"Il pessimo nemico del bene é l'amator del ottimo."
The muses should never pout: each art should reverently accept its limitations. Though the pen is mightier than pencil or chisel, though only the word and the song are privileged to pass intact from age to age, yet a portion of the soul of plastic art may sometimes baffle decay. Even in ruin, architecture is not without its prouder consolations. Ex pede, Herculem. While a bone of her survives, imagination can approximate a resurrection of the departed whole. The malice of her sworn enemies, the elements, is sometimes providentially her salvation; the shrouded lava of Vesuvius embalmed a more vivid presentation of Roman life and manners than lives in the pages of Terence or Plautus. A broken shaft, a fragmentary arch, a section of Cyclopean wall, is at once a poem, a chronicle, and a picture. The ruin is time's authentic seal, without which history were as inconclusive as the myth. The past is a present voice as long as a vestige of its architecture remains. The Column of Trajan is the best orator of the forum now; there is a deeper charm in the living eloquence of the Colosseum than in the dead thunder of the Philippics. [Footnote 88] We are as awed and startled when unexpectedly confronted by some mouldering but still breathing monument of antiquity, as if the form of the deathless evangelist stood bodily before us.
[Footnote 88:
"Tully was not so eloquent as thou,
Thou nameless column with the buried base!">[
We perfectly understand and sympathize with the modern instinct that recoils from imparting a more than needful permanence to private dwellings. The home of man is sullied with low cares and offices; beneath the screen and shelter of its roof the worst passions are often nourished, the darkest mysteries are sometimes celebrated. In many an ancient manor, there is scarcely a chamber without its legend of sin, scarcely a floor without its bloodstain. But the House of God is the witness of the virtues, not the vices, of humanity; within its hallowed precincts the casual profanity and levity of the few are quite lost in the earnest adoration of the many; the whispers of blasphemy drowned in the ceaseless tide of general thanksgiving; the rebellious beatings of passion hushed in the solemn chorus of penitence and praise. The longer it endures, the holier it becomes. Its aisles are impregnated with prayer, its vaults enriched with ashes of the blest, its altars radiant with the wine of sacrifice. Behind the doors of the palace and the dwelling, time is sure to plant the spectre and the thorn; behind the doors of the cathedral, the angel and the palm.
The primary charm of church architecture is veracity. The interior of Santo Spirito is perfect truth. The columns are, what they claim to be, stone; the balustrade of the choir is, what it claims to be, bronze; the altar what it claims to be, pietra dura. You do not sound a pillar and hear a lie, or scratch a panel and see a lie, or touch a jewel and feel a lie. All is fair, square, honest—not even the minutest lurking insincerity to vex the Paraclete. I soon learned to love Santo Spirito as well as any Florentine; to love it better than the Duomo with its windows of a thousand dyes; better than the bride of Buonarroti With her frescoes of Masaccio, her Madonna of Cimabue's, her Crucifix of Giotto's; better even than Santa Croce with its ashes of Angelo, its Annunciation of Donatello's, its Canova's Alfieri. I used to sit for hours in its spacious choir, undisturbed even by the dull, nasal, inharmonious chanting of the good Augustinians, and listen to the sermons preached by those dim, unending arches.
Translated From The Revue Du Monde Catholique.
The Statue Of The Cure D'ars,
Inaugurated At Ars, August 5, 1867.
God's purposes sometimes reveal themselves in a manner greatly to perplex us. They move contrary to all foresight or to any human logic. Day succeeds to night, light to darkness, hope to despair, without any apparent reason, indeed in spite of reason itself. When all seems lost, then everything is regained, and even death itself appears to live anew. The history of religion is full of such decay and such regeneration.
After the frightful crisis of the eighteenth century, one would have thought the Church entirely abandoned, and that no new breath could revive the fallen ruins which the efforts of a hundred years had accumulated. "The pinnacle of the temple is crumbled, and the clew of heaven comes to moisten the face of the kneeling believer," says, in his theatrical and pseudo-biblical style, the most celebrated enemy of our time. [Footnote 89]