Modern Vandalism

“THE feudal and monastic buildings of Europe, and still more the streets of her ancient cities, are vanishing like dreams; and it is difficult to imagine the mingled envy and contempt with which future generations will look back to us who still possessed such things, yet made no effort to preserve, and scarcely any to delineate, them.”

Mr. Ruskin wrote this in 1870. During the fifteen years which have passed since then, despite much talk to the contrary, everything has been done to increase the odium which posterity is to throw upon us. In profession, we of to-day are all Crusaders, burning to defend the places made sacred by the picturesqueness or associations of the past. In deed, we are almost all Goths and Vandals, ruining them without mercy. While the men who are to come will judge us by our actions, we judge our-

selves by our words. Because the speech of a few is fair, we fancy that all must be right with the many. Because more is being said and written about art than ever has been before, we think that the feeling for it must be greater in like proportion. In a word, we mistake our sowing of good seed for the reaping of a fruitful harvest. Once in a while, however, we are reminded that all is not so well as it seems. In the United States, within the last ten years, art schools have been established by hundreds. But when it came to finding out what they accomplished, by an art competition instituted by Harper and Brothers, the result was shown to be just nothing. In England, benevolent men, strong in their own faith, think to refine the lower classes by the influence of art and by making their surroundings beautiful. But even as they put up their mosaics in Whitechapel famous collections of paintings are allowed to be dispersed, and plans are prepared to destroy one of the most picturesque corners in London.

The fact is that the reverence for beauty, genuine enough with men like Mr. Ruskin, is superficial with the multitude, whose real worship is one of comfort. Whenever there is a struggle between the things of the past and those of the present, it is easy to predict which will survive; for in this case fitness is always measured by comfort. Perhaps, after all, when the buildings and cities in which people live are concerned, it is unreasonable to wish it to be otherwise. It may be, as Hawthorne says somewhere in the Marble Faun, in speaking of the gloom and chill and inconvenience of the stone palaces in Italian cities, that a dwelling-place should never be built to last longer than forty or fifty years. It is probably more important that a house should be healthy and clean and adapted to the physical well-being of men who are to spend their days in it than that it should give mental pleasure to those who merely look at it from without. Workingmen living in the ugly suburbs of London, or in the red brick monotony of Christian and Catharine streets in Philadelphia, which no man would go out of his way to look at, are doubtless better off than their fellows in Italian towns, though the latter may be settled in two or three large, damp rooms on the ground floor of old palaces which travelers come from afar to see. The few — a losing remnant in this case — overlook the wants of the people. Considering the subject dispassionately, we must admit that many of the changes which are fatal to mediæval beauty and quaintness are not wholly unnecessary or capricious. No one while the memory of last summer’s plague is still fresh, can deny, for example, that it is better to sacrifice the picturesqueness of some of the narrow dirty streets of Naples than the health and lives of thousands of Neapolitans. The majority of business men in London do not question the wisdom of the removal of Temple Bar, which has made their going to and coming from the city seem so much easier. It must be added, however, that those whose occupations do not lead them cityward wonder what great good has been done by destroying an old landmark, declared to be an obstruction in the street, and then blocking up the way with a new, meaningless monument.

