The Holy Island

When I first saw one of the Papal Guard, or, to be exact, one of the Swiss Guard, I thought he looked like a harlequin. Many, I fear, will imagine that I mean by this that he looked silly or undignified. So little, I realise with a groan, after an obscure and laborious life of writing, does anybody know about anything that I think or feel. When I say he looked like a harlequin, I mean that he looked almost as sublime and splendid and poetical as a harlequin. But the comparison has several aspects, which throw a certain light on the understanding of Rome; and especially on the misunderstanding of Rome. To begin with, it is possible that some do not know that Harlequin was an Italian; just as there are some who do not know that Punch is Punchinello. But there is more than that in the international change. That which we in England used to call the Harlequinade was really the extinction of Harlequin. The English, with their glorious gift of a sort of gluttonous buffoonery, the sort of broad farce which made Chaucer’s Miller and afterwards Mt Piekwic 1 ' and his convivial club,

2,g6 THE RESURRECTION OF ROME soon turned the fantastic figures of the Italian stage into sturdy and even stodgy clowns. Indeed they added the splendid name of Clown; for Clown is quite a different person from Pierrot. The English saturnalia consisted almost entirely of Clown and Pantaloon; always including the Policeman, who, being a responsible public official, existed for the solid social purpose of being made into sausages. The atmosphere of the original Harlequinade was quite different, and chiefly different in tins; that the Harlequinade had something to do with the Harlequin.

In the old English version, which some of us are old and lucky enough to remember, the glittering figure with the rainbow raiment and the wooden but magic sword had already dwindled into a sort of dazzling interlude or parenthesis, twining and twirling his way with an equally objectless Columbine through the maze of the English clowning. But, as originally conceived, the proportions of the pantomime were quite different. Harlequin really was the hero; I might say even the serious hero. His sword was a sword, as well as a magic wand; and his motley was the masquerade of something mysterious and romantic, like a lung disguised. Innumerable romances, of that half sentimental and half ironic sort, have been played out upon Italian stages with this group of old Italian puppets; and the coincidence is even closer when we turn from the scene to the scenery. Victorian England grew used to seeing the farce played out before a butcher’s shop or a baker's shop, or all the flat comicalities of a cockney street; and very glorious the farce was and I wish there were more like it. In the old Continental tradition of Pierrot and Harlequin the background was as different as the atmosphere; and if we ask what it was, we can really give no better answer than that it resembled very much the ordinary background of Rome. Its gardens were Italian gardens, its villas Italian villas; we might say that its very moon was an Italian moon. Indeed it is true to say that the back-scene of such an ancient comedy was really very like the landscape against which I saw standing the strange figure of the Papal Guard, with his striped and vivid raiment and his halberd of extravagant outline; a landscape of urns and broken pillars and the dark green growths of the South; and the great graven pine-cone of grey stone like the head of the thyrsus of some colossal Dionysus turned to dust. Let it not be thought for a moment that I fail in loyalty to the butcher’s shop, or that I am ashamed of the national sausage-machine. When I forget thee, 0 Drury Lane, may my right hand forget its cunning, or rather its clumsiness; for the fun of the English was clumsiness rather than cunning. Never shall I cease to boast of my hearty pleasure in all that heavy farce. I am merely drawing a distinction; and the Italian fantasy was different from the English farce; which the English have made English. The Continental comedy was not inappropriate to its own classical landscape. It was not incongruous even with the uniform of a guard outside the Vatican Palace. Nor was the tradition of Pierrot anything like a heavy farce. It might rather be described as a light tragedy.

Now it is not fanciful to say that there is a real element of such dignity, and even of such tragedy, in the much greater gaiety of colour or bravado of outline in the serious symbols and decorations of the South; and especially in the military uniforms with their much franker parade of swinging sabre or tossing plume. We may sympathise with the British officers, who must escape from uniform; yet somehow do not escape from uniformity. But the South likes the uniform not as a uniform, but as a contrast. It prefers the vanity, the valour and even the passions and pleasures of man to be picked out in flaming scarlet and yellow against the black background of death or destiny, and finds no relief in half-tones or twilight softness; anymore than in wearing field-grey or brown to resemble the dust to which it shall return. It likes the figure that goes strutting with feather and sword, though it knows quite well that the sword may be as futile as the feather. That is why we of the North, when we first see such figures in such landscape, have the sense of something we can only call operatic. But we ought to remember that the name is associated with great things as well as small things; and certainly with serious things. Tragic and tremendous voices, shaking the heart and opening the depths of human nature like a day of judgment, have come from what we call opera. And so they have from this civilisation of operatic colours and costumes. The colours are bright because they are intense, not because they are pale or diluted. We may compare it to an opera, but not merely to a comic opera.

Therefore I do not apologise for the comparison that came to my mind, when I first saw the figure in stripes standing at the top of the great grey stone staircase, against the dark green gardens with their ornaments of thyrsus and urn. If St. Francis of Assisi did not object to being called the Juggler of God, I do not see why any reasonable Swiss gentleman should object to being called the Harlequin of the Pope. But as I watched him, and the pale light from one of Rome's stormy days striking hie streaks of colour a® he turned and shifted the hand upon the halberd, something else stirred within me, to which I could not as yet put a name. As these idle thoughts had been drifting aimlessly through my mind, there was an undercurrent in them that was somehow less international and nearer home; something nameless connected with my own nation and even my own experience. I could not imagine why this romantic Roman halberdier should in any way remind me of England. 1 could x'ecall no connection except the unfortunate link of Sir Willoughby Patterne; who was surely a blasting lightning flash illuminating the Englishman abroad. He did not approve of the Papal Guard. They were condemned by his sense of humour, which he took very seriously. It certainly never occurred to him that the Papal Guard, lounging about and laughing in their motley uniforms, might themselves have been rather humorous about his sense of humour. But obviously that faint memory of Meredith was not the missing link in my mincl; the link with London and my own early life. And then suddenly I remembered that long ago, in my older days of scribbling, I had written a ridiculous story about Notting Hill; of which the joke was that a man might die for a little suburb as if for a holy city; and that I had equipped the men fighting for it with the same sort of halberds and heraldic colours. The man standing on the great stairway was, among a myriad other more important things, one of my own little dreams come true. And I realised with something rather like alarm at the coincidence, that the comparison might really have been pressed further. For the guard of the Vatican City really was defending a place almost parochial in size though the reverse of paro chi al in importance. That here in the heart of Christendom, on the high place of the whole world, on a plane above all earthly empires and under the white and awful light that strikes on an eternal town, was really a model state no larger than Notting Hill.

