I asked what he found to eat.

“_Erba, Signore._ We all did. You could not touch property; a single

orange, and they would have killed you.”

Grass!

He bore a name renowned in the past, but his home being turned into a

dust-heap under which his money, papers and furniture, his two parents

and brothers, are still lying, he now gains a livelihood by carrying

vegetables and fruit from the harbour to the collection of sheds

honoured by the name of market. Later in the day we happened to walk

past the very mansion, which lies near the quay. “Here is my house and

my family,” he remarked, indicating, with a gesture of antique

resignation, a pile of wreckage.

Hard by, among the ruins, there sat a young woman with dishevelled

hair, singing rapturously. “Her husband was crushed to death,” he said,

“and it unhinged her wits. Strange, is it not, sir? They used to fight

like fiends, and now—she sings to him night and day to come back.”

Love—so the Greeks fabled—was the child of Chaos.

In this part of the town stands the civic museum, which all readers of

Gissing’s “Ionian Sea” will remember as the closing note of those

harmonious pages. It is shattered, like everything else that he visited

in Reggio; like the hotel where he lodged; like the cathedral whose

proud superscription _Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium_ impressed him

so deeply; like that “singular bit of advanced civilization, which gave

me an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who

forecast the future—a public slaughter-house of tasteful architecture,

set in a grove of lemon trees and palms, suggesting the dreamy ideal of

some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism.” We went the

round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the

tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting

against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a

rope by which the inmates may have tried to let themselves down.

A friend of mine, Baron C—— of Stilo, is a member of that same

patriotic family, and gave me the following strange account. He was

absent from Reggio at the time of the catastrophe, but three others of

them were staying there. On the first shock they rushed together,

panic-stricken, into one room; the floor gave way, and they suddenly

found themselves sitting in their motor-car which happened to be placed

exactly below them. They escaped with a few cuts and bruises.

An inscription on a neighbouring ruin runs to the effect that the

_mansion having been severely damaged in the earthquake of_ 1783, _its

owner had rebuilt it on lines calculated to defy future shattering!._

Whether he would rebuild it yet again?

Nevertheless, there seems to be some chance for the revival of Reggio;

its prognosis is not utterly hopeless.

But Messina is in desperate case.

That haughty sea-front, with its long line of imposing edifices—imagine

a painted theatre decoration of cardboard through which some sportive

behemoth has been jumping with frantic glee; there you have it. And

within, all is desolation; the wreckage reaches to the windows; you

must clamber over it as best you can. What an all-absorbing

post-tertiary deposit for future generations, for the crafty

antiquarian who deciphers the history of mankind out of kitchen-middens

and deformed heaps of forgotten trash! The whole social life of the

citizens, their arts, domestic economy, and pastimes, lies embedded in

that rubbish. “A musical race,” he will conclude, observing the number

of decayed pianofortes,

guitars, and mandolines. The climate of Messina, he will further argue,

must have been a wet one, inasmuch as there are umbrellas everywhere,

standing upright among the debris, leaning all forlorn against the

ruins, or peering dismally from under them. It rained much during those

awful days, and umbrellas were at a premium. Yet fifty of them would

not have purchased a loaf of bread.

It was Goethe who, speaking of Pompeii, said that of the many

catastrophes which have afflicted mankind few have given greater

pleasure to posterity. The same will never be said of Messina, whose

relics, for the most part, are squalid and mean. The German poet, by

the way, visited this town shortly after the disaster of 1783, and

describes its _zackige Ruinenwüste_—words whose very sound is

suggestive of shatterings and dislocations. Nevertheless, the place

revived again.

But what was 1783?

A mere rehearsal, an amateur performance.

Wandering about in this world of ghosts, I passed the old restaurant

where the sword-fish had once tasted so good—an accumulation of stones

and mortar—and reached the cathedral. It is laid low, all save the

Gargantuan mosaic figures that stare down from behind the altar in

futile benediction of Chaos; inane, terrific. This, then, is the house

of that feudal lady of the _fortiter in re,_ who sent an earthquake and

called it love. Womanlike, she doted on gold and precious stones, and

they recovered her fabulous hoard, together with a copy of a Latin

letter she sent to the Christians of Messina by the hand of Saint Paul.

And not long afterwards—how came it to pass?—my steps were guided amid

that wilderness towards a narrow street containing the ruins of a

_palazzo_ that bore, on a tablet over the ample doorway, an inscription

which arrested my attention. It was an historical title familiar to me;

and forthwith a train of memories, slumbering in the caverns of my

mind, was ignited. Yes; there was no doubt about it: the old

“proprietor” and his nephews, he of the municipal gardens. . . .

I wondered how they had met their fate, on the chill wintry morning.

For assuredly, in that restricted space, not a soul can have escaped

alive; the wreckage, hitherto undisturbed, still covered their remains.

And, remembering the old man and his humane converse that evening under

the trees, the true meaning of the catastrophe began to disentangle

itself from accidental and superficial aspects. For I confess that the

massacre of a myriad Chinamen leaves me cool and self-possessed;

between such creatures and ourselves there is

hardly more than the frail bond of a common descent from the ape; they

are altogether too remote for our narrow world-sympathies. I would as

soon shed tears over the lost Pleiad. But these others are our

spiritual cousins; we have deep roots in this warm soil of Italy, which

brought forth a goodly tithe of what is best in our own lives, in our

arts and aspirations.

And I thought of the two nephews, their decent limbs all distorted and

mangled under a heap of foul rubbish, waiting for a brutal disinterment

and a nameless grave. This is no legitimate death, this murderous

violation of life. How inconceivably hateful is such a leave-taking,

and all that follows after! To picture a fair young body, that divine

instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now

loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, into some

common festering pit of abominations. . . . The Northern type—a mighty

bond, again; a tie of blood, this time, between our race and those

rulers of the South, whose exploits in this land of orange and myrtle

surpassed the dreamings of romance.

Strange to reflect that, without the ephemeral friendship of that

evening, Messina of to-day might have represented to my mind a mere

spectacle, the hecatomb of its inhabitants extorting little more than a

conventional sigh. So it is. The human heart has been constructed on

somewhat ungenerous lines. Moralists, if any still exist on earth, may

generalize with eloquence from the masses, but our poets have long ago

succumbed to the pathos of single happenings; the very angels of

Heaven, they say, take more joy in one sinner that repenteth than in a

hundred righteous, which, duly apprehended, is only an application of

the same illiberal principle.

A rope of bed-sheets knotted together dangled from one of the upper

windows, its end swaying in mid-air at the height of the second floor.

Many of them do, at Messina: a desperate expedient of escape. Some pots

of geranium and cactus, sadly flowering, adorned the other windows,

whose glass panes were unbroken. But for the ominous sunlight pouring

through them from _within,_ the building looked fairly intact on this

outer side. Its ponderous gateway, however, through which I had hoped

to enter, was choked up by internal debris, and I was obliged to climb,

with some little trouble, to the rear of the house.

