he rest of us
so small, such tiny details of itself. He was no detail, but an
independent reality--he and his prayer, his belief, his nailed shoes:
all come who knows how far in what loneliness! I got the sacristan to
open, and went in to see the tomb--a mad masquerade thing, everything
in wrong relief and showing the wrong side, the very virtues or
sciences flat on their backs, so that you could not see them. And in
the middle, presenting his stark bronze feet, the brown,
mummied-looking, wicked pope, with great nose under his tiara. An
insane thing--more so than any Bernini monument, I thought. Perhaps it
was the presence of that man praying away outside which affected me to
think this. There he was, as little likely to move away, apparently,
as the bronze pope stretched out, soles protruded, among the absurd
allegories. I went also to see the Pieta, and then stayed a long while
walking up and down; but still the man was kneeling there, and might
be kneeling, doubtless, till now or till doomsday, if the vergers had
not, in closing the doors, turned him out.

_March_ 8.

V.

THE CRYPTS.

Yesterday the Grotte Vaticane, the Crypts of St. Peter's, a horrible
disappointment, and on the whole absurd impression. That of being
conducted (down a little staircase carpeted with stair cloth) through
the basement of a colossal hotel, with all the electric light turned
on at midday--a basement with lumber-rooms full of rather tawdry
antiquities giving off its corridors, and other antiquities (as we see
them in Italian inns) crammed against walls and into corners.
Donatello and Mino bas-reliefs become sham by their surroundings,
apocryphal Byzantine mosaics, second-rate pictures. Even empty
sarcophagi and desecrated tombs just as at Riettis or Della Torres at
Venice, and with seventeenth-century gilding and painting obbligato
overhead. And then into wider corridors, whitewashed, always with that
glare of electricity from the low roof; corridors where you expect
automatic trucks of coals, or dinner lifts; and where the vague
whitewashed cubes of masonry against the walls suggest new-fangled
washing or heating apparatus. And instead! they are the resting-place
of the Stuarts, only labels telling us so, or of mediaeval popes. And
that vague arched thing with wooden cover, painted to imitate
porphyry, is the tomb of the Emperor Otho; and there, as we go on, it
grows upon one that the carved and mitred figures tucked away u