When it was first whispered that a compromise might restore the Temporal Power to the Pope, it is needless to say that a shock of apprehension went through the whole world, which had been discussing for fifty years what a dark and dreadful thing the Temporal Power had been. One could almost fancy that it was the only Temporal Power in the world; or at least (to be moderate) it was manifest to all that it must be in its nature more powerful than all the great Powers. The plans of the Pope for the conquest of the planet were not known in detail, except in some specially well informed wooden villages of the Middle West; but instant precautions were taken to prevent the celebrated Papal Galleys, rowed by thousands of slaves, from penetrating as far as Omaha or Kansas City. The situation was complicated through the discovery, by some who were electioneering against Al. Smith, that he intended, if triumphant, to bring over the Pope to live as a permanent guest in the White House; which seems an indirect way of vigorously ruling Italy from the Vatican. But on the whole the followers of the more enlightened religions were fully warned of the danger. The Pope could not easily have bombarded New York or landed troops at Liver-pool without somebody noticing it. Needless to say, most of his critics fell back on a general moral lamentation over the thought of any Christian pastor, though he were only a Roman Catholic, yielding to this imperial greed of conquest and laying down the cross to take up the sceptre and the sword. When they had said this at such length as seemed satisfactory and edifying, some of them began to ask what the Temporal Power was. Some of them, I was seriously told, actually asked for a map of Italy, showing the outlines of the Empire which the new Papal Emperor had seized; and they are puzzling over it still.

And indeed I do not blame them, for the Papal decision in the matter really is a puzzle in the sense of a paradox. Indeed it is so much of a paradox that the Papal action is by no means universally pleasing to Papists. Some certainly wish that the Temporal Power had been a little more powerful. I have been told that among the Romans especially there is something like a regret that they have not been more definitely distinguished from the rest of the world, by some sort of link with the Roman Pontiff. Personally, I take the other view; but it is possible, to tell the truth, that I take it a little too personally. I think there is something both subtle and magnificent in the idea of claiming a foothold, but only a foothold, for the foot of St. Peter. A wild Futurist once wrote a romance called The Aeroplane of The Pope; and, speaking symbolically, there is really something wrong about the Pope being all up in the air; and dealing with all of the sky and none of the earth. But there is something strangely right about ' his claiming the smallest possible political power with the largest possible pontifical power. There is a sort of mathematical mystery about it; like the two extremes of the circumference and the central point. But I may be misled by my fancies, for I have always believed firmly in two things; the value of little states and local liberties, and the necessity of a general moral philosophy, big enough to defend such little things. I cannot see how it is piossible to hope for the liberty of little communities, unless there is a large theory of justice that is admitted by all communities. But I think it is singularly fitting that one of the very littlest should be the repository of the theory accepted by all the rest. I may be too romantic; and it is true, as I say, that I have sometimes in this matter dreamed dreams that were extravagant enough. But anyhow, there is something that I find enormously moving to my own imagination in the idea of that sacred island far inland, so small in its size, so absolute in its boundary, so strange and awful in its significance; the Holy Land of Europe; the minute microcosm of Christendom. And it mixes itself in some turbid fashion with all the old debates and dreams that I remember, touching liberty and limitations and the little commonwealths; as if the Faith were meant in this, as in so many things, to be at once a contradiction and an exaggeration and an example. It gives me a new thrill, when I accept the largest of all the religions, to salute it also as the smallest of the small nationalities.

That small piece of earth is indeed a sort of spiritual sublimate of the whole idea of justice that has made so many just men instinctively feel generous in the matter of small nationalities. It is the sense that it is the whole business of civilisation to ensure the protection of small and precious things; that anarchism or taking anything, and imperialism or taking everything, are in their nature inferior to that finer sense of honour that deliberately refrains from taking something; that the tree of history is judged by its fruits even when they look as small as berries, and by its blossoms even when they look as small as buds; that all humanity was subconsciously concerned to keep Athens and Florence and Jerusalem intact; that the true spiral of imagination and creation is always twisting inwards towards smaller and smaller things, ever since men realised that jewels were smaller than pebbles and seeds smaller than clods; that if there be indeed a progress of humanity it may be such a progress inwards to discover its own heart; that if there be indeed an evolution, which means only an unfolding, it may be like the unwrapping of some beautiful Christmas gift, in which large things only exist to be the box and framework and protection of small; and that this toy kingdom is indeed such a Christmas toy, since it is not merely an exhibit in a museum but a relic in a shrine.