On the other hand, when this work of destruction does not add to the comfort of mankind, when nothing is gained and much is lost, it cannot be justified by the most impartial. Charitable as we may try to be in urging that the benefits brought about by modern progress should compensate somewhat for the dream-like vanishing of ancient cities, no excuse can be found for two deeds of vandalism now contemplated in London and Rome. Not long ago, the English papers announced that Staple’s Inn, in the most ancient part of Holborn, had been sold, and that its old gables and green inclosure would disappear, to be replaced by a freight depot. This announcement had hardly been made when the Romans, as if to emulate the Londoners, and to show by other means than the mere sending of an expedition to Assab that they too are a great people, informed the reading public through their newspapers that the Santissimo Bambino, the pride of the Church of the Aracœli, had been seen in its Christmas manger for the last time. For the greater part of that church, together with the monastery attached to it, already turned into barracks by the present government, must be pulled down in order to give space for the erection of a statue of Victor Emmanuel. That a new freight depot is a necessity in London is probably true, but that it is a necessity in that particular part of Holborn is much less certain. That another statue of Victor Emmanuel is an absolute need to Italians, however, even the most loyal among them could not without difficulty demonstrate. Staple’s Inn, as it is, interferes with the comfort of no one. Indeed, its pretty shrubbery and great quiet add to that of fortunate individuals who have lodgings within its quadrangles. The Church of the Aracœli, with its cold, carpetless stone floor and cushionless, rickety chairs, is, it must be admitted, not comfortable. But the monks to whom it belongs have abjured ease and luxury, and should not the laity who worship in it be glad to strengthen their prayers by the additional virtue of mortification of the flesh ? There is positively no reason why these two buildings should be disturbed, but good ones why they should not. Both are closely associated with the past of the cities which so lightly accept their doom, and when they are gone it will seem as if we had also lost the many memories which cling to them. Two more of the few remaining links which connect the commonplace of the present age to what must ever be to us the romance of by-gone days will have been severed.

The Church of the Aracœli, whose foundation dates back to the dark ages, is not very beautiful in itself. The long flight of marble steps which leads to its principal entrance is cracked and broken. The building is a great bare, unfinished pile of red brick. The front, which modern Italians would have improved according to their unlovely art standard had it not been for Overbeck, has no other decoration than an old fresco over the door, faded by the suns of many long afternoons into a square of mellow gray. Within, the once fine pavement is as cracked and broken as the steps. Well-worn, dilapidated chairs are packed in the nave and in the aisles. Tawdry ornaments and artificial flowers in stiff, ungraceful masses are on the altars. Here is a shrine surrounded with fearful and wonderful daubs, representing miracles wrought by prayers offered up before it; and here an altar hung with little silver hearts. A few restored frescos by Pinturicchio, one attributed to Luca Signorelli, a sadly injured relief by Donatello, — these are the art treasures of the Aracœli. Altogether it has but small attraction for the art student, or for the tourist, who seldom goes out of his way to see it, except perhaps at Christmas time, when the Santissimo Bambino lies in its manger, or on some bright morning, when he hopes to find the monk-dentists at work at the side entrance, where in the hours before noon they wait upon their patients. Yet there is no other church in the city which, if studied aright, can tell as much as it does of Rome’s great and stormy past, “ all of which,” one might almost say, “ it saw, part of which it was.” The history of the Church of San Clemente may teach more of early Christians; that of San Giovanni Laterano more of mediaeval Popes. But the records of the Aracœli begin in the days when Christians were not. To recall the story of the hill on which it stands, of its old marble steps and worn pavement, of its altars and chapels, and even of its name, is to be carried back to the very beginning of Roman history, and then led onwards through long centuries when ancient Romans performed deeds of valor, and their mediæval successors showed themselves now the most brutal, now the most gentle, of men, to the last days of papal Rome, when a people, once so mighty, deteriorated into a community of monks and priests.

It was on the hill Saturnius, also called Capitolium, on a high point of which the Aracœli now stands, that Romulus built his fortress ; thus making it the centre of his kingdom, the very heart of the strong life of his people. It was the scene of all the principal events that took place in the City of the Seven Hills before the Christian era, from the time when the fair, frail Tarpeia, for love of gold, betrayed her fellow citizens, and opened the gates to the Sabines, down to the day when Augustus, who would know whether there could be a greater man than he, was shown by the Cumæan Sibyl the Divine Infant in his mother’s arms. And as the proud Emperor gazed, there came from heaven a voice, saying, “ Hæc est Ara Cœli:” and thus the vision of a pagan gave its name to a Christian church. Even when the statue of Victor Emmanuel shall look down from this eminence, once occupied by the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, or the Arx, — archælogists have not yet decided which, — the hill will still remain to remind us of its past greatness. It is, therefore, the many legends and associations belonging to the church itself which to-day, as we look our last upon it, appeal to us most strongly.