If a titanic blade had sheared through the _palazzo_ lengthwise, the

thing could not have been done more neatly. The whole interior had gone

down, save a portion of the rooms abutting on the street-front; these

were literally cut in half, so as to display an ideal section of

domestic architecture. The house with its inmates and

all it contained was lying among the high-piled wreckage within, under

my feet; masonry mostly—entire fragments of wall interspersed with

crumbling mortar and convulsed iron girders that writhed over the

surface or plunged sullenly into the depths; fetid rents and gullies in

between, their flanks affording glimpses of broken vases, candelabras,

hats, bottles, birdcages, writing-books, brass pipes, sofas,

picture-frames, tablecloths, and all the paltry paraphernalia of

everyday life. No attempt at stratification, horizontal, vertical, or

inclined; it was as if the objects had been thrown up by some playful

volcano and allowed to settle where they pleased. Two immense chiselled

blocks of stone—one lying prone at the bottom of a miniature ravine,

the other proudly erect, like a Druidical monument, in the upper

regions—reminded me of the existence of a staircase, a _diabolical_

staircase.

Looking upwards, I endeavoured to reconstruct the habits of the

inmates, but found it impossible, the section that remained being too

shallow. Sky-blue seems to have been their favourite colour. The

kitchen was easily discernible, the hearth with its store of charcoal

underneath, copper vessels hanging in a neat row overhead, and an open

cupboard full of household goods; a neighbouring room (the

communicating doors were all gone), with lace window-curtains, a table,

lamp, and book, and a bedstead toppling over the abyss; another one,

carpeted and hung with pictures and a large faded mirror, below which

ran a row of shelves that groaned under a multitudinous collection of

phials and bottles.

The old man’s embrocations. . . .

XXX

THE SKIRTS OF MONTALTO

After such sights of suffering humanity—back to the fields and

mountains!

Aspromonte, the wild region behind Reggio, was famous, not long ago,

for Garibaldi’s battle. But the exploits of this warrior have lately

been eclipsed by those of the brigand Musolino, who infested the

country up to a few years ago, defying the soldiery and police of all

Italy. He would still be safe and unharmed had he remained in these

fastnesses. But he wandered away, wishful to leave Italy for good and

all, and was captured far from his home by some policemen who were

looking for another man, and who nearly fainted when he pronounced his

name. After a sensational trial, they sentenced him to thirty odd

years’ imprisonment; he is now languishing in the fortress of Porto

Longone on Elba. Whoever has looked into this Spanish citadel will not

envy him. Of the lovely little bay, of the loadstone mountain, of the

romantic pathway to the hermitage of Monserrato or the glittering beach

at Rio—of all the charms of Porto Longone he knows nothing, despite a

lengthy residence on the spot.

They say he has grown consumptive and witless during the long solitary

confinement which preceded his present punishment—an eternal night in a

narrow cell. No wonder. I have seen the condemned on their release from

these boxes of masonry at the island of Santo Stefano: dazed shadows,

tottering, with complexions the colour of parchment. These are the

survivors. But no one asks after the many who die in these dungeons

frenzied, or from battering their heads against the wall; no one knows

their number save the doctor and the governor, whose lips are sealed. .

. .

I decided upon a rear attack of Aspromonte. I would go by rail as far

as Bagnara on the Tyrrhenian, the station beyond Scylla of old renown;

and thence afoot via Sant’ Eufemia[1] to Sinopoli, pushing on, if day

permitted, as far as Delianuova, at the foot of

the mountain. Early next morning I would climb the summit and descend

to the shores of the Ionian, to Bova. It seemed a reasonable programme.

[1] Not to be confounded with the railway station on the gulf of that

name, near Maida.

All this Tyrrhenian coast-line is badly shattered; far more so than the

southern shore. But the scenery is finer. There is nothing on that side

to compare with the views from Nicastro, or Monteleone, or Sant’ Elia

near Palmi. It is also more smiling, more fertile, and far less

malarious. Not that cultivation of the land implies absence of

malaria—nothing is a commoner mistake! The Ionian shore is not

malarious because it is desert—it is desert because malarious. The

richest tracts in Greece are known to be very dangerous, and it is the

same in Italy. Malaria and intensive agriculture go uncommonly well

together. The miserable anopheles-mosquito loves the wells that are

sunk for the watering of the immense orange and lemon plantations in

the Reggio district; it displays a perverse predilection for the minute

puddles left by the artificial irrigation of the fields that are

covered with fruit and vegetables. This artificial watering, in fact,

seems to be partly responsible for the spread of the disease. It is

doubtful whether the custom goes back into remote antiquity, for the

climate used to be moister and could dispense with these practices.

Certain products, once grown in Calabria, no longer thrive there, on

account of the increased dryness and lack of rainfall.

But there are some deadly regions, even along this Tyrrhenian shore.

Such is the plain of Maida, for instance, where stood not long ago the

forest of Sant’ Eufemia, safe retreat of Parafante and other brigand

heroes. The level lands of Rosarno and Gioia are equally ill-reputed. A

French battalion stationed here in the summer of 1807 lost over sixty

men in fourteen days, besides leaving two hundred invalids in the

hospital at Monteleone. Gioia is so malarious that in summer every one

of the inhabitants who can afford the price of a ticket goes by the

evening train to Palmi, to sleep there. You will do well, by the way,

to see something of the oil industry of Palmi, if time permits. In good

years, 200,000 quintals of olive oil are manufactured in the regions of

which it is the commercial centre. Not long ago, before modern methods

of refining were introduced, most of this oil was exported to Russia,

to be burned in holy lamps; nowadays it goes for the most part to

Lucca, to be adulterated for foreign markets (the celebrated Lucca oil,

which the simple Englishman regards as pure); only the finest quality

is sent elsewhere, to Nice. From Gioia there runs a postal diligence

once a day to Delianuova of which I might have availed myself, had I

not preferred to traverse the country on foot.

The journey from Reggio to Bagnara on this fair summer morning, along

the rippling Mediterranean, was short enough, but sufficiently long to

let me overhear the following conversation:

A.—What a lovely sea! It is good, after all, to take three or four

baths a year. What think you?

B.—I? No. For thirteen years I have taken no baths. But they are

considered good for children.

The calamities that Bagnara has suffered in the past have been so

numerous, so fierce and so varied that, properly speaking, the town has

no right to exist any longer. It has enjoyed more than its full share

of earthquakes, having been shaken to the ground over and over again.

Sir William Hamilton reports that 3017 persons were killed in that of

1783. The horrors of war, too, have not spared it, and a certain modern

exploit of the British arms here strikes me as so instructive that I

would gladly extract it from Grant’s “Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp,”

were it not too long to transcribe, and far too good to abbreviate.

A characteristic story, further, is told of the methods of General

Manhes at Bagnara. It may well be an exaggeration when they say that

the entire road from Reggio to Naples was lined with the heads of

decapitated brigands; be that as it may, it stands to reason that

Bagnara, as befits an important place, was to be provided with an

appropriate display of these trophies. The heads were exhibited in

baskets, with strict injunctions to the authorities that they were not

to be touched, seeing that they served not only for decorative but also

moral purposes—as examples. Imagine, therefore, the General’s feelings

on being told that one of these heads had been stolen; stolen,

probably, by some pious relative of the deceased rascal, who wished to

give the relic a decent Christian burial.

