No one need doubt about his quarters in this country town. The Albergo
di Pompeii is a truly sumptuous place. Sofas, tables, and chairs in our
sitting-room are made of buffalo horns, very cleverly pieced together,
but torturing the senses with suggestions of impalement. Sitting or
standing, one felt insecure. When would the points run into us? when
should we begin to break these incrustations off? and would the whole
fabric crumble at a touch into chaotic heaps of horns?
It is market day, and the costumes in the streets are brilliant. The
women wear a white petticoat, a blue skirt made straight and tightly
bound above it, a white richly-worked bodice, and the white
square-folded napkin of the Abruzzi on their heads. Their jacket is of
red or green--pure colour. A rug of striped red, blue, yellow, and black
protects the whole dress from the rain. There is a very noble quality of
green--sappy and gemmy--like some of Titian's or Giorgione's--in the
stuffs they use. Their build and carriage are worthy of goddesses.
Rain falls heavily, persistently. We must ride on donkeys, in
waterproofs, to Monte Cassino. Mountain and valley, oak wood and ilex
grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike in
soft-descending, soaking rain. Far and near the landscape swims in rain,
and the hill-sides send down torrents through their watercourses.
The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent and
princely solidity. It has a fine inner court, with sumptuous staircases
of slabbed stone leading to the church. This public portion of the
edifice is both impressive and magnificent, without sacrifice of
religious severity to parade. We acknowledge a successful compromise
between the austerity of the order and the grandeur befitting the fame,
wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation. The church itself
is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance--costly marble incrustations
and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in
the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro dei Medici.
Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in
the Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this
marble monument--the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco di San
Gallo--to their relative. It is singularly stiff, ugly, out of place--at
once obtrusive and insignificant.
A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over the
convent--boy's school, refectory printing press, lithographic workshop,
library, archives. We then returned to the church, from which we passed
to visit the most venerable and sacred portion of the monastery. The
cell of S. Benedict is being restored and painted in fresco by the
Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigid process of
re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chambered and very ancient
building, with a tower which is now embedded in the massive
superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artists adorning it
contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Egypt, and
Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen pietism. S.
Mauro's vision of his master's translation to heaven--the ladder of
light issuing between two cypresses, and the angels watching on the
tower walls--might even be styled poetical. But the decorative angels on
the roof and other places, being adapted from Egyptian art, have a
strange, incongruous appearance.
Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes in
search of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and even Monte
Cassino was no exception. This ought not to be otherwise, seeing what a
peculiar sympathy with the monastic institution is required to make
these cloisters comprehensible. The atmosphere of operose indolence,
prolonged through centuries and centuries, stifles; nor can antiquity
and influence impose upon a mind which resents monkery itself as an
essential evil. That Monte Cassino supplied the Church with several
potentates is incontestable. That mediaeval learning and morality would
have suffered more without this brotherhood cannot be doubted. Yet it is
difficult to name men of very eminent genius whom the Cassinesi claim as
their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio's testimony to their carelessness, and
with the evidence of their library before our eyes, can we rate their
services to civilised erudition very highly. I longed to possess the
spirit, for one moment, of Montalembert. I longed for what is called
historical imagination, for the indiscriminate voracity of those men to
whom world-famous sites are in themselves soul-stirring.