Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 53, March, 1862», sayfa 7
When all the preparations were at last finished, the procession of mounted horsemen, with a confused gathering of the population, passed down the streets to the gates of the city, and as they passed they sang the words of the Crusaders’ Hymn, which had fluttered back into the traditionary memory of Europe from the knights going to redeem the Holy Sepulchre.
“Fairest Lord Jesus,
Ruler of all Nature,
O Thou of God and man the Son!
Thee will I honor,
Thee will I cherish,
Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown!
“Fair are the meadows,
Fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the pleasing garb of spring:
Jesus shines fairer,
Jesus is purer
Who makes the woful heart to sing!
“Fair is the sunshine,
Fairer still the moonlight,
And all the twinkling starry host;
Jesus shines fairer,
Jesus is purer,
Than all the angels heaven can boast!”
They were singing the second verse, as, emerging from the dark old gate-way of the town, all the distant landscape of silvery olive-orchards, crimson clover-fields, blossoming almond-trees, fig-trees, and grape-vines, just in the tender green of spring, burst upon their view. Agnes felt a kind of inspiration. From the high mountain elevation she could discern the far-off brightness of the sea— all between one vision of beauty,—and the religious enthusiasm which possessed all around her had in her eye all the value of the most solid and reasonable faith. With us, who may look on it from a colder and more distant point of view, doubts may be suggested whether this naïve impressibility to religious influences, this simple, whole-hearted abandonment to their expression, had any real practical value. The fact that any or all of the actors might before night rob or stab or lie quite as freely as if it has not occurred may well give reason for such a question. Be this as it may, the phenomenon is not confined to Italy or the religion of the Middle Ages, but exhibits itself in many a prayer-meeting and camp-meeting of modern days. For our own part, we hold it better to have even transient upliftings of the nobler and more devout element of man’s nature than never to have any at all, and that he who goes on in worldly and sordid courses, without ever a spark of religious enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, though his wings be weak and he fall again.
In all this scene Agostino Sarelli took no part. He had simply given orders for the safe-conduct of Agnes, and then retired to his own room. From a window, however, he watched the procession as it passed through the gates of the city, and his resolution was immediately taken to proceed at once by a secret path to the place where the pilgrims should emerge upon the high-road.
He had been induced to allow the departure of Agnes, from seeing the utter hopelessness by any argument or persuasion of removing a barrier that was so vitally interwoven with the most sensitive religious nerves of her being. He saw in her terrified looks, in the deadly paleness of her face, how real and unaffected was the anguish which his words gave her; he saw that the very consciousness of her own love to him produced a sense of weakness which made her shrink in utter terror from his arguments.
“There is no remedy,” he said, “but to let her go to Rome and see with her own eyes how utterly false and vain is the vision which she draws from the purity of her own believing soul. What Christian would not wish that these fair dreams had any earthly reality? But this gentle dove must not be left unprotected to fly into that foul, unclean cage of vultures and harpies. Deadly as the peril may be to me to breathe the air of Rome, I will be around her invisibly to watch over her.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
ROME
A vision rises upon us from the land of shadows. We see a wide plain, miles and miles in extent, rolling in soft billows of green, and girded on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming in the setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops, though spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fair is this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some wild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the midst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city, sombre, quaint, and old,—a city of dreams and mysteries,—a city of the living and the dead. And this is Rome,—weird, wonderful, ancient, mighty Rome,—mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier now in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral enchantment.
As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes flooded with a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervading presence through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous and mossy age bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrations of hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down, soft-footed and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columns of the Forum seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,—into noisome and cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of Rome’s modern princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins. It streams through a wilderness of churches, each with its tolling prayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzling confusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from roof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons of Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants in cellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas around, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo looks like a great translucent, luminous orb, and the statues of saints and apostles on the top of St. John Lateran glow as if made of living fire, and seem to stretch out glorified hands of welcome to the pilgrims that are approaching the Holy City across the soft, palpitating sea of green that lies stretched like a misty veil around it.
Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress of mighty and wonderful power, with her damp, and mud, and mould, her ill-fed, ill-housed populace, her ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces of to-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition, injustice,—with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,—with the very corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of deadly uncleanness,—still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and eyes and feet turn longingly towards her from the ends of the earth. Great souls and pious yearned for her as for a mother, and could not be quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There they fondly thought was rest to be found,—that rest which through all weary life ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to be shriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unbound from the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealed to the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for the breast of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seek the repose which he found afterwards in Jesus.
At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims of our story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forward and sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud of golden light and stretching out protecting hands to bless her.
“See, see, grandmother!” she exclaimed,—“yonder is our Father’s house, and all the saints beckon us home! Glory be to God who hath brought us hither!”
Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glory streaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightness with which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encircle the shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreaths smile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, graceful arches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marbles and gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams and streaks dim intimations of the sculptured and gilded glories above. Altar and shrine are now veiled in that rich violet hue which the Church has chosen for its mourning color; and violet vestments, taking the place of the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, tell the approach of that holy week of sadness when all Christendom falls in penitence at the feet of that Almighty Love once sorrowful and slain for her.
The long-drawn aisles are now full to overflowing with that weird chanting which one hears nowhere but in Rome at this solemn season. Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead of soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain, ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings. The sounds now swell and flood the church as with a rushing torrent of wailing and clamorous supplication,—now recede and moan themselves away to silence in far-distant aisles, like the last faint sigh of discouragement and despair. Anon they burst out from the roof, they drop from arches and pictures, they rise like steam from the glassy pavement, and, meeting, mingle in wavering clamors of lamentation and shrieks of anguish. One might fancy lost souls from out the infinite and dreary abysses of utter separation from God might thus wearily and aimlessly moan and wail, breaking into agonized tumults of desire, and trembling back into exhaustions of despair. Such music brings only throbbings and yearnings, but no peace; and yonder, on the glassy floor, at the foot of a crucifix, a poor mortal lies sobbing and quivering under its pitiless power, as if it had wrenched every tenderest nerve of memory, and torn open every half-healed wound of the soul.
When the chanting ceases, he rises slow and tottering, and we see in the wan face turning towards the dim light the well-remembered features of Father Francesco. Driven to despair by the wild, ungovernable force of his unfortunate love, weary of striving, overborne with a hopeless and continually accumulating load of guilt, he had come to Rome to lay down at the feet of heavenly wisdom the burden which he can no longer bear alone; and rising now, he totters to a confessional where sits a holy cardinal to whom has been deputed the office to hear and judge those sins which no subordinate power in the Church is competent to absolve.
Father Francesco kneels down with a despairing, confiding movement, such as one makes, when, after a long struggle of anguish, one has found a refuge; and the churchman within inclining his ear to the grating, the confession begins.
Could we only be clairvoyant, it would be worth our while to note the difference between the two faces, separated only by the thin grating of the confessional, but belonging to souls whom an abyss wide as eternity must forever divide from any common ground of understanding.
On the one side, with ear close to the grate, is a round, smoothly developed Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of features which one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy living and habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently, he is puzzled and half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. That other man, who speaks with the sweat of anguish beaded on his brow, with a mortal pallor on his thin, worn cheeks, is putting questions to the celestial guide within which seem to that guide the ravings of a crazed lunatic; and yet there is a deadly, despairing earnestness in the appeal that makes an indistinct knocking at the door of his heart, for the man is born of woman, and can feel that somehow or other these are the words of a mighty agony.
He addresses him some words of commonplace ghostly comfort, and gives a plenary absolution. The Capuchin monk rises up and stands meekly wiping the sweat from his brow, the churchman leaves his box, and they meet face to face, when each starts, seeing in the other the apparition of a once well-known countenance.
“What! Lorenzo Sforza!” said the churchman. “Who would have thought it? Don’t you remember me?”
“Not Lorenzo Sforza,” said the other, a hectic brilliancy flushing his pale cheek; “that name is buried in the tomb of his fathers; he you speak to knows it no more. The unworthy Brother Francesco, deserving nothing of God or man, is before you.”
“Oh, come, come!” said the other, grasping his hand in spite of his resistance; “that is all proper enough in its place; but between friends, you know, what’s the use? It’s lucky we have you here now; we want one of your family to send on a mission to Florence, and talk a little reason into the citizens and the Signoria. Come right away with me to the Pope.”