“That’s rather awkward,” he said, quietly musing. “But of course the

specimen must be replaced. Let me see. . . . Suppose we put the head of

the mayor of Bagnara into the vacant basket? Shall we? Yes, we’ll have

the mayor. It will make him more careful in future.” And within half an

hour the basket was filled once more.

There was a little hitch in starting from Bagnara. From the windings of

the carriage-road as portrayed by the map, I guessed that there must be

a number of short cuts into the uplands at the back of the town,

undiscoverable to myself, which would greatly shorten the journey.

Besides, there was my small bag to be carried. A porter familiar with

the tracks was plainly required, and soon enough I found a number of

lusty youths leaning against a wall and

doing nothing in particular. Yes, they would accompany me, they said,

the whole lot of them, just for the fun of the thing.

“And my bag?” I asked.

“A bag to be carried? Then we must get a woman.”

They unearthed a nondescript female who undertook to bear the burden as

far as Sinopoli for a reasonable consideration. So far good. But as we

proceeded, the boys began to drop off, till only a single one was left.

And then the woman suddenly vanished down a side street, declaring that

she must change her clothes. We waited for three-quarters of an hour,

in the glaring dust of the turnpike; she never emerged again, and the

remaining boy stoutly refused to handle her load.

“No,” he declared. “She must carry the bag. And I will keep you

company.”

The precious morning hours were wearing away, and here we stood idly by

the side of the road. It never struck me that the time might have been

profitably employed in paying a flying visit to one of the most sacred

objects in Calabria and possibly in the whole world, one which Signor

N. Marcone describes as reposing at Bagnara in a rich reliquary—the

authentic Hat of the Mother of God. A lady tourist would not have

missed this chance of studying the fashions of those days.[2]

[2] See next chapter.

Finally, in desperation, I snatched up the wretched luggage and poured

my griefs with unwonted eloquence into the ears of a man driving a

bullock-cart down the road. So much was he moved, that he peremptorily

ordered his son to conduct me then and there to Sinopoli, to carry the

bag, and claim one franc by way of payment. The little man tumbled off

the cart, rather reluctantly.

“Away with you!” cried the stern parent, and we began the long march,

climbing uphill in the blazing sunshine; winding, later on, through

shady chestnut woods and across broad tracts of cultivated land. It was

plain that the task was beyond his powers, and when we had reached a

spot where the strange-looking new village of Sant’ Eufemia was

visible—it is built entirely of wooden shelters; the stone town was

greatly shaken in the late earthquake—he was obliged to halt, and

thenceforward stumbled slowly into the place. There he deposited the

bag on the ground, and faced me squarely.

“No more of this!” he said, concentrating every ounce of his virility

into a look of uncompromising defiance.

“Then I shall not pay you a single farthing, my son. And,

moreover, I will tell your father. You know what he commanded: to

Sinopoli. This is only Sant’ Eufemia. Unless——”

“You will tell my father? Unless——?”

“Unless you discover some one who will carry the bag not only to

Sinopoli, but as far as Delianuova.” I was not in the mood for

repeating the experiences of the morning.

“It is difficult. But we will try.”

He went in search, and returned anon with a slender lad of unusual

comeliness—an earthquake orphan. “This big one,” he explained, “walks

wherever you please and carries whatever you give him. And you will pay

him nothing at all, unless he deserves it. Such is the arrangement. Are

you content?”

“You have acted like a man.”

The earthquake survivor set off at a swinging pace, and we soon reached

Sinopoli—new Sinopoli; the older settlement lies at a considerable

distance. Midday was past, and the long main street of the town—a

former fief of the terrible Ruffo family—stood deserted in the

trembling heat. None the less there was sufficient liveliness within

the houses; the whole place seemed in a state of jollification. It was

Sunday, the orphan explained; the country was duller than usual,

however, because of the high price of wine. There had been no murders

to speak of—no, not for a long time past. But the vintage of this year,

he added, promises well, and life will soon become normal again.

The mule track from here to Delianuova traverses some pretty scenery,

both wild and pastoral. But the personal graces of my companion made me

take small heed of the landscape. He was aglow with animal spirits, and

his conversation naively brilliant and of uncommon import.

Understanding at a glance that he belonged to a type which is rather

rare in Calabria, that he was a classic (of a kind), I made every

effort to be pleasant to him; and I must have succeeded, for he was

soon relating anecdotes which would have been neither instructive, nor

even intelligible, to the _jeune fille;_ all this, with angelic

serenity of conscience.

This radiantly-vicious child was the embodiment of the joy of life, the

perfect immoralist. There was no cynicism in his nature, no cruelty, no

obliquity, no remorse; nothing but sunshine with a few clouds sailing

across the fathomless blue spaces—the sky of Hellas. _Nihil humani

alienum;_ and as I listened to those glad tales, I marvelled at the

many-tinted experiences that could be crammed into seventeen short

years; what a document the adventures of such a frolicsome demon would

be, what a feast for the initiated, could some one be induced to make

them known! But

such things are hopelessly out of the question. And that is why so many

of our wise people go into their graves without ever learning what

happens in this world.

Among minor matters, he mentioned that he had already been three times

to prison for “certain little affairs of blood,” while defending

“certain friends.” Was it not dull, I asked, in prison? “The time

passes pleasantly anywhere,” he answered, “when you are young. I always

make friends, even in prison.” I could well believe it. His affinities

were with the blithe crew of the Liber Stratonis. He had a roving eye

and the mouth of Antinous; and his morals were those of a condescending

tiger-cub.

Arriving at Delianuova after sunset, he conceived the project of

accompanying me next morning up Montalto. I hesitated. In the first

place, I was going not only up that mountain, but to Bova on the

distant Ionian littoral——

“For my part,” he broke in, “_ho pigliato confidenza._ If you mistrust

me, here! take my knife,” an ugly blade, pointed, and two inches in

excess of the police regulation length. This act of quasi-filial

submission touched me; but it was not his knife I feared so much as

that of “certain friends.” Some little difference of opinion might

arise, some question of money or other argument, and lo! the friends

would be at hand (they always are), and one more stranger might

disappear among the clefts and gullies of Montalto. Aspromonte, the

roughest corner of Italy, is no place for misunderstandings; the knife

decides promptly who is right or wrong, and only two weeks ago I was

warned not to cross the district without a carbineer on either side of

me.

But to have clothed my thoughts in words during his gracious mood would

have been supremely unethical. I contented myself with the trite but

pregnant remark that things sometimes looked different in the morning,

which provoked a pagan fit of laughter; farewelled him “with the

Madonna!” and watched as he withdrew under the trees, lithe and

buoyant, like a flame that is swallowed up in the night.

Only then did the real business begin. I should be sorry to say into

how many houses and wine-shops the obliging owner of the local inn

conducted me, in search of a guide. We traversed all the lanes of this

straggling and fairly prosperous place, and even those of its suburb

Paracorio, evidently of Byzantine origin; the answer was everywhere the

same: To Montalto, yes; to Bova, no! Night drew on apace and, as a last

resource, he led the way to the dwelling of a gentleman of the old

school—a retired brigand, to wit, who, as I afterwards learned, had

some ten or twelve homicides

to his account. Delianuova, and indeed the whole of Aspromonte, has a

bad reputation for crime.