And when I realised that, I knew there had been something in my old nonsensical notion or novel, something that was certainly never expressed properly in that novel and almost certainly will never be expressed at all. I can only hint at it by saying that what represents

TJr good in this world must be first concrete and second compact. The idealists and the professors of abstractions can never understand it being concrete. The imperialists and the greedy megalomaniacs can never understand it being compact. The pearl of great price, in the parable, is as valuable as a field or a kingdom, but it is not as vast as a field or a kingdom. On the other hand, it is quite a mistake to suppose that because it is not more vast than the field, it is not more solid than the sky. The pearl is a possession, it is a positive and solid thing; it is an incomparably precious and priceless thing; only it is a small thing. But a thing, not a theory. And here indeed my thoughts began to drift towards deeper parallels where I dare hardly follow them, or at any rate follow them here; for the great supreme riddle or mystery which concentrates on that high place, or gathers against that citadel, in sunlight and lightning, all the blessings and curses of the world, is indeed the doctrine that what is most divine does truly offer itself as something as material and as small. Perhaps a truly great thing always tries to grow small; and there is hidden here a mystery of microscopic ambition. For though the Magnificat magnifies the Lord, it is only just after the Lord has minimised Himself. And there is here a mansion within a mansion, a new Bethlehem or

House of Bread, and in the smallest of the Tabernacles something yet more little than a child.

As I say, I find my words altogether fail me in following out the deepest applications of the principle, but I do believe there is some truth in that principle, concerning the material manifestation of good things; that it is material but it is limited. When material things grow too large, men lose the sense that they are even material, and they take on the darker character of abstractions. Thus the measurement of the material universe, by modern science, by mere size, ceases to be real, and men do not believe that moons so far away are moons at all. So money may be merely mud, but mountains of money are something much worse than mud and far less than mountains. They become merely noughts in a ledger; that is the endless addition of nothing to nothing. The vulgar American expression about delivering the goods has this dim truth about it; that good does express itself in goods, but not in too many goods. States that are small enough to be really governed, properties that are small enough to be really owned, works of art that are concrete and compact enough to be permanently appreciated, these are a class of things which the vast capitalist organisations of to-day understand very little, but which Italy of the small republics and the little vineyards has understood very well. And as my wandering thoughts went back to the solitary figure on the steps, which had so inconsequently called them forth, I remembered that he was also the representative of many brave men who have really defended such tiny towns with such old-world weapons. For though in one sense his sword and halberd are harmless and for show, yet he or his like have died on those steps in defence of the Father of Christians; and if need were, which God avert, the Harlequin would die again.

But he will hardly have to die. Many are asking, in effect, what the new Vatican State or Roman Settlement means. I can tell them at least one thing that it means. It means that nobody is going to make the mistake again which the whole nineteenth century made. Even the survivors, who made the mistake, will now probably deny that they ever made it. For this is a very practical side of history that is generally entirely forgotten; in this case, as I say, wilfully forgotten. Real history, if there could be such a thing, would not consist of what men did, or even what they said. It would consist far more of the mighty and enormous things that they did not say. The assumptions of an age are more vital than the acts of an age. The most important sentence is the sentence that a whole generation has forgotten to say; or felt it needless to say. It is that silence which so often makes a whole generation inscrutable, and leaves the sons looking in the faces of strange fathers. The men from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth had a luminous but negative notion, which most of them expressed with polite moderation; but which they expressed better, perhaps, in watercolour sketches of broken aqueducts in the Campagna or carefully shaded drawings of sculptured fragments in the Vatican. Rogers the wit, who in some strange way came to be called a poet, doing all the elegant things required of him by his world, wrote verses about Italian landscape and history; verses as smooth-sliding as Mincius but hardly crowned with the vocal reeds of Milton. It is significant of the spirit in which these men wrote of such things that he called his poem “ The Pleasures of Memory.” That generation wrote of other things under the title of " The Pleasures of Hope.” Rome to these men in most aspects, but supremely in its religious aspect, was at best a memory; still a respected memory, but always a fading memory. But Rogers the wit, as distinct from Rogers the poet, was also the man who made the famous remark that he believed in the religion of all sensible men; and when asked what it was, replied placidly: “ Sensible men never say.”

There he bore witness to one of these universal silences of which I speak. Rogers himself meant, quite simply, that his religion was irreligion. But all the men of that time meant that it was something less like the old Roman religion than they commonly said in so many words. All the sensible men assumed that the world would abandon such beliefs if it became more sensible; and most of them assumed that it would become more sensible. That is the point to see about this substantial if subconscious agreement. Nearly all of them thought that such religion, which they would call superstition, was not only a dream but a dream from which everybody was waking up. Most of them were polite to it; some of them were rude to it; but hardly any of them really expected it to last another hundred years. The vast majority of them thought that it would die; without saying so. Now they know that it will live; also without saying so.

Every great man of the nineteenth century made that mistake, and only a few unmade it. Every great dictator, from Napoleon to Bismarck, blundered sooner or later on that particular point. Napoleon, being a man of far finer culture and intelligence than Bismarck, found himself in the midst of the misunderstanding;

and before the end understood that he had misunderstood. Bismarck, I suppose, never understood the name of the rock that had tripped and thrown him. But both of them, and all of them, fell down on this fact; that they fancied that in some way the Papacy was connected with the Past. The Papacy is as much a thing of the Future as a thing of the Past; it is very sharply and plainly a thing of the Present. It may be a menace of the Future; it may be a plague of the Present; so far as that argument is concerned, it may be a new peril like the Next War or the Final Comet. It may be Antichrist coming in the last days and bestriding the earth with a new and evil empire, as is sometimes whispered with confidential excitement by men who hand round little leaflets at Margate. But it is not a ruin or a broken arch in the middle of the Campagna, to be sketched in watercolours or lamented in elegiacs. Everybody knows that now, whether they say so or not; and the men nearest to it know it best of all. And that, for one thing, is the meaning of the Vatican State.

Compare the conduct of dictators like Napoleon and Bismarck with the conduct of dictators like Mussolini and Pilsudski. The former thought that they were falling over so much lumber, and that the lumber would soon be cleared away. The latter know that they are coming against certain limits; and those limits will never be moved away. They may like or dislike them in varying degrees; they may bargain with them or balance them with various alternatives, but they will always deal with the Papacy as they would deal with the Pyrenees or the Polar Sea; in short, as they deal with the planet and everything that will only end with the planet. That is the lesson that has been learnt by the strong men of the age once dedicated to the production of the Superman. That is the chief difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth. That is the news silently digested by those whose information and outlook are really new. Here is the wisdom of the new dictators; that they do know where they cannot dictate.

