THE CITY OF ST. FRANCIS
The Italian hill-cities are such a strange novelty to the American of
the Middle West--used only to the flat reaches of the prairie, and the
city or town gathered primarily about the railway-station. One sees a
whole series of them ranged along the eastern ridge of the Apennines
as one travels northward from Rome. All the way up this valley I had
been noting examples on either hand but when I got off the train
at Assisi I saw what appeared to be a great fortress on a distant
hill--the sheer walls of the church and monastery of St. Francis. It
all came back to me, the fact that St. Francis had been born here of
a well-to-do father, that he had led a gay life in his youth, had had
his “vision”--his change of heart--which caused him to embrace poverty,
the care of the poor and needy and to follow precisely that idealistic
dictum which says: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,...
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,... for where your
treasure is there will your heart be also.” I had found in one of the
little books I had with me, “Umbrian Towns,” a copy of the prayer that
he devised for his Order which reads:
Poverty was in the crib and like a faithful squire she kept
herself armed in the great combat Thou didst wage for our
redemption. During Thy passion she alone did not forsake Thee.
Mary, Thy Mother, stopped at the foot of the cross, but poverty
mounted it with Thee and clasped Thee in her embrace unto the
end; and when Thou wast dying of thirst as a watchful spouse
she prepared for Thee the gall. Thou didst expire in the ardor
of her embraces, nor did she leave Thee when dead, O Lord
Jesus, for she allowed not Thy body to rest elsewhere than in
a borrowed grave. O poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is
to bestow on me the treasure of the highest poverty. Grant
that the distinctive mark of our Order may be never to possess
anything as its own under the sun for the glory of Thy name and
to have no other patrimony than begging.
I wonder if there is any one who can read this without a thrill of
response. This world sets such store by wealth and comfort. We all
batten on luxury so far as our means will permit,--many of us wallow
in it; and the thought of a man who could write such a prayer as that,
and live it, made my hair tingle to the roots. I can understand Pope
Innocent III’s saying that the rule offered by St. Francis and his
disciples to ordinary mortals was too severe, but I can also conceive
the poetic enthusiasm of a St. Francis. I found myself on the instant
in the deepest accord with him, understanding how it was that he
wanted his followers not to wear a habit, and to work in the fields
as day-laborers, begging only when they could not earn their way. The
fact that he and his disciples had lived in reed huts on the site of
Santa Maria degli Angeli, the great church which stands in the valley
near the station, far down from the town, and had practised the utmost
austerity, came upon me as a bit of imaginative poetry of the highest
sort. Before the rumbling bus arrived, which conveyed me and several
others to the little hotel, I was thrilling with enthusiasm for this
religious fact, and anything that concerned him interested me.
In some ways Assisi was a disappointment because I expected something
more than bare picturesqueness; it is very old and I fancy, as modern
Italy goes, very poor. The walls of the houses are for the most part
built of dull gray stone. The streets climbed up hill and down dale,
hard, winding, narrow, stony affairs, lined right to the roadway by
these bare, inhospitable-looking houses. No yards, no gardens--at least
none visible from the streets, but, between walls, and down street
stairways, and between odd angles of buildings the loveliest vistas
of the valley below, where were spread great orchards of olive trees,
occasional small groups of houses, distant churches and the mountains
on the other side of the valley. Quite suited to the self-abnegating
spirit of St. Francis, I thought,--and I wondered if the town had
changed greatly since his day--1182!
As I came up in the bus, looking after my very un-St. Francis-like
luggage, and my precious fur overcoat, I encountered a pale,
ascetic-looking French priest,--“L’Abbé Guillmant, Vicar General,
Arras (Pas-de-Calais), France;” he wrote out his address for me,--who,
looking at me over his French Baedeker every now and then, finally
asked in his own tongue, “Do you Speak French?” I shook my head
deprecatingly and smiled regretfully. “Italiano?” Again I had to shake
my head. “C’est triste!” he said, and went on reading. He was clad in a
black cassock that reached to his feet, the buttons ranging nicely down
his chest, and carried only a small portmanteau and an umbrella. We
reached the hotel and I found that he was stopping there. Once on the
way up he waved his hand out of the window and said something. I think
he was indicating that we could see Perugia further up the valley. In
the dining-room where I found him after being assigned to my room he
offered me his bill-of-fare and indicated that a certain Italian dish
was the best.