It was our last remaining chance.

We found the patriarch sitting in a simple but tidy chamber, smoking

his pipe and playing with a baby; his daughter-in-law rose as we

entered, and discreetly moved into an adjoining room. The cheery

cut-throat put the baby down to crawl on the floor, and his eyes

sparkled when he heard of Bova.

“Ah, one speaks of Bova!” he said. “A fine walk over the mountain!” He

much regretted that he was too old for the trip, but so-and-so, he

thought, might know something of the country. It pained him, too, that

he could not offer me a glass of wine. There was none in the house. In

his day, he added, it was not thought right to drink in the modern

fashion; this wine-bibbing was responsible for considerable mischief;

it troubled the brain, driving men to do things they afterwards

repented. He drank only milk, having become accustomed to it during a

long life among the hills. Milk cools the blood, he said, and steadies

the hand, and keeps a man’s judgment undisturbed.

The person he had named was found after some further search. He was a

bronzed, clean-shaven type of about fifty, who began by refusing his

services point-blank, but soon relented, on hearing the ex-brigand’s

recommendation of his qualities.

XXXI

SOUTHERN SAINTLINESS

Southern saints, like their worshippers, put on new faces and vestments

in the course of ages. Old ones die away; new ones take their place.

Several hundred of the older class of saint have clean faded from the

popular memory, and are now so forgotten that the wisest priest can

tell you nothing about them save, perhaps, that “he’s in the

church”—meaning, that some fragment of his holy anatomy survives as a

relic amid a collection of similar antiques. But you can find their

histories in early literature, and their names linger on old maps where

they are given to promontories and other natural features which are

gradually being re-christened.

Such saints were chiefly non-Italian: Byzantines or Africans who, by

miraculous intervention, protected the village or district of which

they were patrons from the manifold scourges of mediævalism; they took

the place of the classic tutelar deities. They were men; they could

fight; and in those troublous times that is exactly what saints were

made for.

With the softening of manners a new element appears. Male saints lost

their chief _raison d’être,_ and these virile creatures were superseded

by pacific women. So, to give only one instance, Saint Rosalia in

Palermo displaced the former protector Saint Mark. Her sacred bones

were miraculously discovered in a cave; and have since been identified

as those of a goat. But it was not till the twelfth century that the

cult of female saints began to assume imposing dimensions.

Of the Madonna no mention occurs in the songs of Bishop Paulinus

(fourth century); no monument exists in the Neapolitan catacombs.

Thereafter her cult begins to dominate.

She supplied the natives with what orthodox Christianity did not give

them, but what they had possessed from early times—a female element in

religion. Those Greek settlers had their nymphs, their Venus, and so

forth; the Mother of God absorbed and continued their functions. There

is indeed only one of these female pagan divinities whose role she has

not endeavoured to

usurp—Athene. Herein she reflects the minds of her creators, the

priests and common people, whose ideal woman contents herself with the

duties of motherhood. I doubt whether an Athene-Madonna, an

intellectual goddess, could ever have been evolved; their attitude

towards gods in general is too childlike and positive.

South Italians, famous for abstractions in philosophy, cannot endure

them in religion. Unlike ourselves, they do not desire to learn

anything from their deities or to argue about them. They only wish to

love and be loved in return, reserving to themselves the right to

punish them, when they deserve it. Countless cases are on record where

(pictures or statues of) Madonnas and saints have been thrown into a

ditch for not doing what they were told, or for not keeping their share

of a bargain. During the Vesuvius eruption of 1906 a good number were

subjected to this “punishment,” because they neglected to protect their

worshippers from the calamity according to contract (so many candles

and festivals = so much protection).

For the same reason the adult Jesus—the teacher, the God—is practically

unknown. He is too remote from themselves and the ordinary activities

of their daily lives; he is not married, like his mother; he has no

trade, like his father (Mark calls him a carpenter); moreover, the

maxims of the Sermon on the Mount are so repugnant to the South Italian

as to be almost incomprehensible. In effigy, this period of Christ’s

life is portrayed most frequently in the primitive monuments of the

catacombs, erected when tradition was purer.

Three tangibly-human aspects of Christ’s life figure here: the

_bambino-cult,_ which not only appeals to the people’s love of babyhood

but also carries on the old traditions of the Lar Familiaris and of

Horus; next, the youthful Jesus, beloved of local female mystics; and

lastly the Crucified—that grim and gloomy image of suffering which was

imported, or at least furiously fostered, by the Spaniards.

The engulfing of the saints by the Mother of God is due also to

political reasons. The Vatican, once centralized in its policy, began

to be disquieted by the persistent survival of Byzantinism (Greek cults

and language lingered up to the twelfth century); with the Tacitean

_odium fratrum_ she exercised more severity towards the sister-faith

than towards actual paganism.[1] The Madonna was a fit instrument for

sweeping away the particularist tendencies of the

past; she attacked relic-worship and other outworn superstitions; like

a benignant whirlwind she careered over the land, and these now

enigmatical shapes and customs fell faster than leaves of Vallombrosa.

No sanctuary or cave so remote that she did not endeavour to expel its

male saint—its old presiding genius, whether Byzantine or Roman. But

saints have tough lives, and do not yield without a struggle; they

fought for their time-honoured privileges like the “daemons” they were,

and sometimes came off victorious. Those sanctuaries that proved too

strong to be taken by storm were sapped by an artful and determined

siege. The combat goes on to this day. This is what is happening to the

thrice-deposed and still triumphant Saint Januarius, who is hard

pressed by sheer force of numbers. Like those phagocytes which

congregate from all sides to assail some weakened cell in the body

physical, even so Madonna-cults—in frenzied competition with each

other—cluster thickest round some imperilled venerable of ancient

lineage, bent on his destruction. The Madonna dell’ Arco, del Soccorso,

and at least fifty others (not forgetting the newly-invented Madonna di

Pompei)—they have all established themselves in the particular domain

of St. Januarius; they are all undermining his reputation, and claiming

to possess his special gifts.[2]

[1] Greek and Egyptian anchorites were established in south Italy by

the fourth century. But paganism was still flourishing, locally, in

the sixth. There is some evidence that Christians used to take part in

pagan festivals.

[2] He is known to have quelled an outbreak of Vesuvius in the fifth

century, though his earliest church, I believe, only dates from the

ninth. His blood, famous for liquefaction, is not mentioned till 1337.

Early monastic movements of the Roman Church also played their part in

obliterating old religious landmarks. Settling down in some remote

place with the Madonna as their leader or as their “second Mother,”

these companies of holy men soon acquired such temporal and spiritual

influence as enabled them successfully to oppose their divinity to the

local saint, whose once bright glories began to pale before her

effulgence. Their labours in favour of the Mother of God were part of

that work of consolidating Papal power which was afterwards carried on

by the Jesuits.