They begin as soon as we have put our foot upon the lowest of its high flight of steps; for these are a record of the plague, a deadlier foe than Goth or Saracen, which in the fourteenth century spread death and despair through the fair land of Italy. In Rome, when the evil was at its height, special prayers were offered that it might be abated, and the precious picture of the Madonna painted by Saint Luke was brought from its shrine in the Aracœli, and borne in solemn procession through the streets. Then the faithful came and, according to their means, gave alms to the Madonna who had heard their supplications. With this money, and out of marble brought from the Temple of Quirinus, Lorenzo Simeone Andreozzi built the stairway with its hundred and twenty-four steps, up which the monks, used to them as they are, sometimes find it difficult to toil. When we have climbed to the top,— alone, per-

haps, or else through the crowd which gathers here during Christmas week,— have looked up at the bare façade with its Gothic windows, and have lifted the old leather curtain and passed into the quiet interior, the memories of other days thicken about us. Here, during the Middle Ages, the Roman Senate, whose church the Arœceli was, often met in grave debate. Here, too, after the death of Boniface IX., the Savelli fortified themselves against the Orsini, and for three days this sanctuary, as not seldom happened to others, became a stronghold. At another time, Stefano Porcano, fired with a burning desire for freedom, and even while Alfonso of Aragon protected the Campagna for the papal party, came here to appeal to the people to assert their rights and fling off the sacerdotal sway that left them none; but in vain. The conquerors from the battle of Lepanto brought hither the gold they had captured from the Turks, and adorned with it the ceiling of the church, which still bears witness to their victory. Within these walls, centuries later, and in an age we can better understand, the English Gibbon sat, and, as the candles flickered on the altar and the monks chanted vespers, conceived the idea of the work which was afterwards to make him famous. Where, indeed, could he have better realized the fall of which he was to write ? As he looked down the long nave he could see the many columns brought from the temples and palaces of pagan Rome — one telling by its inscription that it once stood in the palace of the Cæsars, on the near Palatine — to be set up in a church where priests would by word of mouth revile the paganism and luxury of the old world, which in their lives and religious ceremonial they would imitate. Then, turning to the left transept, his eyes must have fallen on the circular shrine containing the altar built over the tomb of Saint Helena, marking as it were the principal era—that in which Rome really became Christian — in the decline which was henceforward to occupy his thoughts. And as, vespers ended, he wandered through the aisles, he must have seen on the tombs over which he walked the flattened figures of the Crusaders buried there, which finished the story begun by antique column and early Christian shrine, and told how Romans had finally fallen away from their early ideals, and forgotten their country for the church.

But within the Aracœli one reads the history not only of the decay of the old civilization, but of the growth of the new culture, and of the terrible feuds and tyrannies, alleviated but too seldom by deeds of loving humanity. During many years this church was the favorite burying-place of Romans, and in passing from tomb to tomb we are reminded, here of nobles, whose bitter enmities made the streets of Rome a bloody battle - ground ; here of gentle saints, whose charity helped, in those troubled times, to make the lives of the poor and fallen bearable ; and here, again, of the paganism which, despite priest and Pope, or perhaps because of them, lingered long in Christian Rome ; or else of the revived interest in ancient art and literature, whereby a change was wrought for all Europe as great as that by which Rome became nominally Christian. In one chapel, gaudy with green and brown marble decorations, much gilding, and many paper flowers, and in two old mosaic-adorned tombs, lie the bodies of Luca and Pandulphus, famous members of the Savelli family, to whom it belonged,—a family now extinct, but which until the seventeenth century ranked as one of the noblest in Rome. In following the progress and struggles and vicissitudes of one of the great houses of Rome, the history of all is learned. The career of the Savelli — now repulsing their fellow nobles from their fortress in the Theatre of Marcellus, and now being slain in the streets for refusing to cry “ Viva ! ” for successful rivals ; at one time fighting the Popes, seizing the Capitoline Palace, and sacking the Vatican, at the next being crowned with the papal tiara or the cardinal’s hat — differs in no essential point from that of their allies, the Colonna, or of their foes, the Orsini and Conti.