“Brother, in God’s name let me go! I have no mission to the great of this world; and I cannot remember or be called by the name of other days, or salute kinsman or acquaintance after the flesh, without a breach of vows.”
“Poh, poh! you are nervous, dyspeptic; you don’t understand things. Don’t you see you are where vows can be bound and loosed? Come along, and let us wake you out of this nightmare. Such a pother about a pretty peasant-girl! One of your rank and taste, too! I warrant me the little sinner practised on you at the confessional. I know their ways, the whole of them; but you mourn over it in a way that is perfectly incomprehensible. If you had tripped a little,—paid a compliment, or taken a liberty or two,—it would have been only natural; but this desperation, when you have resisted like Saint Anthony himself, shows your nerves are out of order and you need change.”
“For God’s sake, brother, tempt me not!” said Father Francesco, wrenching himself away, with such a haggard and insane vehemence as quite to discompose the churchman; and drawing his cowl over his face, he glided swiftly down a side-aisle and out the door.
The churchman was too easy-going to risk the fatigue of a scuffle with a man whom he considered as a monomaniac; but he stepped smoothly and stealthily after him and watched him go out.
“Look you,” he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting by the door, “follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides.—He may be cracked,” he said to himself; “but, after all, one of his blood may be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence or Milan. We must have him transferred to some convent here, where we can lay hands on him readily, if we want him.”
Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark and dingy street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherly admission. Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, for the very altar of his God seems to have failed him. He asked for bread, and has got a stone,—he asked a fish, and has got a scorpion. Again and again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom he has been confessing sounds like the hiss of a serpent in his ear.
But he is sent for in haste to visit the bedside of the Prior, who has long been sick and failing, and who gladly embraces this opportunity to make his last confession to a man of such reputed sanctity in his order as Father Francesco. For the acute Father Johannes, casting about for various means to empty the Superior’s chair at Sorrento, for his own benefit, and despairing of any occasion of slanderous accusation, had taken the other tack of writing to Rome extravagant laudations of such feats of penance and saintship in his Superior as in the view of all the brothers required that such a light should no more be hidden in an obscure province, but be set on a Roman candlestick, where it might give light to the faithful in all parts of the world. Thus two currents of worldly intrigue were uniting to push an unworldly man to a higher dignity than he either sought or desired.
When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the pain of which he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is marvellous what coincidences of events will be found to press upon it wherever he may go. Singularly enough, one of the first items in the confession of the Capuchin Superior related to Agnes, and his story was in substance as follows. In his youth he had been induced by the persuasions of the young son of a great and powerful family to unite him in the holy sacrament of marriage with a protégée of his mother’s; but the marriage being detected, it was disavowed by the young nobleman, and the girl and her mother chased out ignominiously, so that she died in great misery. For his complicity in this sin the conscience of the monk had often troubled him, and he had kept track of the child she left, thinking perhaps some day to make reparation by declaring the true marriage of her mother, which now he certified upon the holy cross, and charged Father Francesco to make known to one of that kin whom he named. He further informed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure of the Pope and his son, Cæsar Borgia, had been banished from the city, and their property confiscated, so that there was none of them to be found thereabouts except an aged widowed sister, who, having married into a family in favor with the Pope, was allowed to retain her possessions, and now resided in a villa near Rome, where she lived retired, devoting her whole life to works of piety. The old man therefore conjured Father Francesco to lose no time in making this religious lady understand the existence of so near a kinswoman, and take her under her protection.—Thus strangely did Father Francesco find himself again obliged to take up that enchanted thread which had led him into labyrinths so fatal to his peace.
METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY
V
It is in the search after the true boundaries and characteristics of orders that we may expect the greatest advance by the naturalists of the present day; and yet there is now much discrepancy among them, some mistaking orders for classes, others raising families to the dignity of orders. This want of agreement in their results is not strange, however; for the recognition of orders is indeed exceedingly difficult. If they are, as I have defined them, groups in Nature founded upon a greater or less complication of structure, they must of course form a regular gradation within the limits of their class, since comparative perfection implies comparative rank, and a correct estimate of these degrees of complication requires an intimate and extensive knowledge of structure throughout the class. There would seem to be an arbitrary element here,—that of our individual appreciation of structural character. If one man holds a certain kind of structural characters superior to another, he will establish the rank of the order upon that feature, while some other naturalist, appreciating a different point of the structure more highly, will make that the test character of the group. Let us see whether we can eliminate this arbitrary element in our estimate of these groups, and find any mode of determining orders that shall be unquestionable, and give us results as positive as a chemical analysis according to quantitative elements. I believe that there are such absolute tests of structural relations. It is my conviction, that orders, like all the other groups of the Animal Kingdom, have a positive existence in Nature with definite limits, that no arbitrary element should enter into any part of our classifications, and that we have already the key by which to solve this question about orders.
To illustrate this statement, I must return to the class of Insects. We have seen that they are divided into three orders: the long cylindrical Centipedes, with the body divided throughout in uniform rings, like the Worms; the Spiders, with the body divided into two regions; and the Winged Insects, with head, chest, and hind body distinct from each other, forming three separate regions. In the first group, the Centipedes, the nervous system is scattered through the whole body, as in the Worms; in the Spiders it is concentrated in two nervous swellings, as in the Crustacea, the front one being the largest; and in the Insects there are three nervous centres, the largest in the head, a smaller one in the chest, and the smallest in the hind body. Now according to this greater or less individualization of parts, with the corresponding localization of the nervous centres, naturalists have established the relative rank of these three groups, placing Centipedes lowest, Spiders next, and Winged Insects highest. But naturalists may, and indeed they actually do, differ as to this estimation of the anatomical structure. Have we, then, any means of testing its truth to Nature? Let us look at the development of these animals, taking the highest order as an illustration, that we may have the whole succession of changes. All know the story of the Butterfly with its three lives, as Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Winged Insect. I speak of its three lives, but we must not forget that they make after all but one life, and that the Caterpillar is as truly the same being with the future Butterfly as the child is the same being with the future man. The old significance of the word metamorphosis—the fabled transformation of one individual into another, in which so much of the imagination and poetical culture of the ancients found expression—still clings to us; and where the different phases of the same life assume such different external forms, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is one single continuous life. To a naturalist, metamorphosis is simply growth; and in that sense the different stages of development in animals that undergo their successive changes within the egg are as much metamorphoses as the successive phases of life in those animals that complete their development after they are hatched.
But to return to our Butterfly. In its most imperfect, earliest condition, it is Worm-like, the body consisting of thirteen uniform rings; but when it has completed this stage of its existence, it passes into the Chrysalis state, during which the body has two regions, the front rings being soldered together to form the head and chest, while the hind joints remain distinct; and it is only when it bursts from its Chrysalis envelope, as a complete Winged Insect, that it has three distinct regions of the body. Do not the different periods of growth in this highest order explain the relation of all the orders to each other? The earliest condition of an animal cannot be its highest condition,—it does not pass from a more perfect to a less perfect state of existence. The history of its growth is, on the contrary, the history of its progress in development; and therefore, when we find that the first stage of growth in the Winged Insect transiently represents a structural character that is permanent in the lowest order of its class, that its second stage of growth transiently represents a structural character that is permanent in the second order of its class, and that only in the last stage of its existence does the Winged Insect attain its complete and perfect condition, we may fairly infer that this division of the class of Insects into a gradation of orders placing Centipedes lowest, Spiders next, and Winged Insects highest, is true to Nature.
This is not the only instance in which the embryological evidence confirms perfectly the anatomical evidence on which orders have been distinguished, and I believe that Embryology will give us the true standard by which to test the accuracy of our ordinal groups. In the class of Crustacea, for instance, the Crabs have been placed above the Lobsters by some naturalists, in consequence of certain anatomical features; but there may easily be a difference of individual opinion as to the relative value of these features. When we find, however, that the Crab, while undergoing its changes in the egg, passes through a stage in which it resembles the Lobster much more than it does its own adult condition, we cannot doubt that its earlier state is its lower one, and that the organization of the Lobster is not as high in the class of Crustacea as that of the Crab. While using illustrations of this kind, however, I must guard against misinterpretation. These embryological changes are never the passing of one kind of animal into another kind of animal: the Crab is none the less a Crab during that period of its development in which it resembles a Lobster; it simply passes, in the natural course of its growth, through a phase of existence which is permanent in the Lobster, but transient in the Crab. Such facts should stimulate all our young students to embryological investigation as a most important branch of study in the present state of our science.