Perhaps what chiefly accounts for the spread of Madonna-worship is the

human craving for novelty. You can invent most easily where no fixed

legends are established. Now the saints have fixed legendary attributes

and histories, and as culture advances it becomes increasingly

difficult to manufacture new saints with fresh and original characters

and yet passable pedigrees (the experiment is tried, now and again);

while the old saints have been exploited and are now inefficient—worn

out, like old toys. Madonna, on the other hand, can subdivide with the

ease of an amoeba, and yet never lose her identity or credibility;

moreover, thanks to her divine

character, anything can be accredited to her—anything good, however

wonderful; lastly, the traditions concerning her are so conveniently

vague that they actually foster the mythopoetic faculty. Hence her

success. Again: the man-saints were separatists; they fought for their

own towns against African intruders, and in those frequent and bloody

inter-communal battles which are a feature of Italian mediævalism.

Nowadays it is hardly proper that neighbouring townsmen, aided and

abetted by their respective saints, should sally forth to cut each

others’ throats. The Madonna, as cosmopolitan Nike, is a fitter

patroness for settled society.

She also found a ready welcome in consequence of the pastoral

institutions of the country in which the mother plays such a

conspicuous role. So deeply are they ingrained here that if the Mother

of God had not existed, the group would have been deemed incomplete; a

family without a mother is to them like a tree without roots—a thing

which cannot be. This accounts for the fact that their Trinity is not

ours; it consists of the Mother, the Father (Saint Joseph), and the

Child—with Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an

important personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all

things and the Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible and

non-human.

But She never became a true cosmopolitan Nike, save in literature. The

decentralizing spirit of South Italy was too strong for her. She had to

conform to the old custom of geographical specialization. In all save

in name she doffed her essential character of Mother of God, and became

a local demi-god; an accessible wonder-worker attached to some

particular district. An inhabitant of village A would stand a poor

chance of his prayers being heard by the Madonna of village B; if you

have a headache, it is no use applying to the _Madonna of the Hens,_

who deals with diseases of women; you will find yourself in a pretty

fix if you expect financial assistance from the Madonna of village C:

she is a weather-specialist. In short, these hundreds of Madonnas have

taken up the qualities of the saints they supplanted.

They can often outdo them; and this is yet another reason for their

success. It is a well-ascertained fact, for example, that many holy men

have been nourished by the Milk of the Mother of God, “not,” as a

Catholic writer says, “in a mystic or spiritual sense, but with their

actual lips”; Saint Bernard “among a hundred, a thousand, others.” Nor

is this all, for in the year 1690, a painted image of the Madonna, not

far from the city of Carinola, was observed to “diffuse abundant milk”

for the edification of a great concourse of spectators—a miracle which

was recognized as such by

the bishop of that diocese, Monsignor Paolo Ayrola, who wrote a report

on the subject. Some more of this authentic milk is kept in a bottle in

the convent of Mater Domini on Vesuvius, and the chronicle of that

establishment, printed in 1834, says:

“Since Mary is the Mother and Co-redeemer of the Church, may she not

have left some drops of her precious milk as a gift to this Church,

even as we still possess some of the blood of Christ? In various

churches there exists some of this milk, by means of which many graces

and benefits are obtained. We find such relics, for example, in the

church of Saint Luigi in Naples, namely, two bottles full of the milk

of the Blessed Virgin; and this milk becomes fluid on feast-days of the

Madonna, as everybody can see. Also in this convent of Mater Domini the

milk sometimes liquefies.” During eruptions of Vesuvius this bottle is

carried abroad in procession, and always dispels the danger. Saint

Januarius must indeed look to his laurels! Meanwhile it is interesting

to observe that the Mother of God has condescended to employ the method

of holy relics which she once combated so strenuously, her milk

competing with the blood of Saint John, the fat of Saint Laurence, and

those other physiological curios which are still preserved for the

edification of believers.

All of which would pass if a subtle poison had not been creeping in to

taint religious institutions. Taken by themselves, these infantile

observances do not necessarily harm family life, the support of the

state; for a man can believe a considerable deal of nonsense, and yet

go about his daily work in a natural and cheerful manner. But when the

body is despised and tormented the mind loses its equilibrium, and when

that happens nonsense may assume a sinister shape. We have seen it in

England, where, during the ascetic movement of Puritanism, more witches

were burnt than in the whole period before and after.

The virus of asceticism entered South Italy from three principal

sources. From early ages the country had stood in commercial relations

with the valley of the Nile; and even as its black magic is largely

tinged with Egyptian practices, so its magic of the white kind—its

saintly legends—bear the impress of the self-macerations and perverted

life-theories of those desert-lunatics who called themselves

Christians.[3] But this Orientalism fell at first upon

unfruitful soil; the Vatican was yet wavering, and Hellenic notions of

conduct still survived. It received a further rebuff at the hands of

men like Benedict, who set up sounder ideals of holiness, introducing a

gleam of sanity even in that insanest of institutions—the herding

together of idle men to the glory of God.

[3] These ascetics were here before Christianity (see Philo Judaeus);

in fact, there is not a single element in the new faith which had not

been independently developed by the pagans, many of whom, like Seneca,

Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, were ripe for the most abject

self-abasement.

But things became more centralized as the Papacy gained ground. The

strong Christian, the independent ruler or warrior or builder saint,

was tolerated only if he conformed to its precepts; and the

inauspicious rise of subservient ascetic orders like the Franciscans

and Dominicans, who quickly invaded the fair regions of the south, gave

an evil tone to their Christianity.

There has always been a contrary tendency at work: the Ionic spirit,

heritage of the past. Monkish ideals of chastity and poverty have never

appealed to the hearts of people, priests or prelates of the south;

they will endure much fondness in their religion, but not those

phenomena of cruelty and pruriency which are inseparably connected with

asceticism; their notions have ever been akin to those of the sage

Xenocrates, who held that “happiness consists not only in the

possession of human virtues, but _in the accomplishment of natural

acts.”_ Among the latter they include the acquisition of wealth and the

satisfaction of carnal needs. At this time, too, the old Hellenic

curiosity was not wholly dimmed; they took an intelligent interest in

imported creeds like that of Luther, which, if not convincing, at least

satisfied their desire for novelty. Theirs was exactly the attitude of

the Athenians towards Paul’s “New God”; and Protestantism might have

spread far in the south, had it not been ferociously repressed.

But after the brilliant humanistic period of the Aragons there followed

the third and fiercest reaction—that of the Spanish viceroys, whose

misrule struck at every one of the roots of national prosperity. It is

that “seicentismo” which a modern writer (A. Niceforo, “L’Italia

barbara,” 1898) has recognized as the blight, the evil genius, of south

Italy. The Ionic spirit did not help the people much at this time. The

greatest of these viceroys, Don Pietro di Toledo, hanged 18,000 of them

in eight years, and then confessed, with a sigh, that “he did not know

what more he could do.” What more _could_ he do? As a pious Spaniard he

was incapable of understanding that quarterings and breakings on the

rack were of less avail than the education of the populace in certain

secular notions of good conduct—notions which it was the business of

his Church not to teach. Reading through the legislation of the

viceregal period, one is astonished to find how little was done for the

common people, who lived like the veriest beasts of earth.

Their civil rulers—scholars and gentlemen, most of them—really believed

that the example of half a million illiterate and vicious monks was all

the education they needed. And yet one notes with surprise that the

Government was perpetually at loggerheads with the ecclesiastical

authorities. True; but it is wonderful with what intuitive alacrity

they joined forces when it was a question of repelling their common

antagonist, enlightenment.