For the moment, the signal of that discovery is a tiny scrap of territory not much larger than its own flag; but its flag is its own. Its purpose and policy are its own; it is visible, it is inviolable, it is saluted by all the flags of the world. And it represents primarily this profound change in the historic sense of Europeans. That notion, that old things can always be left behind, has itself been left behind. The notion that what is traditional is destructible is itself destroyed; the notion that all our Christian past was dying is dead.

In short, Mussolini may not he a greater man than Napoleon, but he is a wiser man than Napoleon; a hundred years wiser. And the difference is exactly this; that a hundred years ago all men held their breath and said: " The Pope has crossed the path of Napoleon.” But if there were an internal quarrel in Italy tomorrow (absit omen) the same men would hold their breath and say: “ Mussolini has crossed the path of the Pope.” The notion of something permanent in European affairs, not to be altered even by right and just revolutions, has come with a quiet and crushing force to all our contemporaries, and especially to the most intelligent and even the most revolutionary. Henceforth, the more a man wants to destroy something that ought to be destroyed, the less he will turn aside to be entangled in an attempt to destroy the indestructible. Napoleon could have brought back common sense and the career open to talent, sweeping away the stiff and frozen frivolities of a feudalism already dead for ages, without going out of his way to pretend that the Pope was not the Pope. But he was a man of his time and could not always resist the contemporary illusion that the Papacy was the Past. Qui mange du Pape meuvt; but this great man discovered his error before dying, and certainly abjured it in the hour of death. Bismarck might have announced that a German Empire was bom, without wantonly adding that the Papal Empire was dying; but he also was a simple man of his time, and was patiently watching for it to die. The new men of action have grown tired of watching and waiting to see the death of undying things; and, while quite capable of dealing death, will leave alone the specialist function of dealing damnation round the land. In a sense it means the first appearance of secular government in the modern world or, in other words, of government that minds its own business.

An anti-clerical government is not a secular government. It is the very reverse of secular or even secularist. Anti-clericalism is a particular form of religious bigotry, intruding and intriguing in secular politics. It is opposed to Catholicism as was Calvinism; but with exactly the same poison of spirituality in the wrong place. Anti-clericalism keeps countries like France in a perpetual ferment of debate about God and the things that are God’s; and tends if anything to prevent people from rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. There is nobody so theistic as the atheist; just as in the last resort there is nobody so mystical as the materialist. The French atheist has wasted so much time talking of what he says does not exist, that he has no right to be annoyed when an Italian Syndicalist suddenly jumps up and proposes to discuss things that do exist. But there is one thing which the Italian Syndicalist very early recognised as being among the things that do exist; and, even while not yet especially his affair, as a thing that would go on existing. It is real realism; it is the spread of the scientific spirit in politics, which has revealed in the geological formation of southern Europe something which men in a less scientific age thought to trample like mire or drive before them like dust; a rock.

Modem Italy is a model of how the state becomes so much more secular by becoming less secularist. Even Rome, in which there seem sometimes to be more churches than houses, almost takes on the appearance of a sensible secular town. It could not do so while the very name of Nathan recalled the Jewish Prophet — and the Jewish Problem. It could not do so while that remarkable Jewish Prophet stood in permanent antithesis to the Christian Apostle. Rome has become a rational place where policemen are policemen and priests are priests and soldiers are soldiers; not a place where they are clericals or anti-clericals. Some of them may be atheists but not many of them are lunatics; like the lunatics who made black marks against the name of any French soldier who went to church, and who nearly lost the Great War in order to spite the spiritual tastes of Foch. This sort of rationality is not necessarily religion, certainly not my religion; and it may have a long way to go before it becomes internally religious. But it is something to have seen the dawn of a new Age of Reason, and a real race of rationalists who will leave religion alone.

I T is the whole point of this book that the pomps of Rome are rightly meaningless until we know what they mean. I am entirely on the side of the Puritan who thinks the symbol fictitious so long as he thinks the significance false. I am now going to attempt to describe the personal experience of approaching the very centre of such pomps or ceremonies, and meeting the personal ruler who oversees them all. And I am particularly anxious to affirm, at the start, that though of course these shows and pageants meant immeasurably much to me, and profoundly affected my emotions, yet I do not base my belief on such emotions, still less on such pageants or shows. I was myself received into the Catholic Church in a small tin shed, painted brick-red, which stood among the sculleries and outhouses of a Railway Hotel. That represents, with great exactitude, the precise extent to which I was or am influenced by exquisite architecture or alluring music, or storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light. And the Pope would be the first to say that the step I took in entering that shed was inconceivably more important than the step of entering St. Peter's, or the Vatican, or his own presence.

I saw His Holiness Pius XI three times; the first time in private audience; the second in a semi-private assembly of various notables and the third time among the crowds that thronged St. Peter's on the day of the Beatification of the English Martyrs. On the first occasion a dignitary who was the head of one of the National Colleges kindly helped to introduce me; and I have seldom been more grateful for human companionship. It is altogether inadequate to say I was nervous. I was nervous when I saw Signor Mussolini, chiefly because he talked French so much better than I did. But it is perhaps curious to note that, while my nervousness in the presence of II Duce drove me madly on to talk French and more French, merely because I could not talk French, I found in the presence of the Pope that I could not talk English, or talk at all. He came suddenly out of his study, a sturdy figure in a cape, with a square face and spectacles and began speaking to me about what I had written, saying some very generous things about a sketch I wrote of St. Francis of Assisi. He asked me if I wrote a great deal; and I answered, in fragmentary French phrases that it was only too true, or words to that effect. The clerical dignitary nobly struck in in my support by saying it was my modesty. As a matter of fact, my head was in a whirl and it might have been anything. Then he made a motion and we all knelt; and in the words that followed I understood for the first time something that was once meant by the ceremonial use of the plural, and in a flash I saw the sense of something that had always seemed to me a senseless custom of kings. With a new strong voice, that was hardly even like his own, he began " Nous vous benissons,” and I knew that something stood there infinitely greater than an individual; I knew that it was indeed “ We ”; We, Peter and Gregory and Hildebrand and all the dynasty that does not die. Then, as he passed on, we rose and found our way out of the Palace, through knots of Swiss and Papal Guards, till we were again under the open sky. I said to the clerical dignitary, " That frightened me more than anything I have known in my life.” The clerical dignitary laughed heartily.