This hotel to which we had come was a bare little affair. It was new
enough--one of Cook’s offerings,--to which all the tourists traveling
under the direction of that agency are sent. The walls were quite
white and clean. The ceilings of the rooms were high, over high
latticed windows and doors. My room, I found, gave upon a balcony which
commanded the wonderful sweep of plain below.
The dining-room contained six or seven other travelers bound either
southward towards Rome or northward towards Perugia and Florence. It
was a rather hazy day, not cold and not warm, but cheerless. I can
still hear the clink of the knives and forks as the few guests ate in
silence or conversed in low tones. Travelers in this world seem almost
innately fearsome of each other, particularly when they are few in
number and meet in some such out-of-the-way place as this. My Catholic
Abbé was longing to be sociable with me, I could feel it; but this
lack of a common tongue prevented him, or seemed to. As I was leaving
I asked the proprietor to say to him that I was sorry that I did not
speak French, that if I did I would be glad to accompany him; and
he immediately reported that the Abbé said, Would I not come along,
anyhow? “He haav ask,” said the proprietor, a small, stout, dark man,
“weel you not come halong hanyhow?”
“Certainly,” I replied. And so the Abbé Guillmant and I, apparently not
understanding a word of each other’s language, started out sightseeing
together--I had almost said arm-in-arm.
I soon learned that while my French priest did not speak English, he
read it after a fashion, and if he took plenty of time he could form
an occasional sentence. It took time, however. He began,--in no vivid
or enthusiastic fashion, to be sure,--to indicate what the different
things were as we went along.
Now the sights of Assisi are not many. If you are in a hurry and do
not fall in love with the quaint and picturesque character of it and
its wonderful views you can do them all in a day,--an afternoon if
you skimp. There is the church of St. Francis with its associated
monastery (what an anachronism a monastery seems in connection with
St. Francis, who thought only of huts of branches, or holes in the
rocks!) with its sepulcher of the saint in the lower church, and the
frescoed scenes from St. Francis’s life by Giotto in the upper; the
church of St. Clare (Santa Chiara) with its tomb and the body of that
enthusiastic imitator of St. Francis; the Duomo, or cathedral, begun
in 1134--a rather poor specimen of a cathedral after some others--and
the church of St. Damiano, which was given--the chapel of it--to St.
Francis by the Benedictine monks of Monte Subasio soon after he had
begun his work of preaching the penitential life. There is also the
hermitage of the Carceri, where, in small holes in the rocks the early
Franciscans led a self-depriving life, and the new church raised on the
site of the house belonging to Pietro Bernardone, the father of St.
Francis, who was in the cloth business.
I cannot say that I followed with any too much enthusiasm the involved
architectural, historical, artistic, and religious details of these
churches and chapels. St. Francis, wonderful “jongleur of God” that he
was, was not interested in churches and chapels so much as he was in
the self-immolating life of Christ. He did not want his followers to
have monasteries in the first place. “Carry neither gold nor silver
nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor
staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire.” I liked the church
of St. Francis, however, for in spite of the fact that it is gray
and bare as befits a Franciscan edifice, it is a double church--one
below the other, and seemingly running at right angles; and they are
both large Gothic churches, each complete with sacristy, choir nave,
transepts and the like. The cloister is lovely, in the best Italian
manner, and through the interstices of the walls wonderful views of the
valley below may be secured. The lower church, gray and varied in its
interior, is rich in frescoes by Cimabue and others dealing with the
sacred vows of the Franciscans, the upper (the nave) decorated with
frescoes by Giotto, illustrating the life of St. Francis. The latter
interested me immensely because I knew by now that these were almost
the beginning of Italian and Umbrian religious art and because Giotto,
from the evidences his work affords, must have been such a naïve and
pleasant old soul. I fairly laughed aloud as I stalked about this
great nave of the upper church--the Abbé was still below--at some of
the good old Italian’s attempts at characterization and composition.
It is no easy thing, if you are the founder of a whole line of great
artists, called upon to teach them something entirely new in the way
of life-expression, to get all the wonderful things you see and feel
into a certain picture or series of pictures, but Giotto tried it
and he succeeded very well, too. The decorations are not great, but
they are quaint and lovely, even if you have to admit at times that
an apprentice of to-day could draw and compose better. He couldn’t
“intend” better, however, nor convey more human tenderness and feeling
in gay, light coloring,--and therein lies the whole secret!
