THE MAKERS OF MODERN ROME.*
MRS. OLIPHANT'S new book on Rome is in some ways more attractive than her well-known Makers of Florence, or than the fresher and less familiar Makers of Venice. It brings home to us once more the truth that among the cities of the world—to those who know the world's history—Rome is and will remain supreme. Other cities may have a finer record in art, and may in modern times have more to do with civilisa- tion, and may now, and possibly in the future, have more influence on politics. The supremacy of Rome has some- thing of an ideal nature, and does not depend at all on present-day Governments, or on the opinions of one country or another. Her claims date, of course, from the past, as the mother of the modern world ; but in this ideal sense they are as strong now as they were in the Middle Ages, and to educated minds she must always hold a rank which gains no • The Makers of Modern Rome,. In Four Books. By Mrs Oliphant. With Illus. trations by H. P. NT ire and Joseph Pennell. London Macmillan and 00 dignity hour her being called the "capital of Italy." If this idea is brought to the testi'of logic and reality, no doubt it becomes what Mrs. Oliphant feels obliged to call it, " A
strange principle a visionary and unreal claim .
the strangest superstition;" but there are visions and super- stitions more powerful than facts, and Mrs. Oliphant's own book is as strong a testimony to this as anything we have read for a long time.
It is not an actual history of the city of Rome, though more delightful and more instructive than many histories. It is a series of studies of the most striking periods in the life of Rome, and the chief characters who influenced and acted in them, from the fourth to the sixteenth century, from Mar- cella and Paula to Pope Leo X. All through this time, of course, the history of the city of Rome is in great measure the history of Christianity, and also a strong series of proofs of its divine origin. For it seems as if no merely human in- vention could have lived through such times and borne such handling without being overwhelmed and destroyed. The picture grows gradually darker as the ages advance, and yet no one who fairly considers Leo XIII. can say that his Church is not greater now than in the days when the new St. Peter's was built, three hundred years ago.
Many people will find Mrs. Oliphant's early chapters the newest and the most interesting in her present book. These " honourable women not a few" cannot be said to be familiarly known to any of us, except to those who have made a special study of the first centuries. It is difficult enough to realise Rome in those early Christian days, when, the first trials and persecutions being over, only a few old-fashioned and philo- sophical sort of people held back from the new religion, and when St. Jerome drew such stern pictures of the vanity and folly of men and women who were both fashionable and Christian. The women seem to have been specially incon- sistent; spending long hours before their mirrors, dressed with such stiff magnificence that they could hardly walk with- out help, their faces painted, and their hair arranged in towers. No wonder that a reaction began in a few nobler minds, and that Christianity soon had a worthier picture to show : Marcella, in plain dark garments in her palace on the Aven- tine, drawing round her all in Rome that was both good and beautiful, not repelling the young and gay by an artificial or conventual strictness, but simply living the life with a few like-minded friends, and sometimes honoured by the presence of Jerome himself. Students of that time know well the names of Paula and her daughter Eastochium, who followed Jerome to Bethlehem, and spent the rest of their lives in helping the master in his translations from the Scriptures. But the whole story of Marcella and her friends, and of the wonderful Melania and her journeys through the desert, is certainly unfamiliar, and Mrs. Oliphant tells it delightfully. It ends in tragedy, as most stories did in those days, alike for the city of Rome and her noblest inhabitants ; swept terribly away by one of those northern invasions which may be supposed to have been God's scourges then.
The following studies deal with " the Popes who made the Papacy," Gregory the Great, Gregory VII., and his earlier life as the Monk Hildebrand, powerful as any Pope ; passing on to Innocent III., to the greatness of whose character and influence Mrs. Oliphant hardly, perhaps, does full justice. She does not profess, it is true, to be a historian, and the impres- sions of a cultivated mind such as hers are always valuable ; but we suspect that the truth as to the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the dominion of the Church, the position of Emperor and Kings with regard to the Pope, lies some- where between her picture and that of M. de Montalembert in his introduction to the Histoire de Ste. Elisabeth de Hongrie. The remarks that Mrs. Oliphant makes on the relations between Pope Innocent and King John of England seem to suggest a not very perfect understanding of the mediaeval mind. The same may be said of her observations with regard to Philip Augustus and his treatment of his wife Ingelburga. The Pope's influence here, in those wild days, was a real
triumph of the moral law ; and it does not seem quite worthy of Mrs. Oliphant to say, "In France be bad one brief triumph indeed, and broke a poor woman's heart "—this poor woman having taken the French Queen's place without any right to it; but these are matters of history. Considering the enor- mous•difficulties of the time, one feels inclined to wonder at the greatness of the Church's influence on the side of religion and morality,—certainly not to belittle it. The most enjoyable parts of Mrs. Oliphant's book are those in which she leads us off from the broad high roads of European history, and keeps us for a time within the walls of that city, whose mediaeval state, built upon tombs and ruins, surrounded by robbers, she makes us realise with a clearness that leaves little to be desired. Nothing can be more picturesque than her account of Rienzi's short and strange period of power, his conflicts, so unex- pectedly triumphant, with the Colonna family, his downfall, visit to Avignon, return, second triumph, and speedy ruin and death. The wild, romantic, and pathetic story has never been better told.
We should have liked to linger a good deal longer with some of those Popes who, after the return from Avignon, set themselves, according to their varying taste and character, to repair and beautify Rome. Among these, one of the most attractive is Nicolas V., Thomas of Sarzana, with his passion for collecting manuscripts, his kindness to learned men, his gentle patronage of artists, the Pope under whom Fra Angelico painted the chapel of San Lorenzo, and whose peaceful heart—" a small and spare man of little strength of constitution "—was finally broken by the downfall of Con- stantinople. This Pope, with his quiet, artistic tastes, was the first to design the great improvements in Rome which were to be carried out by his more famous successors.
We can read the lives of the Popes elsewhere, told in more authoritative fashion ; but more formal histories do not show them to ns as they moved among the Roman people, collected libraries, gems, antiquities, watched artists and architects at their work, held friendly conversations " in their habit as they lived." The picture will never lose its interest.
As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, these later Princes of the Church, whose own nature, and the tendency of their time, drew them more towards building and decorat- ing palaces and churches than towards ruling the souls and ways of men, are more interesting figures than the far greater Gregory and Innocent of an earlier day. Julius II. and Leo X. have left their traces more distinctly, for the time, in the city that is called Eternal. But the whole world now would have been a different place without that high aim and ideal of the Middle Ages, the supremacy of religion ; and we cannot entirely agree with Mrs. Oliphant that the ideal was impossible, that the lofty conception ended in failure. At any rate, those centuries of witness for the right form for ever a part of Rome's great claim, acknowledged or not, to the honour of the nations.
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