THE CHURCH IN CECILIA’S HOUSE

     “Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
     visions.”

“The house in which she lives,” says that mystical German writer quoted once before, “is for the orderly soul, which does not live on blindly before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences, building and adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself, only an expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy of Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the soul.  For such an orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways, the lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may seem incorporate with it — until at last, in the entire expressiveness of what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between outward and inward, no longer any distinction at all; and the light which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon the wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular window, become to her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of apprehension and door-ways to things beyond — the germ or rudiment of certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities of spirit and sense.”

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think, together with that bodily “tent” or “tabernacle,” only one of many vestures for the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they borrowed what momentary value or significance they had.

The little doorway in this long, low wall admitted them, in fact, into the court or garden of a villa, disposed in one of those abrupt natural hollows, which give its character to the country in this place; the house itself, with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of which surprised Marius as he entered, being thus wholly concealed from passengers along the road.  All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste — a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world.  It was the old way of true Renaissance — being indeed the way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man, perhaps with his soul — conceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times.  The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very seductive.  Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset.  And from the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian’s early essays towards a new world of poetic sound.  It was the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness — the blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of places, — above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they might have, — was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion all around him, passed into the house.  That intelligent seriousness about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual picture.  If the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul.  As he passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their children — of all the various affections of family life under its most natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some sublime new type of it, into large controlling passions.  There reigned throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way of making ready for some gracious spousals.  The place itself was like a bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his companion.

As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the worship or commemoration of the departed was disposed around — incense, lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved to the utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt-out fires.  Would they ever kindle again? — possess, transform, the place? — Turning to an ashen pallor where, at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a hard beam of clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon row within, leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time could move along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed to shut one in into the great company of the dead.  Only the long straight pathway lay before him; opening, however, here and there, into a small chamber, around a broad, table-like coffin or “altar-tomb,” adorned even more profusely than the rest as if for some anniversary observance.  Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated.  The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in him a preference for that other mode of settlement to the last sleep, as having something about it more home-like and hopeful, at least in outward seeming.  But whence the strange confidence that these “handfuls of white dust” would hereafter recompose themselves once more into exulting human creatures?  By what heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from above, such as was certainly never again to reach the dead violets? — Januarius, Agapetus, Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you, the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many, scratched, like a passing sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar that had closed up the prison-door.  All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set aside, here at least, carried further than ever before, was that pious, systematic commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.

The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the floor of hell.  Every visitor to the Catacombs must have observed, in a very different theological connexion, the numerous children’s graves there — beds of infants, but a span long indeed, lowly “prisoners of hope,” on these sacred floors.  It was with great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them, decked in some instances with the favourite toys of their tiny occupants — toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, the entire paraphernalia of a baby-house; and when he saw afterwards the living children, who sang and were busy above — sang their psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum! — their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint unreality from the memory of those others, the children of the Catacombs, but a little way below them.

Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and sometimes even at these children’s graves, were the signs of violent death or “martyrdom,” — proofs that some “had loved not their lives unto the death” — in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red flowers for their heavenly “birthday.”  About one sepulchre in particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what, by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia — a birthday, the peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered.  And it was with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics, snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so tragic for the “Christian superstition.”  Something of them he had heard indeed already.  They had seemed to him but one savagery the more, savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.

And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering, in the remote background.  Yes! the interest, the expression, of the entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of some priceless incense.  Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible mortality, death’s very self — Ah! lovelier than any fable of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.  Peace!  Pax tecum! — the word, the thought — was put forth everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the various consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of regeneration, of escape from the grave — Hercules wrestling with Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulders.  Yet these imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed but a slight contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope there — a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart, as with the sense, again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to deepen the longer one lingered through these strange and awful passages.  A figure, partly pagan in character, yet most frequently repeated of all these visible parables — the figure of one just escaped from the sea, still clinging as for life to the shore in surprised joy, together with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to express the prevailing sentiment of the place.  And it was just as he had puzzled out this inscription —

     I went down to the bottom of the mountains. 
     The earth with her bars was about me for ever: 
     Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!

— that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark places “quieted by hope,” into the daylight.

They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond.  The orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible, was still afloat in crimson splendour.  The colour of all earthly things seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great richness lingering in their shadows.  At that moment the voice of the singers, a “voice of joy and health,” concentrated itself with solemn antistrophic movement, into an evening, or “candle” hymn.

     “Hail!  Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured,
     Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest: —
     Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung
     With undefiled tongue.” —

That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the afternoon’s strange experiences.  A few minutes later, passing forward on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream.  The house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he had lately visited at Tusculum.  And what a contrast was presented by the former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate cleanness, of responsive affection! — all alike determined by that transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the old puzzle of life had found its solution.  In truth, one of his most characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for escape — for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most pleasantly — for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon.  It was like the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a sick man’s longing for northern coolness, and the whispering willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the south.  To some such effect had this visit occurred to him, and through so slight an accident.  Rome and Roman life, just then, were come to seem like some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet with roots in a deep, down-trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities.  In the midst of its suffocation, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this vision of the church in Cecilia’s house, as never before.  It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those experiences appealed — the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her children.  But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral or spiritual influence, of a somewhat exigent and controlling character, added anew to life, a new element therein, with which, consistently with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms.

The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul thereto.  This had carried him along in a continuous communion with ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own being, or in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius.  Surely, in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first time to-day — in this strange family, like “a garden enclosed” — was the fulfilment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that half-understood friend, which of late years had been his protection so often amid the perplexities of life.  Here, it might be, was, if not the cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows — of that constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but which had made his life certainly like one long “disease of the spirit.”  Merciful intention made itself known remedially here, in the mere contact of the air, like a soft touch upon aching flesh.  On the other hand, he was aware that new responsibilities also might be awakened — new and untried responsibilities — a demand for something from him in return.  Might this new vision, like the malignant beauty of pagan Medusa, be exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but itself?  At least he suspected that, after the beholding of it, he could never again be altogether as he had been before.