When we came back at that time and bought our way into the church by rightful payment to the two blind beggars who guarded its doors, we found it packed with people who bad been more literally punctual. They were of all nations, but a large part were Anglo-Americans, and a young girl of this race rose and gave her seat, with a sweet insistence that would not be denied, to that one of us who deserved it most. He who was left leaning against the soft side of a pillar hesitated whether to make some young priests spreading over undue space on one of the benches push up, and he enjoyed a rich moment of self-satisfaction in his forbearance. He was there, to be sure, an alien and a heretic, out of mere curiosity, and they were there probably so rapt in their devout attention that they did not notice their errant step-brother, and so did not think to offer him the hospitality of their mother church's house. But he would not make any such allowance; he condemned them with the unsparing severity of the strap-hanger in a trolley-car, who blushes with shame for the serried rows of men sitting behind their newspapers. When he was at his wit's end to find excuse for them a priest on another bench made room, and he sank down glad to forgive and forget; but now he would not have yielded his place to any other Protestant in Christendom.
In the collective curiosity he lost the sense of self-reproach for his own, and eagerly bent his gaze on the group of officiating priests at the high altar beyond the grille of the choir. The altar was all a blaze of electric lights, and there was a novel effect in their composition in the crosses resting diagonally on either side of it. Next the grille showed the feathers and fashions of the mothers and sisters of the young girls from the school of the adjoining Convent of the Sacred Heart, and midway between these visitors, like a flock of white birds stooping on some heavenly plain, the white veils of the girls stretched in lovely levels to left and right. Nothing could have attuned the spirit for the surprise awaiting it like this angelic sight; and when the voices of the nuns fell suddenly from the organ gallery, behind all the people, like the singing of the morning stars molten in one adoring music and falling from the zenith down, whatever moments of innocent joy life might have had it could have had none surpassing that.
But when we came out the self-mockery with which life is apt to recover itself from any exaltation began. In returning from the Pincio the only cab we had been able to get was the last left of the very worst cabs in Rome, and we had bidden the driver wait for us at the church-steps, not without some hope that he would play us false. But there he was, true to his word, with such disciplined fidelity as that of the Roman sentinels who used to die at their posts; and we mounted to ours with the muted prayer that we, at least, might reach home alive. This did not seem probable when the driver whipped up his horse. It appeared to have aged and sickened while we were in the church, though we had thought it looked as bad as could be before, and it lurched alarmingly from side to side, recovering itself with a plunge of its heavy head away from the side in which its body was sinking. The driver swayed on his box, having fallen equally decrepit in spite of the restoratives he seemed to have applied for his years and infirmities. His clothes had put on some such effect of extreme decay as those of Rip Van Winkle in the third act; there was danger that he would fall on top of his falling horse, and that their raiment would mingle in one scandalous ruin. Via Sistina had never been so full of people before; never before had it been so long to that point where we were to turn out of it into the friendly obscurity of the little cross street which would bring us to our hotel. We could not consent to arrive in that form; we made the driver stop, and we got out and began overpaying him to release us. But the more generously we overpaid him the more nobly he insisted upon serving us to our door. At last, by such a lavish expenditure as ought richly to provide for the few remaining years of himself and his horse, we prevailed with him to let us go, and reached our hotel glad, almost proud, to arrive on foot.
Hare tells me, now it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the exceptional dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of its most noble nave is thickly plated with the first gold mined in South America, which Ferdinand and Isabella gave that least estimable of the popes, Alexander VI. Now I know that it is far richer than any gold could make it in the treasures of history and legend, which fairly encrust it in every part. Doubtless some portion of this wealth my fellow-sightseers were striving to store up out of the guide-books which they bore in their hands and from which they strained their eyes to the memorable points as they slowly paced through the temple. Some were reading one to another in bated voices, and I thought them ridiculous; but perhaps they were wise, and rather he was ridiculous who marched by them and contented himself with a general sense of the grandeur, the splendor. More than any other church except that of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore imparts this sense, for, as I have already pretended, St. Peter's fails of it. Without as well as within the church is spacious and impressive from its spaciousness; but it seems more densely fringed than most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic pins. On going in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out you do not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the driver while he made a last, a humorous appeal. “Skiddoo?” he asked in my native speech. “Yes,” I sullenly replied, “skiddoo!” But it is now one of the regrets which I shall always feel for my wasted opportunities in Rome that I did not buy all his post-cards. Patient gayety like his merited as much.
As it was, I drove callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San Pietro in Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for Michelangelo's Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in the minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to be quite honest with one's self as to the why and wherefore of one's earlier veneration, one might not get a very distinct or convincing reply. Do sculptors and painters suffer periods of slight as authors do? Are Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting limbo? I find I have said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and unimpressive, and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you enter the church. Is the true, then, better than the ideal, or is it only my grovelling spirit which prefers it? What I scarcely venture to say is that those two men evidently lived and still live, and that Michelangelo's prophet never lived; I scarcely venture, because I remember with tenderness how certain clear and sweet spirits used to bow their reason before the Moses as before a dogma of art which must be implicitly accepted. Do they still do so, those clear and sweet spirits?
The archaeologist who was driving my cab that morning had pointed out to me on the way to this church the tower on which Nero stood fiddling while Rome was burning. It is a strong, square, mediaeval structure which will serve the purpose of legend yet many centuries, if progress does not pull it down; but the fiddle no longer exists, apparently, and Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted into my cab, my driver showed me with his whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very beautiful against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said was the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know why it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers; but it was a great satisfaction to have it identified. Very possibly I had seen both of these memorable towers in my former Roman sojourn, but I did not remember them, whereas I renewed my old impressions of San Paolo fuori le Mura in almost every detail.