From this rank soil there sprang up an exotic efflorescence of

holiness. If south Italy swarmed with sinners, as the experiences of

Don Pietro seemed to show, it also swarmed with saints. And hardly one

of them escaped the influence of the period, the love of futile

ornamentation. Their piety is overloaded with embellishing touches and

needless excrescences of virtue. It was the baroque period of

saintliness, as of architecture.

I have already given some account of one of them, the Flying Monk

(Chapter X), and have perused the biographies of at least fifty others.

One cannot help observing a great uniformity in their lives—a kind of

family resemblance. This parallelism is due to the simple reason that

there is only one right for a thousand wrongs. One may well look in

vain, here, for those many-tinted perversions and aberrations which

disfigure the histories of average mankind. These saints are all

alike—monotonously alike, if one cares to say so—in their chastity and

other official virtues. But a little acquaintance with the subject will

soon show you that, so far as the range of their particular

Christianity allowed of it, there is a praiseworthy and even

astonishing diversity among them. Nearly all of them could fly, more or

less; nearly all of them could cure diseases and cause the clouds to

rain; nearly all of them were illiterate; and every one of them died in

the odour of sanctity—with roseate complexion, sweetly smelling corpse,

and flexible limbs. Yet each one has his particular gifts, his strong

point. Joseph of Copertino specialized in flying; others were

conspicuous for their heroism in sitting in hot baths, devouring

ordure, tormenting themselves with pins, and so forth.

Here, for instance, is a good representative biography—the Life of

Saint Giangiuseppe della Croce (born 1654), reprinted for the occasion

of his solemn sanctification.[4]

[4] “Vita di S. Giangiuseppe della Croce . . . Scritta dal P. Fr.

Diodato dell’ Assunta per la Beatificazione ed ora ristampata dal

postulatore della causa P. Fr. Giuseppe Rostoll in occasione della

solenne Santificazione.” Roma, 1839.

He resembled other saints in many points. He never allowed the “vermin

which generated in his bed” to be disturbed; he wore the same clothes

for sixty-four years on end; with women his

behaviour was that of an “animated statue,” and during his long life he

never looked any one in the face (even his brother-monks were known to

him only by their voices); he could raise the dead, relieve a duchess

of a devil in the shape of a black dog, change chestnuts into apricots,

and bad wine into good; his flesh was encrusted with sores, the result

of his fierce scarifications; he was always half starved, and when

delicate viands were brought to him, he used to say to his body: “Have

you seen them? Have you smelt them? Then let that suffice for you.”

He, too, could fly a little. So once, when he was nowhere to be found,

the monks of the convent at last discovered him in the church, “raised

so high above the ground that his head touched the ceiling.” This is

not a bad performance for a mere lad, as he then was. And how useful

this gift became in old age was seen when, being almost incapable of

moving his legs, and with body half paralysed, he was nevertheless

enabled to accompany a procession for the length of two miles on foot,

walking, to the stupefaction of thousands of spectators, at about a

cubit’s height above the street, on air; after the fashion of those

Hindu gods whose feet—so the pagans fable—are too pure to touch mortal

earth.

His love of poverty, moreover, was so intense that even after his death

a picture of him, which his relatives had tried to attach to the wall

in loving remembrance, repeatedly fell down again, although nailed very

securely; nor did it remain fixed until they realized that its costly

gilt frame was objectionable to the saint in heaven, and accordingly

removed it. No wonder the infant Jesus was pleased to descend from the

breast of Mary and take rest for several hours in the arms of Saint

Giangiuseppe, who, on being disturbed by some priestly visitor,

exclaimed, “O how I have enjoyed holding the Holy Babe in my arms!”

This is an old and favourite motif; it occurs, for example, in the

Fioretti of Saint Francis; there are precedents, in fact, for all these

divine favours.

But his distinguishing feature, his “dominating gift,” was that of

prophecy, especially in foretelling the deaths of children, “which he

almost always accompanied with jocular words _(scherzi)_ on his lips.”

He would enter a house and genially remark: “O, what an odour of

Paradise”; sooner or later one or more of the children of the family

would perish. To a boy of twelve he said, “Be good, Natale, for the

angels are coming to take you.” These playful words seem to have

weighed considerably on the boy’s mind and, sure enough, after a few

years he died. But even more charming—_più grazioso,_ the biographer

calls it—was the

incident when he once asked a father whether he would give his son to

Saint Pasquale. The fond parent agreed, thinking that the words

referred to the boy’s future career in the Church. But the saint meant

something quite different—he meant a career in heaven! And in less than

a month the child died. To a little girl who was crying in the street

he said: “I don’t want to hear you any more. Go and sing in Paradise.”

And meeting her a short time after, he said, “What, are you still

here?” In a few days she was dead.

The biography gives many instances of this pretty gift which would

hardly have contributed to the saint’s popularity in England or any

other country save this, where—although the surviving youngsters are

described as “struck with terror at the mere name of the Servant of

God”—the parents were naturally glad to have one or two angels in the

family, to act as _avvocati_ (pleaders) for those that remained on

earth.

And the mention of the legal profession brings me to one really

instructive miracle. It is usually to be observed, after a saint has

been canonized, that heaven, by some further sign or signs, signifies

approval of this solemn act of the Vicar of God; indeed, to judge by

these biographies, such a course is not only customary but, to use a

worldly expression, _de rigueur._ And so it happened after the decree

relative to Saint Giangiuseppe had been pronounced in the Vatican

basilica by His Holiness Pius VI, in the presence of the assembled

cardinals. Innumerable celestial portents (their enumeration fills

eleven pages of the “Life”) confirmed and ratified the great event, and

among them this: the notary, who had drawn up both the ordinary and the

apostolic _processi,_ was cured of a grievous apoplexy, survived for

four years, and finally died on the very anniversary of the death of

the saint. Involuntarily one contrasts this heavenly largesse with the

sordid guineas which would have contented an English lawyer. . . .

Or glance into the biography of the Venerable Sister Orsola Benincasa.

She, too, could fly a little and raise men from the dead. She cured

diseases, foretold her own death and that of others, lived for a month

on the sole nourishment of a consecrated wafer; she could speak Latin

and Polish, although she had been taught nothing at all; wrought

miracles after death, and possessed to a heroic degree the virtues of

patience, humility, temperance, justice, etc. etc. So inflamed was she

with divine love, that almost every day thick steam issued out of her

mouth, which was observed to be destructive to articles of clothing;

her heated body, when ice was applied, used to hiss like a red-hot iron

under similar conditions.