One touch may be added to the scene, which is not so irrelevant as it looks. When we left the Vatican, one of the party discovered the loss of an umbrella; I believe somebody else's umbrella. With all respect to the umbrella, I thought it unlikely that it would be used as a Papal canopy and carried in state in any of the gorgeous processions. But we made the obvious jest about the highest church dignitaries having a weakness for stealing umbrellas, or having a little horde of parasols. Then someone more native to the spot said firmly that the Pope would certainly give it to the niggers. “ At this moment,” said my informant solemnly, " a little nigger is walking about in the sun with your umbrella.” In this slightly exaggerative form I first fully realised the quality to be added to the obvious qualities of Pius XI; it is called an enthusiasm for missions, but it is in fact a very strong antagonism to the contempt for the aboriginal races and a gigantic faith in the fraternity of all tribes in the light of the Faith. “ We have not only to save Christendom, but to save mankind.” A distinguished Scandinavian, whom I met later, was so warm an upholder of this humanitarianism, that he said, with shining eyes as one who beholds a vision, “ We may yet have a black Pope.” In a spirit of disgraceful compromise, I suggested meekly that (if not quite ready for that) I should be delighted to see a black Cardinal. I was conscious of some shadowy pleasure in the image; and I recalled the imperial bust of black marble with the red robe, and wondered if there is something prophetic or significant in our fancies. Then I remembered the great King who came to Bethlehem, heavy with purple and crimson and with a face like night; and I was ashamed.

THK HOLY ISLAND

The second time I saw the Pope with more detachment, and heard him at greater length; when the documents of the Beatification were finally read for his approval. I heard the very long list of those English heroes, who resisted the despotic destruction of the national religion, read in due order; and listened to a number of names that sounded like Smith or Higgins pronounced with a perfect Italian accent. Then the Pope himself spoke, in a manner rather conversational than rhetorical, but with not a little Italian gesture and vivacity, by the standard of English conversation. What moved me very much, as an Englishman and an exile, was that he spoke with peculiar warmth and vividness in praise of England, and like one who had seen it rather than heard of it. He dwelt even more strongly on the words, “ So beautiful a country,” than on the words, " So great a nation.” He also emphasised strongly the fact that the last witnesses in England were men of every class and condition, poor as well as rich, and agricultural labourers as well as the first noble of the land. He spoke in Italian; but so clearly and with such exact gesture that I could understand nearly every word.

Lastly, as I have said, the last time I saw him was in the fullest blaze of publicity when he came to consummate the Beatification before a colossal congregation, and to conclude it by

W-celebrating Benediction at the High Altar. Here indeed there was, admittedly and openly, the full torrent of pomp and popular excitement but it seemed to me as if I already knew enough not to trust merely to the effect of these. Pius XI will always be to me a real man whom I have met; with all the intense but indescribable difference that that fact makes in our judgment of men. I should always know that certain things said about him were nonsense; it is true, in that sense, that pageantry proves nothing one way or the other; and he might be enthroned on the top of St. Peter's, with populations lying prostrate round it for miles, and I should still know that there was not in him any shadow of pride. Nevertheless, the pageant as a pageant is well worthy of better words than I can find for it, for it had another significance also, which perhaps can only be suggested in another way. It begins so far away that I can only convey it by getting far away from it.

The historic Church, which contains all things, contains something not only historic, but prehistoric. It is awful with the Primitive Revelation, and even the Fall or the Flood. I came to feel it in the most barbaric of the Baroque; and in the Baldacchino in St. Peter’s, which I once hated as a piece of black confectionery, of twisted sticks of liquorice. But when, as I shall describe, a voice like a great wind went through the central temple of the world, I suddenly felt that its dark spirals were dizzy like tropic trees, in some boiling cyclone of the south; when something beyond words shakes the dark heart of Africa; something that is worship — yes, if it be only devil-worship.

W HEN I made a due and proper pilgrimage to the Lake of Nemi, it was chiefly for the sake of something that is not there. It was combined, I grieve to say, with a certain momentary indifference verging on irritation, concerning what is there. I have explained with all humility that I am a bad sight-seer, without intending any reflection on the sight-seers or the sights. The power of abruptly adapting the proper sentiment to the present sight may be a form of presence of mind which it is a weakness to lack; but anyhow I lack it. Therefore I went to Nemi with the secret gratification of knowing that my own favourite sight is not there to be seen. Most sensible people go there to see what is to be seen of the Galleys of Caligula, but somehow I felt curiously cold about these vessels, as if they were the house-boats of Sir Thomas Lipton. Caligula seems modern in so many ways; he was mad and doubtless spent a great deal of money on show, in things like these particular ships. But the name of Nemi was connected in my mind with that dark primeval cult of the priest of the moon; who was ordained for his sacred office by becoming a murderer and then looking forward as cheerfully as possible to being murdered. I looked at Nemi as the scene of that mystery, and even in bright sunshine it was worthy of it. It really is " the still glassy lake that sleeps beneath Alicia’s trees,” though Macaulay did say so. But the absence of the temple, so much more impressive than the presence of the galleys, reminded me of something else which is not irrelevant to this rambling theme.