But while there is this structural gradation among orders, establishing a relative rank between them, are classes and branches also linked together as a connected chain? That such a chain exists throughout the Animal Kingdom has long been a favorite idea, not only among naturalists, but also in the popular mind. Lamarck was one of the greatest teachers of this doctrine. He held not only that branches and classes were connected in a direct gradation, but that within each class there was a regular series of orders, families, genera, and species, forming a continuous chain from the lowest animals to the highest, and that the whole had been a gradual development of higher out of lower forms. I have already alluded to his division of the Animal Kingdom into the Apathetic, Sensitive, and Intelligent animals. The Apathetic were those devoid of all sensitiveness except when aroused by the influence of some external agent. Under this head he placed five classes, including the Infusoria, Polyps, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins, Tunicata, and Worms,—thus bringing together indiscriminately Radiates, Mollusks, and Articulates. Under the head of Sensitive he had also a heterogeneous assemblage, including Winged Insects, Spiders, Crustacea, Annelids, and Barnacles, all of which are Articulates, and with these he placed in two classes the Mollusks, Conchifera, Gasteropoda, and Cephalopoda. Under the head of Intelligent he brought together a natural division, for he here united all the Vertebrates. He succeeded in this way in making out a series which seemed plausible enough, but when we examine it, we find at once that it is perfectly arbitrary; for he has brought together animals built on entirely different structural plans, when he could find characters among them that seemed to justify his favorite idea of a gradation of qualities. Blainville attempted to establish the same idea in another way. He founded his series on gradations of form, placing together, in one division, all animals that he considered vague and indefinite in form, and in another all those that he considered symmetrical. Under a third head he brought together the Radiates; but his symmetrical division united Articulates, Mollusks, and Vertebrates in the most indiscriminate manner. He sustained his theory by assuming intermediate groups,—as, for instance, the Barnacles between the Mollusks and Articulates, whereas they are as truly Articulates as Insects or Crabs. Thus, by misplacing certain animals, he arrived at a series which, like that of Lamarck, made a strong impression on the scientific world, till a more careful investigation of facts exposed its fallacy.
Oken, the great German naturalist, also attempted to establish a connected chain throughout the Animal Kingdom, but on an entirely different principle; and I cannot allude to this most original investigator, so condemned by some, so praised by others, so powerful in his influence on science in Germany, without attempting to give some analysis of his peculiar philosophy. For twenty years his classification was accepted by his countrymen without question; and though I believe it to be wrong, yet, by the ingenuity with which he maintained it, he has shed a flood of light upon science, and has stimulated other naturalists to most important and interesting investigations. This famous classification was founded upon the idea that the system of man, the most perfect created being, is the measure for the whole Animal Kingdom, and that in analyzing his organization we have the clue to all organized beings. The structure of man includes two systems of organs: those which maintain the body in its integrity, and which he shares in some sort with the lower animals,—the organs of digestion, circulation, respiration, and reproduction; and that higher system of organs, the brain, spinal marrow, and nerves, with the organs of sense, on which all the manifestations of the intelligent faculties depend, and by which his relations to the external world are established and controlled: the whole being surrounded by flesh, muscles, and skin. On account of this fleshy envelope of the hard parts in all the higher animals, Oken divided the Animal Kingdom into two groups, the Vertebrates and Invertebrates, or, as he called them, the “Eingeweide und Fleisch Thiere”—which we may translate as the Intestinal Animals, or those that represent the intestinal systems of organs, and the Flesh Animals, or those that combine all the systems of organs under one envelope of flesh. Let us examine a little more closely this singular theory, by which each branch of the Invertebrates becomes, as it were, the exponent of a special system of organs, while the Vertebrates, with man at their head, include all these systems.