As a child, she already cried for other people’s sins; she was always

hunting for her own and would gladly, at the end of her long and

blameless career, have exchanged her sins for those of the youthful

Duchess of Aquaro. An interesting phenomenon, by the way, the theory of

sinfulness which crops up at this particular period of history. For our

conception of sin is alien to the Latin mind. There is no “sin” in

Italy (and this is not the least of her many attractions); it is an

article manufactured exclusively for export.[5]

[5] “Vita della Venerabile Serva di Dio Suor Orsola Benincasa, Scritta

da un cherico regolare,” Rome, 1796. There are, of course, much

earlier biographies of all these saints; concerning Sister Orsola we

possess, for instance, the remarkable pamphlet by Cesare d’Eboli

(“Caesaris Aevoli Neapolitani Apologia pro Ursula Neapolitana quæ ad

urbem accessit MDLXXXIII,” Venice, 1589), which achieves the

distinction of never mentioning Orsola by name: she is only once

referred to as “mulier de qua agitur.” But I prefer to quote from the

more recent ones because they are authoritative, in so far as they

have been written on the basis of miracles attested by eye-witnesses

and accepted as veracious by the Vatican tribunal. Sister Orsola,

though born in 1547, was only declared Venerable by Pontifical decree

of 1793. Biographies prior to that date are therefore ex-parte

statements and might conceivably contain errors of fact. This is out

of the question here, as is clearly shown by the author on p. 178.

Orsola’s speciality, however, were those frequent trance-like

conditions by reason of which, during her lifetime, she was created

“Protectress of the City of Naples.” I cannot tell whether she was the

first woman-saint to obtain this honour. Certainly the “Seven Holy

Protectors” concerning whom Paolo Regio writes were all musty old

males. . . .

And here is quite another biography, that of Alfonso di Liguori (born

1696), the founder of the Redemptorist order and a canonized saint. He,

too, could fly a little and raise the dead to life; he suffered

devil-temptations, caused the clouds to rain, calmed an eruption of

Vesuvius, multiplied food, and so forth. Such was his bashfulness, that

even as an aged bishop he refused to be unrobed by his attendants; such

his instinct for moral cleanliness that once, when a messenger had

alighted at his convent accompanied by a soldier, he instantly

detected, under the military disguise, the lineaments of a young

woman-friend. Despite these divine gifts, he always needed a confessor.

An enormous batch of miracles accompanied his sanctification.

But he only employed these divine graces by the way; he was by

profession not a _taumaturgo,_ but a clerical instructor, organizer,

and writer. The Vatican has conferred on him the rare title of “Doctor

Ecclesiæ,” which he shares with Saint Augustine and some others.

The biography from which I have drawn these details was

printed in Rome in 1839. It is valuable because it is modern and so far

authentic; and for two other reasons. In the first place, curiously

enough, it barely mentions the saint’s life-work—his writings.

Secondly, it is a good example of what I call the pious palimpsest. It

is over-scored with contradictory matter. The author, for example,

while accidentally informing us that Alfonso kept a carriage, imputes

to him a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments, in

order (I presume) to make his character conform to the grosser ideals

of the mendicant friars. I do not believe in these traits—in his hatred

of soap and clean apparel. From his works I deduce a different

original. He was refined and urbane; of a casuistical and prying

disposition; like many sensitive men, unduly preoccupied with the

sexual life of youth; like a true feudal aristocrat, ever ready to

apply force where verbal admonition proved unavailing. . . .

In wonder-working capacities these saints were all put in the shade by

the Calabrian Francesco di Paola, who raised fifteen persons from the

dead in his boyhood. He used to perform a hundred miracles a day, and

“it was a miracle, when a day passed without a miracle.” The index

alone of any one of his numerous biographies is enough to make one’s

head swim.

The vast majority of saints of this period do not belong to that third

sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the

constructive and purposeful third sex. They are wholly sexless,

unsocial and futile beings, the negation of every masculine or feminine

virtue. Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican

and of their particular order, these creatures had _nothing to do;_ and

like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously

introspective. Those honourable saintly combats of the past with

external enemies and plagues and stormy seasons were transplanted from

without into the microcosm within, taking the shape of hallucinations

and demon-temptations. They were no longer actors, but sufferers;

automata, who attained a degree of inanity which would have made their

old Byzantine prototypes burst with envy.

Yet they vary in their gifts; each one, as I have said, has his or her

strong point. Why? The reason of this diversity lies in the furious

competition between the various monastic orders of the time—in those

unedifying squabbles which led to never-ending litigation and

complaints to head-quarters in Rome. Every one of these saints, from

the first dawning of his divine talents, was surrounded by an

atmosphere of jealous hatred on the part of his

co-religionists. If one order came out with a flying wonder, another,

in frantic emulation, would introduce some new speciality to eclipse

his fame—something in the fasting line, it may be; or a female mystic

whose palpitating letters to Jesus Christ would melt all readers to

pity. The Franciscans, for instance, dissected the body of a certain

holy Margaret and discovered in her heart the symbols of the Trinity

and of the Passion. This bold and original idea would have gained them

much credit, but for the rival Dominicans, who promptly discovered, and

dissected, another saintly Margaret, whose heart contained three stones

on which were engraven portraits of the Virgin Mary.[6] So they

ceaselessly unearthed fresh saints with a view to disparaging each

other—all of them waiting for a favourable moment when the Vatican

could be successfully approached to consider their particular claims.

For it stands to reason that a Carmelite Pope would prefer a Carmelite

saint to one of the Jesuits, and so forth.

[6] These and other details will be found in the four volumes “Das

Heidentum in der romischen Kirche” (Gotha, 1889-91), by Theodor Trede,

a late Protestant parson in Naples, strongly tinged with

anti-Catholicism, but whose facts may be relied upon. Indeed, he gives

chapter and verse for them.

And over all throned the Inquisition in Rome, alert, ever-suspicious;

testing the “irregularities” of the various orders and harassing their

respective saints with Olympic impartiality.

I know that mystics such as Orsola Benincasa are supposed to have

another side to their character, an eminently practical side. It is

perfectly true—and we need not go out of England to learn it—that piety

is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly affairs. But

the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of nine-tenths

of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor and not of

the saint. Trainers of performing animals are aware how these differ in

plasticity of disposition and amenability to discipline; the spiritual

adviser, who knows his business, must be quick to detect these various

qualities in the minds of his penitents and to utilize them to the best

advantage. It is inconceivable, for instance, that the

convent-foundress Orsola was other than a neuropathic nonentity—a blind

instrument in the hands of what we should call her backers, chiefest of

whom (in Naples) were two Spanish priests, Borli and Navarro, whose

local efforts were supported, at head-quarters, by the saintly Filippo

Neri and the learned Cardinal Baronius.

This is noticeable. The earlier of these godly biographies are written

in Latin, and these are more restrained in their language; they were

composed, one imagines, for the priests and

educated classes who could dispense to a certain degree with prodigies.

But the later ones, from the viceregal period onwards, are in the

vernacular and display a marked deterioration; one must suppose that

they were printed for such of the common people as could still read (up

to a few years ago, sixty-five per cent of the populace were

analphabetic). They are pervaded by the characteristic of all

contemporary literature and art: that deliberate intention to _astound_

which originated with the poet Marino, who declared such to have been

his object and ideal. The miracles certainly do astound; they are as

_strepitosi_ (clamour-arousing) as the writers claim them to be; how

they ever came to occur must be left to the consciences of those who

swore on oath to the truth of them.