The chapel of Santa Croce, which contains the dead of the Ponziani family, shows the reverse of the medal. The legend related in connection with it needs no explanation or comment. When Vanozza Ponziani died, her body was brought and laid out in this chapel. Her life had been spent in charity, and now in death those whom she had befriended came to look upon her for the last time. With the crowd was her sister-in-law, who, destined to have a church built in her honor as Santa Francesca Romana, then humbly called herself the poor woman of the Trastevere. As Francesca sat by the coffin she fell into an ecstasy, and with a smile of joy she called out, “ Cuando ? Cuando?” The men and women watching with her heard the cry, and when they looked, lo ! her body was raised up above the ground. Then her confessor approached, and bade her go forth and visit the sick. At his bidding, but with her soul still rapt in heavenly contemplation, she left the church, and went her way to perform her usual works of mercy.

With the tomb of Cardinal d’Acquasparta we turn a leaf in the history we are reading. He is the same sung of with small praise by Dante in his Paradiso, and it is as one condemned by the poet that he is now better known than as the General of the Franciscan order. Hence his name must ever suggest the song which heralded the dawn of the day of Italy’s, and through her the world’s, awakening, — a day upon which the sun of intellectual freedom has not yet set. Not far from this cardinal’s monument is a slab put up in memory of Felix de Fredis, two centuries later, which shows that the light of dawn had in his time grown to noontide brightness. For on it is recorded that it was he who found the Laocoön on the Esquiline Hill; the service which he thus rendered to art being by his contemporaries counted far more praiseworthy than the saintliness of Santa Francesca or the charity of Vanozza Ponziani.

After this the Church of the Aracœli has nothing to tell but the many miracles of the Santissimo Bambino, a wooden figure of the Holy Infant, believed to have been painted by Saint Luke. But this too is typical of the state of Rome, of which, after the sixteenth century, not much need be said save that it was the home of the Popes. The Santissimo Bambino is the most valuable possession of the Franciscans of the Aracoeli, not because of the jewels with which it is covered from head to feet, but because of its wonderful miraculous gifts. In the good old papal days of faith, when any one was sick, this Bambino was sent for; and as the monks carried it through the streets, in its own carriage, every one fell upon their knees until it had passed. Now it happened that a Roman lady longed to own this divine physician, and so she had a wooden puppet made just like it, and then she went to bed and feigned serious illness. At once the good monks brought the Bambino from the Aracœli to her room, leaving it alone with her, as was then the custom. As soon as they had gone she hastily stripped it, and dressed her puppet in its clothes. Then she hid the Bambino, and when they returned she gave them its counterfeit ; and they, without discovering the substitution, went back to their monastery with it. But that night, as they lay asleep, every bell in church and cloister was set to ringing, and at all the doors there came a loud knocking. Uneasy, and fearing the noise to he the work of the devil, they ran from their cells to the great convent door, and there they found the true Bambino, cold and shivering and naked.

This is the Bambino which at Christmas is borne through the church by the monks and laid at the feet of the Virgin and Saint Joseph in the manger, which then is set up in one of the chapels. Many years ago Saint Francis, filled with divine love, and with the consent of Honorius III., then Pope, represented in the church of the little town of Grecia, near Assisi, the manger of Bethlehem, with the Holy Family and the shepherds. In his deep joy at his good work, he knelt all night by it, now praying, now weeping, from the fullness of his heart. The monks of the Aracœli are Franciscans, and they keep up the pious practice instituted by their founder. For a week after Christmas Day the manger is shown to the faithful, while at certain hours of the afternoon boys and girls on a platform opposite preach pretty little sermons about the Child Christ; but only peasants and monks in great numbers and an occasional tourist come to listen. So it is that its glory has gone from the Aracœli, and the church which once rang with the clash of armor, or resounded with the impassioned appeal of patriots, is now given over to peasants and children. But even the manger has been seen and the sermons have been heard for the last time. The old columns must be again moved, perhaps to support another roof. Savelli and Ponziani, cardinals and laymen, must be disturbed in the tombs where they have lain for ages. The legend of Augustus will hereafter be told only in books, and perhaps by the bare brick façade, if that, too, is not destroyed. When the monastery and the principal part of the church have gone, and Victor Emmanuel, in bronze or marble, looks down from his height over the Roman Forum, who can say that the world is the better for the change ?