There are some twenty-eight of these frescoes ranged along the lower
walls on either side--St. Francis stepping on the cloak of the poor
man who, recognizing him as a saint, spread it down before him; St.
Francis giving his cloak to the poor nobleman; St. Francis seeing the
vision of the palace which was to be reared for him and his followers;
St. Francis in the car of fire; St. Francis driving the devils away
from Arezzo; St. Francis before the Sultan; St. Francis preaching to
the birds; and so on. It was very charming. I could not help thinking
what a severe blow has been given to religious legend since those
days however; nowadays, except in the minds of the ignorant, saints
and devils and angels and stigmata and holy visions have all but
disappeared. The grand phantasmagoria of religious notions as they
relate to the life of Christ have all but vanished, for the time
being anyhow, even in the brains of the masses, and we are having an
invasion of rationalism or something approximating it, even at the
bottom. The laissez-faire opportunism which has characterized the
men at the top in all ages is seeping down to the bottom. Via the
newspaper and the magazine, even in Italy--in Assisi--something of
astronomy, botany, politics and mechanics, scientifically demonstrated,
is creeping in. The inflow seems very meager as yet, a mere trickle,
but it has begun. Even in Assisi I saw newspapers and a weekly in
a local barber-shop. The natives--the aged ones--very thin, shabby
and pale, run into the churches at all hours of the day to prostrate
themselves before helpless saints; but nevertheless the newspapers are
in the barber-shops. Old Cosimo Medici’s truism that governments are
not managed by paternosters is slowly seeping down. We have scores of
men in the world to-day as able as old Cosimo Medici and as ruthless.
We will have hundreds and thousands after a while, only they will be
much more circumspect in their ruthlessness and they will work hard
for the State. Perhaps there won’t be so much useless praying before
useless images when that time comes. The thought of divinity _in the
individual_ needs to be more fully developed.
While I was wandering thus and ruminating I was interested at the
same time in the faithful enthusiasm my Abbé was manifesting in the
details of the art of this great church. He followed me about for a
time in my idle wanderings as I studied the architectural details of
this one of the earliest of Gothic churches and then he went away by
himself, returning every so often to find in my guide-book certain
passages which he wanted me to read, pointing to certain frescoes and
exclaiming, “Giotto!” “Cimabue!” “Andrea da Bologna!” Finally he said
in plain English, but very slowly: “Did--you--ever--read--a--life--of
St. Francis?”
I must confess that my knowledge of the intricacies of Italian art,
aside from the lines of its general development, is slim. Alas,
dabbling in Italian art, and in art in general, is like trifling with
some soothing drug--the more you know the more you want to know.
We continued our way and finally we found a Franciscan monk who spoke
both English and French--a peculiar-looking man, tall, and athletic,
who appeared to be very widely experienced in the world, indeed. He
explained more of the frescoes, the history of the church, the present
state of the Franciscans here, and so on.
The other places Franciscan, as I have said, did not interest me
so much, though I accompanied my friend, the Abbé, wherever he was
impelled to go. He inquired about New York, looking up and waving his
hand upward as indicating great height, great buildings, and I knew he
was thinking of our skyscrapers. “American bar!” he said, twittering to
himself like a bird, “American stim-eat [steam heat]; American ’otel.”
I had to smile.
Side by side we proceeded through the church of St. Clare, the Duomo,
the new church raised on the site of the house that belonged to Pietro
Bernardone, the father of the saint; and finally to the Church of San
Damiano, where after St. Francis had seen the vision of the new life,
he went to pray. After it was given him by the Benedictines he set
about the work of repairing it and when once it was in charge of the
poor Clares, after resigning the command of his order, he returned
thither to rest and compose the “Canticle of the Law.” I never knew
until I came to Assisi what a business this thing of religion is in
Italy--how valuable the shrines and churches of an earlier day are
to its communities. Thousands of travelers must pass this way each
year. They support the only good hotels. Travelers from all nations
come, English, French, German, American, Russian, and Japanese. The
attendants at the shrines reap a small livelihood from the tips of
visitors and they are always there, lively and almost obstreperous
in their attentions. The oldest and most faded of all the guides and
attendants throng about the churches and shrines of Assisi, so old and
faded that they seemed almost epics of poverty. My good priest was for
praying before every shrine. He would get down on his knees and cross
himself, praying four or five minutes while I stood irreligiously in
the background, looking at him and wondering how long he would be.