Amid the million sensational novels which I have devoured with the most agreeable sensations, I remember one which was really very thrilling; and the thrill consisted in the well concealed, and well betrayed secret that there still exists in the world a group continuing the ancient and mysterious rite of Nemi; the temple of Diana where the priest sacrificed the priest. The story was so well told that the reader did really feel something like the icy shock of antiquity. He realised something unnaturally moving in the mere fact that a religion had somehow managed to survive out of ancient Roman times. Few of those who read that novel would pause to reflect that a religion really has survived out of ancient Roman times. But nobody notices it, because it is not secret but public; because it is not cruel but humane; and because, in that antique Italian idolatry, it is not the priest but the god that died.

Nevertheless, it is only by some such angle almost of accident, that it is possible to put a finger on that nerve of fear and unfamiliarity, by which we can really accept the stupendous fact that has happened. In one sense the idiots are perfectly right when they say that the Christian religion is but a continuation of the Pagan religions. Only it was nothing in the Pagan religions themselves that could possibly continue. It was in itself a Christian miracle to make Paganism live. When we look at the Mass, we see something that the heathens saw; the only thing that remains of them or their seeing. Despite the delights of the detective narrative I have mentioned, we most of us know very well that there is not a modem priest of Diana quietly cutting the throat of the late incumbent of his parish. But there is something pretty nearly as old and every bit as sensational. The story is not only a romance, it is in the first derivative sense a novel; in that it is still novel, or has not left off being news.

The first example of this is that the very garments of the priests standing at the altar are essentially the garments of a man of ancient Rome, or even of heathen Rome. In being handed down for hundreds and hundreds of years, they have of course been modified in pattern, but they preserve the ancient plan. What looks so strange to us in a man standing at the altar would hardly have looked so strange to Horace or Catullus in a man walking in the street. The whole apparatus of altar and priest and sacred enclosure carries us back to that which seems to us like the world before the Flood, whose remoteness we really express when we can only call it Antiquity. On the day of the Beatification, as this very obvious idea crossed my mind when gazing at those about to serve in the sanctuary, I looked round at the huge variegated and many-coloured crowd in the church; with all their multifarious uniforms and robes of office. And it struck me as odd, even at a glance, to note that there were people present in almost every costume of every century since that first garb of Antiquity had been worn. We all know how a past period will leave behind one feature like a fossil; how Beef-Eaters wear the uniform of guards under Henry VIII or Bluecoat Boys wear the garments of boys under Edward VI. But here it was not a question of one or two survivals in incongruous clothes. All the generations of men were here, and most of them still playing a part congruous to their original purpose. The Franciscans, in their brown and corded frocks.

were simply peasants of the early Middle Ages; unaltered since St. Francis changed clothes with a peasant. The men who immediately surround the Pope, and carry his throne, seemed quite familiar figures in square-cut garments of Genoese velvet; for we have seen them in hundreds of pictures. They were simply men of the Renaissance, whose dark red garments have glowed in countless canvases of Titian or Veronese. In a ring outside these stood men so startlingly like academy pictures of Essex and Raleigh that for a moment one might suppose it was a highly historical carnival; yet these were not fancy dresses but the ancient ceremonial dress of old orders of knighthood or offices of piety handed down for three hundred years. They stood in their stiff ruffs and ribbed trunk hose with all that easy gravity of men wearing their own proper clothes, as if they were standing about in the court of Philip II of Spain. So it was right down the ages; there were later types with the knee-breeches and court swords of the eighteenth century, and others in an evening dress to us rather reminiscent of the nineteenth century; and behind, the huge twentieth century crowd, with the clothes of our own day. Pageantry, as I say, is little enough in itself; but if you are talking of pageantry, there never was a pageant in the world like this; for it is a procession of all the centuries, not of actors dressed up as dead things, but of things really dating from those centuries and yet alive. As the vast throng moved by, I caught a glimpse beyond of the coloured image of Our Lady, and the words went through my mind: " All generations shall call me blessed.”

The greater part of this solemn carnival of all the sons of time moved forward vaguely like a vast wave, far ahead of the actual termination of the triumph, which was the appearance of the Pontiff. And as I looked and listened, I realised a paradox that inheres in the very nature of that place. St. Peter’s looks fairly large, but it is very much larger than it looks. Some have praised it for this, as being a triumph of proportion; some have scoffed at it for this, like Macaulay when he said that an architect so clever as to make a big building look small is as sensible as a debater so clever as to make a strong argument look weak. But whatever be our view of the fact, it certainly is the fact. Something in the curious cavernous lines of the place, with its wide and curved and almost wavering pillars, makes us imagine something lowering over our heads or enclosing us in dizzy and magic circles, which is not the same as the mere sensation of unlimited space. There is a sort of optical illusion, which is here corrected by what I may call an auricular confession. Suddenly, I realised that my ears contradicted my eyes. For there came as if carried on the wind something that was almost a whisper; and yet I knew by the thrill of it that it was a shout. It was the people at the other end of the church cheering the Pope; but it was like the sound of people cheering whole streets away. There was something creepy at once in the contradiction and the realisation. It was as if a man called across the room and his voice seemed to come faint and far across the valley. And with the sound of that the whole building seemed to swell and expand and open upwards into eternity, until we realised that these painted and gilded caverns were vast like the hollows of the sky. The noise grew louder and louder along a remote and winding road; and at last, while it was yet distant, rose into one deafening roar of “ Viva II Papa.” Perhaps it was an accident; but I did not hear anywhere that cry that used to be provocative and political in the days of the division; " Viva II Papa-Re.” Perhaps it was felt to be in bad taste to insist on it, now that the nation and the Holy Father were friends. Perhaps it was because there was no need for it now. He was a King and need not be called so. Anyhow the roar rose as if to rend the roof as the Pope passed by. Officially, I believe, the congregation were forbidden to shout. God Vnows what noise they would have made, if they had been allowed to shout.

Of that which thus passed, and was thus saluted, there is another word to be said, or the full impression will be again false. I have already referred to the real case for popular pomp in an institution like the Papacy; and have admitted as a fact, and defended as a logical fact, that it does hold itself free to go almost all lengths in material magnificence. And yet, if we left the matter thus, we should miss yet a further point. There is in fact a further paradox; very illustrative of the immemorial instincts of hieratic art. It must be remembered that, even among heathens, it is perhaps the oldest art in the world. The instincts and imagination behind it are very deep and delicate; and there is a sense in which the Pontifex Maximus is the simplest figure in the scene. There is something analogous to things lifted into a clearer and a colder air, in the tradition by which a pale and silver splendour has been made the highlight of the picture. It passes into a phase where light has transcended colour; as in the hueless dawn of creation when the first light was as strange as the first snow, or like the last white ashes of a world purified by death. There is here something subtle, altogether above the scale of pride and isolated by its very background of glory; where he walks in white when all his household is clothed in scarlet; and moves to the sound of trumpets; but they are of silver and not of brass or gold.

Whatever that pageant may mean, it has passed like a vision, and if there were no more to say of its meaning, we could agree that it is passed like a dream. Nobody but a fool, I respectfully repeat, would take such shows and shadows as a reason for his belief; but when belief has once satisfied the reason, it would be strange indeed if these things did not follow and pursue with all the wings of the imagination. Nor does the outer world disdain to be inspired by ceremony; it only invents other ceremonies that are not so inspiring. We talk of anti-ritualists, but there are no anti-ritualists. It is only given to men to degrade ritualism into etiquette. And when we went forth from that place into the world outside, with its advertisements and its newspapers and its flunkeys and its fashionable dresses, we cannot be very much blamed, if we thought that the world within had held something larger than the world without.

Yet, strangely enough, it is exactly at this moment that I can turn once more and say a word of consolation to my invisible companion, my dear friend the Nordic Man, the cultivated tourist, whether he be Puritan or Rusldnian or grim unsoftened Gothicist, with whom (you must know) I have been wandering hand in hand from the beginning of this book and through all the streets of this city. To him alone I have been appealing and attempting to demonstrate (quite without effect) that the tone of triumph and parade which he feels in the monuments of the Papal city is not quite so worthless, or at least not quite so meaningless as he thinks. For his ear alone have been the digressions and examples, in which I sought to suggest that all this triumph is not mere vainglory, because the fight and the triumph were not vain. I have hinted to liim that a city and a civilisation does really rejoice over certain great Pontifical judgments; from the Pope in the ninth century who justified Statues to the Pope in the nineteenth century who justified Strikes. And all the time I was thus reasoning with him, in so affectionate a fashion, I fear that his Nordic spirits have sunk lower and lower; and that he has found it hardest of all to pardon my recent laudation of the coloured pageant in St. Peter s. Well, I will end by making an admission, I might almost say by telling a secret; though I know not whether that, when explained, will make it easier for us to part friends. Much as I felt the majesty of the Papal procession, keenly as I shared the enthusiasm for the cause of the English Martyrs, these were not the scenes that have remained most magnetically in my memory, nor the inward pictures which I shall recall till I die. As I said at the beginning, the objects that really please the traveller are often apparently detached and illogical; there is no man so self-controlled as to be sure of feeling his most intense emotions at the most important time. I will conclude by confessing that two other images, the one transitory, the other familiar, now stand out from all my impressions with the prominence of something mesmeric and with a power akin to magic. I will leave them with the reader, hoping that here, after all, the lost meaning may be found.

Some time before we left Rome, the city was illuminated everywhere for the festival of the Immaculate Conception. The doctrine is not in question here, but it is worth noting, in relation to the general theme, that it is a recent and almost defiant decision, right or wrong, made in the very midst of the rationalist or anti-clerical nineteenth century, as a challenge to the world from a religion that refused to die. In any case, to see a celebration of this sort in the heart of Southern civilisation is to have nothing left but laughter for those who pretend that Catholicism is Puritan and not popular or festive. There was, of course, every kind of decoration and display, down to those which have for us almost grotesque associations.

There were fireworks; and I have always been as fond of fireworks as a child or a Chinaman. Nor could I, at any time of my life, have found it easy to maintain that the love of Mary was a less worthy motive than the hatred of Guy Fawkes. But I do not speak of the general brilliance that burned through the heart of the night, but of one chance effect, which (as I have said) fixed itself in my memory with an intensity quite indescribable. Which is the reason (of course) that I shall here show the weakness of all writing men, by attempting to describe it.

I had always had, I hardly know why, a sort of attachment to that particular column near the Piazza di Spagna, which is topped by a figure of the Virgin standing on the crescent of the moon. When I came on it, on this particular night, as it rose into the dark dome of sky above the pale or painted facades of the Italian houses, it was picked out more distinctly by one of the long searchlights, but still so delicately that the grey stone was barely changed to a faint silver; it might have been moonshine and fitting enough to the statue thus standing on the moon. But when I looked up at the moon, I could not see it. For it seemed at first to be caught or entangled in incredible manycoloured clouds; such coloured clouds as are never seen against the vault of night. When I looked again, I felt as if it were a miracle; and a more amazing miracle than sunset clouds at midnight. For these things were not manycoloured clouds but banks of many-coloured blossom. It seemed as if Our Lady had at that instant alighted, and the stark stone pillar had broken into flowers under her feet. (No, no, dear Nordic companion, I did not think it was a miracle. There is no need for us to discuss the dead philosophy of monism and materialism.) What did I think it was? What shall I say, or what shall anybody say?

What are the names for Beauty? Who shall praise God’s pledge He can fulfil His creature’s eyes?

Or what strong words of what creative phrase Determine Beauty’s title in the skies?