“ I went astray in Holborn,” Hawthorne writes in his English NoteBook, “ through an arched entrance, over which was ‘ Staple Inn,’ and here likewise seemed to be offices ; but in a court opening inwards from this there was a surrounding seclusion of quiet dwelling-houses, with beautiful green shrubbery and grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers in full bloom. The windows were open ; it was a lovely summer afternoon, and I have a sense that bees were humming in the court, though this may have been suggested by my fancy, because the sound would have been so well suited to the scene. A boy was reading at one of the windows. There was not a quieter spot in England than this, and it was very strange to have drifted into it so suddenly out of the bustle and rumble of Holborn, and to lose all this repose as suddenly on passing through the arch of the outer court. In all the hundreds of years since London was built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over that little island of quiet.” But the tide has at length reached it, and those who would save Staple’s Inn are as powerless as Canute to stay its progress. The fate of the old English inn, like that of the Italian church, is sealed. This quietness of which Hawthorne speaks is the principal characteristic and charm of all the inns of court and chancery. Nothing could be more restful than to leave the Strand, when the noise and traffic of the day is at its height, for the little garden in the Inner Temple, where all that can be heard is the splashing of the fountain to which Ruth Pinch listened, and where on the benches are perhaps one or two silent women, an old man sleeping while a cat lies curled up in his lap, and another with head bent over a tattered yellow brief. It is the same in Clifford’s Inn, where, towards twilight, a large, uncanny black cat takes possession of the quadrangle, in which the only sign of human life is the jingling of an old piano in a room above ; or in Grey’s Inn, where, on summer afternoons, children run and race over the green, and a few young men play tennis between the ffower-beds on the terrace. But of all these quiet places Staple’s Inn is by far the quietest.

Whoever may have walked along busy Holborn, where there are so many shops and shoppers and a never-ending procession of hansoms and omnibuses, must remember, as a curious contrast to the new buildings by which it is surrounded, the old, quaintly gabled, pinnacled house which stands on the righthand side in going towards the city, and just behind Holborn Bars. It is such an irregular, rambling pile, as it follows the curve in the street, and there is so little method in its gables and windows, that it gives the effect of a number of small, friendly houses, each one trying to prop up its neighbor, which but for this timely help would totter over from sheer old age and decrepitude. The upper stories project so boldly over the shops on the ground floor that the latter seem to be retreating, as if in shame for having set up their plebeian stores in such eminently aristocratic quarters. In the centre is the low-arched doorway through which Hawthorne entered, and which leads into the greater court or quadrangle of the inn. Here one might fancy one’s self in some sleepy, old-fashioned town, instead of in modern, wide-awake London. The houses on its four sides are dingy, and wear a settled, respectable look, as if they had done with the cares and vulgar worries of every-day life. The loiterer standing there cannot hear the noise of the street without, but, instead, the twittering of a few sparrows, which in the stunted, smoky trees “ play at country,” as Dickens says. But opposite is another low, dark archway, on the other side of which is a smaller quadrangle, where the birds can carry on their play with less violence to their tiny understandings. For there are soft grass-plots and bright flower-beds, and one or two broad-leaved fig-trees, and a terrace with a balustrade, making a garden which might belong appropriately to an Italian palace, but which it is strange to And in the heart of London town. But when we look from the terrace back at the hall, with a little lantern in its roof, a clock in its tower, anti a luxuriant Virginia creeper over its gray walls, and at the houses on the other sides of the court, which, though comparatively new, are blackened into apparent ago by London soot, the place no longer seems like Italy, but like a bit of Canterbury or one of the picturesque English cathedral towns. It is always bright there, even on a gray day, with a sense of air and space which one does not get in crowded Holhorn or narrow Chancery Lane. But when, overhead, there is blue sky instead of fog, and the flowers are in bloom, and the leaves on the vine are beginning to redden, then Staple’s Inn truly deserves its reputation as “the fayrest Inne of Chauncerie in this Universitie.”