He prayed before the tomb of St. Francis in the Franciscan church;
before the body of St. Clare (clothed in a black habit and shown behind
a glass case), in the church of St. Clare; before the altar in the
chapel of Saint Damiano, where St. Francis had first prayed; and so
on. Finally when we were all through, and it was getting late evening,
he wanted to go down into the valley, near the railroad station, to
the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the cell in which St.
Francis died, is located. He thought I might want to leave him now,
but I refused. We started out, inquiring our way of the monks at Saint
Damiano and found that we had to go back through the town. One of the
monks, a fat, bare-footed man, signaled me to put on my hat, which I
was carrying because I wanted to enjoy the freshness of the evening
wind. It had cleared off now, the sun had come out and we were enjoying
one of those lovely Italian spring evenings which bring a sense of
childhood to the heart. The good monk thought I was holding my hat out
of reverence to his calling. I put it on.
We went back through the town and then I realized how lovely the life
of a small Italian town is, in spring. Assisi has about five thousand
population. It was cool and pleasant. Many doorways were now open,
showing evening fires within the shadows of the rooms. Some children
were in the roadways. Carts and wains were already clattering up from
the fields below and church-bells--the sweetest echoes from churches
here and there in the valley and from those here in Assisi--exchanged
melodies. We walked fast because it was late and when we reached the
station it was already dusk. The moon had risen, however, and lighted
up this great edifice, standing among a ruck of tiny homes. A number
of Italian men and women were grouped around a pump outside--those
same dark, ear-ringed Italians with whom we are now so familiar in
America. The church was locked, but my Abbé went about to the cloister
gate which stood at one side of the main entrance, and rang a bell.
A brown-cowled monk appeared and they exchanged a few words. Finally
with many smiles we were admitted into a moonlit garden, where cypress
trees and box and ilex showed their lovely forms, and through a long
court that had an odor of malt, as if beer were brewed here, and so
finally by a circuitous route into the main body of the church and
the chapel containing the cell of St. Francis. It was so dark by now
that only the heaviest objects appeared distinctly, the moonlight
falling faintly through several of the windows. The voices of the monks
sounded strange and sonorous, even though they talked in low tones. We
walked about looking at the great altars, the windows, and the high,
flat ceiling. We went into the chapel, lined on either side by wooden
benches, occupied by kneeling monks, and lighted by one low, swinging
lamp which hung before the cell in which St. Francis died. There was
much whispering of prayers here and the good Abbé was on his knees in
a moment praying solemnly.
St. Francis certainly never contemplated that his beggarly cell would
ever be surrounded by the rich marbles and bronze work against which
his life was a protest. He never imagined, I am sure, that in spite of
his prayer for poverty, his Order would become rich and influential
and that this, the site of his abstinence, would be occupied by one of
the most ornate churches in Italy. It is curious how barnacle-wise the
spirit of materiality invariably encrusts the ideal! Christ died on
the cross for the privilege of worshiping God “in spirit and in truth”
after he had preached the sermon on the mount,--and then you have the
gold-incrusted, power-seeking, wealth-loving Papacy, with women and
villas and wars of aggrandizement and bastardy among the principal
concomitants. And following Francis, imitating the self-immolation of
the Nazarene, you have another great Order whose churches and convents
in Italy are among the richest and most beautiful. And everywhere you
find that lust for riches and show and gormandizing and a love of
seeming what they are not, so that they may satisfy a faint scratching
of the spirit which is so thickly coated over that it is almost
extinguished.
Or it may be that the ideal is always such an excellent device
wherewith to trap the unwary and the unsophisticated. “Feed them with
a fine-seeming and then put a tax on their humble credulity” seems to
be the logic of materialism in regard to the mass. Anything to obtain
power and authority! Anything to rule! And so you have an Alexander
VI, Vicar of Christ, poisoning cardinals and seizing on estates that
did not belong to him: leading a life of almost insane luxury; and a
Medicean pope interested in worldly fine art and the development of a
pagan ideal.