The question put in Mr. Belloc's sonnet is the only answer to any other question in this case. We have all seen flowers. We have all seen statues and columns. We have all seen moonlight. These things, or words, do not convey in separation even the most remote suggestion of that amazing garden in the sky. The wan light lay on it like a veil, not discolouring and yet changing as by enchantment; so that while nothing was lost of the glow from the glorious flowers of Italy, they had also something unearthly and luminous that might belong to the flowers of the moon. The little meadow on which She walked seemed infinitely far away in the upper void of space; and yet the Figure seemed to have come nearer.

Was I worshipping the image? No. Oh no. Only with diilia. Not with latyia. Did I know that the column, and also the statue, were only two large pieces of stone? I did. Was I aware that modern science, in her ruthless researches into the laws of nature, has discovered that flowers do not generally grow out of bare stone, when there is no earth for them to grow out of? I was. Has this anything to do with any intelligent person offering his homage to such a vision, as to something sent by God? It has not. I am quite well acquainted, thank you, with the fact that Protestantism denounces idolatry. I am also acquainted with the fact that Catholicism forbids idolatry. But where-ever and in whatever mode or form my prayers were offered, they included a prayer that somehow or somewhere there might be found enough daylight or dynamite to lift the prigs and provincials who ask such questions a hundred leagues into the upper air; far and wide into those wider and more windy altitudes where She stands, beholding, before we can see it, the broad dawn that is breaking over Christendom; that the poor fellows may, for once, be really In Advance of the Age; and travelling through time as well as space, find the paradise where,

Y» far above the roofs of Rome in winter. She walked upon the flowers of spring.

Whether you call it accident or art or artifice, there was something much more than conventional ornament in the idea of heaping those burning blossoms on the precipice of that remote pillar. I mention the detail without any inferences; but when I asked who had done it, I was told that the flowers before this image were the personal contribution of Mussolini.

[■? I have not written this book for those who like Rome; those who like Rome know infinitely more about it than I do; and even I have not dealt here with the details of what I know. I have not written it for those who pretend to like Rome, for they will not admit the difficulty with which I deal; and there is no fate or fashion compelling them to pretend to like my books. I have certainly not written it for those mysterious people who definitely dislike Rome, and yet think it their duty to come from the ends of the earth and examine everything in it. I have written it for those who would like to like Rome, but feel an honest temptation to dislike it, for the perfectly just and adequate reason that they cannot make out what it is all about. And my own difficulty is that, though I believe my own thesis of perpetual Resurrection is the real clue, I cannot easily point to any lucid and conscious expression of that thesis; the jungle is too thick and gorgeous for the primitive roots to be seen. Rome has hidden herself in her hundred innovations and renewals, and has given many a man the impression rather of walking amid the ruins of old revolutions than in the scheme or scaffolding of new plans for the world. As a fact, the new plans in Rome are as plain as the old ones; but they also are put forth by men too eager to explain themselves, and likely to leave behind them great works, which may in their turn be gi-eat ruins, but will almost certainly be great riddles. It is not easy to find the place where Rome has hidden the key to the riddle; in the form of any simple summary of the central idea. Critics of the New Italy, or the new social experiments, may be as crude as those who imagine that, because silver trumpets are blown before the Pope, therefore he is always blowing his own trumpet.

And at last, I might almost say by accident, in the course of my very irregular and indeed insufficient wanderings among the classical fanes of the most famous of earthly cities, I came upon the exact expression of all that I have here been vainly trying to express. I have done my best to explain that I do not blame the traveller who can see nothing but what is blatant and empty in all those hollow horns and urns and tossing trumpets, which seem to him hollow in the same fashion as the florid masks of tragedy and comedy. I have also done my best to explain that these things are anything but hollow, save with the hollowness of drums and bugles going into battle. I have tried to sketch here and there the nature of the battle and the reason of the triumph. But here, in this one place, is an older type of symbolism, in which the real nature of that triumph is conveyed as I can hardly convey it here. It is traced in mosaic in the apse of the ancient Church of St. Clemente, one of the most remarkable and yet one of the most typically Roman of churches; for it descends below into a stratification of dead churches and pagan foundations. Under all there is a dark cavern carved with the mystery of Mithras; and I have heard, standing before that strange altar, the noise of the Lost Waters of Rome. But the upper church, in which I have heard Mass, is in more ways than one the crown of the revival and triumph of Christian things; and the old decoration of the apse expresses the idea with a symmetry that is almost startling. The apse is a half-moon of gold on the usual pattern; but at the top there is a cloud out of which comes the hand of God above the crucifix. It does not merely bless it or even merely rest on it. It seems to take the cross as if by the cross-hilt and thrust it like a sword into the earth below. Yet in one sense it is the very reverse of a sword, since its touch is not death but life; life springing and sprouting and shooting into the air, that the world may have life, and that it may have it more abundantly. It is impossible to say too much of the fruitful violence of this effect. It is not the normal groping of roots or branches. It is more like the blood of the earth spurting instantly from its arteries at the first wound. The living shoots go whirling away into space covering the whole background with their gyres and eddies; as if to lasso the stars. This antique design does really achieve what so many Futurist experiments or crazy jazz decorations have attempted; to make a dynamic diagram and to express suddenness in a pattern. The very disproportion between the long loops and circles sprawling everywhere and the slender cross at whose touch they have leapt into life, emphasises with energy the power of that magic wand. Curled inside each of the circles, as in something that is at once a nest and a new and separate world, is a bird, to express the universal birth of life; and each bird is different in species or colour. No one but a madman could stand before it and say that our faith is anti-vital or a creed of death. And there is one last touch, which has already been remarked by many; that the face of the Crucified, which in most images is naturally tragic, is in this case radiant and like the sun at noon; or like the words that have no need to be written here in any motto or inscription: I am the Resurrection and the Life.

THE END