Before Henry V.’s time Staple’s Inn was an exchange for wool merchants, or staplers. But during his reign it was made an inn of chancery, the merchants having previously gone elsewhere. Then, by a grant some years later, when Henry VIII. was king, it was given to Grey’s Inn, to which it has ever since been a dependency. Here students, too young to enter the inn of court at once, came to make their preparatory studies for a certain number of years. Since the inns of chancery occupied a subordinate position, they are naturally kept somewhat in the background in the records of those “ noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom,” as Ben Jonson calls the inns of

court. It is, for example, in their accounts of the Christmas revels in the Temple or in Lincoln’s Inn that the old gossiping chroniclers are most glowing. We hear less of the loungers about Staple’s Inn than of the gay gallants and fair ladies who in Pepys’ time made the green at Grey’s Inn, always famous “ for walks,” the fashionable promenade on Sundays. However, one or two names associated with Staple’s Inn give it that human interest which after all is a greater charm than mere picturesqueness. If we linger on the terrace, or in the dingy court, a few familiar figures will come forth from the past to greet us. First of all is one, large, uncouth, and shabby, at whom we might laugh did he not awe us into respect. There is an expression of deep trouble, but of determination as well, on his face, as he goes his way into the house and shuts himself up in a little room, where we know he will remain until he has written a story to he called Rasselas, by which he can earn money enough to pay his mother’s funeral expenses and the debts, small in themselves but heavy for him, which the good lady left him for her legacy. “ I, too, am an old struggler,” Dr. Johnson used often to say, in the words of a poor woman who once begged from him on this plea. Staple’s Inn was the scene of one of the bitterest of his many bitter struggles with poverty, — an evil worse than fifty demons in the house, according to the Jewish philosopher. And hence, in its quadrangles, he and his sorrow, and the story he evolved from it, have ever been remembered, just as Ben Jonson, trowel in one hand and Horace in the other, has been in Lincoln’s Inn, or as Chaucer, belaboring the unfortunate Franciscan, in the Temple.

It was here that Stevens, in Isaac Reed’s chambers, corrected the proofsheets of his edition of Shakespeare; and here, too, that Dickens established the chief characters of his last story, Edwin Drood. What more fitting corner could he have found in all Loudon for the home of the angular sentimentalist, Mr. Grewgious, or for an asylum for proud, sensitive Neville Landless? As they, followed by pretty Rosa and Helena, honest, friendly Mr. Crisparkle and nervous, opium-eating Jasper, in turn pass by, they seem scarcely more unreal than the broad, homely figure who led the way for this procession of shadows. But now we must bid them all farewell. For who can suppose that Dr. Johnson, or Grewgious, or Stevens, will ever come back to their old home, when it has been turned into a freight depot, where all day long men will be hurrying hither and thither, and carts will be loaded and unloaded ? They would be as out of place in it as Chaucer and his lordynges in the tall, straight brick inn which stands where were once the low gables and balustraded galleries of the Tabard. Staple’s Inn will henceforth be the haunt of merchants, to whom it will practically belong, even as it did in the days before Richard II. removed the wool merchants to Westminster.

A few Romans, it is said, will do all they can to save the Church of the Aracœli. But, hitherto, their opposition to the municipal powers, in similar cases, has been so unsuccessful that little is to be expected from it in the present instance. Meanwhile, it is very likely that all of Mr. Ruskin’s lament may truthfully be reëchoed, and that scarcely any effort will be made to delineate these two ancient buildings before they also have vanished like dreams.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell.