you have to start at about one o’clock, or midday, in full evening costume, dress-coat and black trowsers. Any man who has ever had to walk out in evening attire in the broad daylight, will agree with me that the sensation of the general shabbiness and duskiness of your whole appearance is so strong as to overcome all other considerations, not to mention your devotional feelings. In this attire you have to stand for a couple of hours amongst a perspiring and ill-tempered crowd, composed of tourists and priests, for the Italians are too wise to trouble themselves for such an object. During these two mortal hours you are pushed forward constantly by energetic ladies bent on being placed, and pushed back by the Swedish guards, who defend the entrance. The conversation you hear around you, and perforce engage in, is equally unedifying, both religiously and intellectually, a sort of réchauffé of Murray’s handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday’s sermon. When you are reduced to such a frame of mind and body as is the natural result of time so employed, the doors of the chapel are opened, and you have literally to fight your way in amidst a crowd of ladies hustling, screaming, and fainting. If you
are lucky, you get standing room in a sort of open pen, whence, if you are tall, you can catch a sight of the Pope’s tiara in the distance; or, if you belong to the softer sex, you get a place behind the screen, where you cannot see, but, what is much better, can sit. The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned backwards. For three long hours you have a succession of dreary monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible, broken at intervals by a passage of intonation. There is no organ or instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for female vocalists.
The music itself may be very fine,—competent critics declare it is, and I have no doubt they are right; but I say, unhesitatingly, it is not music that addresses itself to popular tastes, or produces any feeling save that of weariness on nine-tenths of its hearers. You can mark clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as candle after candle of the stack of
wax-lights before the altar is put out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance. The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first place, it comes when your patience is exhausted; and, in the second, it lasts so long, that you begin to wonder whether it will ever end. The slavery to conventional rules in England, which causes one to shrink from the charge of not caring about music as zealously as one could, and from pleading guilty to personal cowardice, makes Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, profess to be delighted with the Miserere; but, in their heart of hearts, their feeling is much such as I have given utterance to.
The ceremonies in St Peter’s itself are, as sights, much better; but yet I often think that the very size and grandeur of the giant edifice increases the mesquin-ness (for want of an English word I must manufacture a French one) of the whole ceremony. At the exposition of the relics, for instance, you see in a very lofty gallery
two small figures, holding up something—what, you cannot tell—set up in a rich framework of gold and jewels; it may be a piece of the cross, or a martyr’s finger-bone, or a horse’s tooth—what it is neither you nor any one else can guess at that distance. If the whole congregation knelt down in adoration, the artistic effect would unquestionably be fine, but then not one person in seven does kneel, and therefore the effect is lost. So it is with the washing of the high altar. If one priest alone went up and poured the wine and oil over the sacred stone, and then cleansed the shrine from any spot or stain, the grandeur of the idea would not be marred by the monotony of the performance; but when some four hundred priests and choristers defile past, each armed with a chip besom, like those of the buy-a-broom girls of our childhood, and each gives a dab to the altar as he passes, the whole scene becomes tiresome, if not absurd. The same fatal objection applies to the famous washing of the feet at the Trinita dei Pellegrini. As a mere matter of simple fact, there is nothing very interesting in seeing a number of old women’s feet washed, or in beholding a number of peasants who would be much better if the washing extended
above their feet, engaged in gulping down an unsavoury repast. The whole charm of the thing rests in the idea, and this idea is quite extinguished by the extreme length and tediousness of the whole proceeding. The feet have too evidently been washed before, and the pilgrims are too palpably got up for the occasion.
The finest ceremony I have ever witnessed in Rome is the High Mass at St Peter’s on Easter-day; but as a theatrical spectacle, in which light alone I am now speaking of it, it is marred by many palpable defects. Whenever I have seen the Pope carried in his chair in state, I can never help thinking of the story of the Irishman, who, when the bottom and seat of his sedan-chair fell out, remarked to his bearers, that “he might as well walk, but for the honour of the thing.” One feels so strongly that the Pope might every bit as well walk as ride in that ricketty, top-heavy chair, in which he sits, or rather sways to and fro, with a sea-sick expression. Then the ostrich feathers are so very shabby, and the whole get-up of the procession is so painfully “not” regardless of expense. You see Cardinals with dirty robes, under the most gorgeous stoles, while the surplices are as yellow as the stained gold-worked
bands which hang across them. There is, indeed, no sense of congruity or the inherent fitness of things about the Italian ceremonials. A priest performs mass and elevates the host with muddy boots on, while the Pope himself, in the midst of the grandest service, blows his nose on a common red pocket-handkerchief. The absence of the organ detracts much from the impressiveness of the music in English ears, while the constant bowings and genuflexions, the drawling intonations, and the endless monotonous psalms, all utterly devoid of meaning for a lay-worshipper, added to the utter listlessness of the congregation, and even of the priests engaged in celebration of the service, destroy the impression the gorgeousness of the scene would otherwise produce.
The insuperable objection, however, to the impressiveness of the whole scene is the same as mars all Papal pageants,—I mean the length and monotony of the performance. One chant may be fine, one prostration before the altar may be striking, one burst of the choral litany may act upon your senses; but, when you have chant after chant, prostration after prostration, chorus after chorus, each the twin brother to the other,