During this period the Mother of God as a local saint increased in

popularity. There was a ceaseless flow of monographs dealing with

particular Madonnas, as well as a small library on what the Germans

would doubtless call the “Madonna as a Whole.” Here is Serafino

Montorio’s “Zodiaco di Maria,” printed in 1715 on the lines of that

monster of a book by Gumppenberg. It treats of over two hundred

subspecies of Madonna worshipped in different parts of south Italy

which is divided, for these celestial purposes, into twelve regions,

according to the signs of the Zodiac. The book is dedicated by the

author to his “Sovereign Lady the _Gran Madre di Dio”_ and might, in

truth, have been written to the glory of that protean old Magna Mater

by one of Juvenal’s “tonsured herd” possessed of much industry but

little discrimination.[7] Such as it is, it reflects the crude mental

status of the Dominican order to which the author belonged. I warmly

recommend this book to all Englishmen desirous of understanding the

south. It is pure, undiluted paganism—paganism of a bad school; one

would think it marked the lowest possible ebb of Christian

spirituality. But this is by no means the case, as I shall presently

show.

[7] The Mater Dei was officially installed in the place of Magna Mater

at the Synod of Ephesus in 431.

How different, from such straightforward unreason, are the

etherealized, saccharine effusions of the “Glories of Mary,” by Alfonso

di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly

pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly

physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints and

pictures. The bearded men-saints were extinct; in the place of them

this mawkish, sub-sexual love for the Virgin developed a corresponding

type of

adorer—clean-shaven, emasculate youths, posing in ecstatic attitudes

with a nauseous feminine smirk. Rather an unpleasant sort of saint.

The unwholesome chastity-ideal, without which no holy man of the period

was “complete,” naturally left its mark upon literature, notably on

that of certain Spanish theologians. But good specimens of what I mean

may also be found in the Theologia Moralis of Liguori; the kind of

stuff, that is, which would be classed as “curious” in catalogues and

kept in a locked cupboard by the most broad-minded paterfamilias.

Reading these elucubrations of Alfonso’s, one feels that the saint has

pondered long and lovingly upon themes like _an et quando peccata sint

oscula_ or _de tactu et adspectu corporis;_ he writes with all the

authority of an expert whose richly-varied experiences in the

confessional have been amplified and irradiated by divine inspiration.

I hesitate what to call this literature, seeing that it was obviously

written to the glory of God and His Virgin Mother. The congregation of

the Index, which was severe in the matter of indecent publications and

prohibited Boccaccio’s Decameron on these grounds, hailed with approval

the appearance of such treatises composed, as they were, for the

guidance of young priests.

Cruelty (in the shape of the Inquisition) and lasciviousness (as

exemplified by such pious filth)—these are the prime fruits of that

cult of asceticism which for centuries the Government strove to impose

upon south Italy. If the people were saved, it was due to that

substratum of sanity, of Greek _sophrosyne,_ which resisted the one and

derided the other. Whoever has saturated himself with the records will

marvel not so much that the inhabitants preserved some shreds of common

sense and decent feeling, as that they survived at all—he will marvel

that the once fair kingdom was not converted into a wilderness, saintly

but uninhabited, like Spain itself.

For the movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism

culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the

closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south

Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable

number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate,

but—as often happens when the quantity is excessive—the quality

declined. This lazzaroni-period was the debâcle of holiness. So true it

is that our gods reflect the hearts that make them.

The Venerable Fra Egidio, a native of Taranto, is a good example of

contemporary godliness. My biography of him was

printed in Naples in 1876,[8] and contains a dedicatory epistle

addressed to the Blessed Virgin by her “servant, subject, and most

loving son Rosario Frungillo”—a canon of the church and the author of

the book.

[8] “Vita del Venerabile servo di Dio Fra Egidio da S. Giuseppe laico

professo alcantarino,” Napoli, 1876.

This “taumaturgo” could perform all the ordinary feats; I will not

linger over them. What has made him popular to this day are those

wonders which appealed to the taste of the poorer people, such as, for

example, that miracle of the eels. A fisherman had brought fourteen

hundredweight of these for sale in the market. Judge of his

disappointment when he discovered that they had all died during the

journey (southerners will not pay for dead eels). Fortunately, he saw

the saint arriving in a little boat, who informed him that the eels

were “not dead, but only asleep,” and who woke them up again by means

of a relic of Saint Pasquale which he always carried about with him,

after a quarter of an hour’s devout praying, during which the

perspiration oozed from his forehead. The eels, says the writer, had

been dead and slimy, but now turned their bellies downwards once more

and twisted about in their usual spirals; there began a general weeping

among the onlookers, and the fame of the miracle immediately spread

abroad. He could do the same with lobsters, cows, and human beings.

Thus a cow belonging to Fra Egidio’s monastery was once stolen by an

impious butcher, and cut up into the usual joints with a view to a

clandestine sale of the meat. The saint discovered the beast’s remains,

ordered that they should be laid together on the floor in the shape of

a living cow, with the entrails, head and so forth in their natural

positions; then, having made the sign of the cross with his cord upon

the slaughtered beast, and rousing up all his faith, he said: “In the

name of God and of Saint Pasquale, arise, Catherine!” (Catherine was

the cow’s name.) “At these words the animal lowed, shook itself, and

stood up on its feet alive, whole and strong, even as it had been

before it was killed.”

In the case of one of the dead men whom he brought to life, the

undertakers were already about their sad task; but Fra Egidio, viewing

the corpse, remarked in his usual manner that the man was “not dead,

but only asleep,” and after a few saintly manipulations, roused him

from his slumber. The most portentous of his wonders, however, are

those which he wrought _after his own death_ by means of his relics and

otherwise; they have been sworn to by many persons. Nor did his hand

lose its old cunning, in these posthumous manifestations, with the

finny tribe. A certain woman,

Maria Scuotto, was enabled to resuscitate a number of dead eels by

means of an image of the deceased saint which she cast among them.

Every one of the statements in this biography is drawn from the

_processi_ to which I will presently refer; there were 202 witnesses

who deposed “under the rigour and sanctity of oath” to the truth of

these miracles; and among those who were personally convinced of the

Venerable’s rare gifts was the Royal Family of Naples, the archbishop

of that town, as well as innumerable dukes and princes. An embittered

rationalist would note that the reading of Voltaire, at this period,

was punished with three years’ galley-slavery and that several thousand

citizens were hanged for expressing liberal opinions; he will suggest

that belief in the supernatural, rejected by the thinking classes,

finds an abiding shelter among royalty and the proletariat.

It occurs to me, à propos of Fra Egidio, to make the obvious statement

that an account of an occurrence is not necessarily true, because it

happened long ago. Credibility does not improve, like violins and port

wine, with lapse of years. This being the case, it will not be

considered objectionable to say that there are certain deeds attributed

to holy men of olden days which, to speak frankly, are open to doubt;

or at least not susceptible of proof. Who were these men, if they ever

existed? and who vouches for their prodigies? This makes me think that

Pope Gelasius showed no small penetration in excluding, as early as the

fifth century, some few _acta sanctorum_ from the use of the churches;

another step in the same direction was taken in the twelfth century

when the power of canonizing saints, which had hitherto been claimed by

all bishops, became vested in the Pope alone; and yet another, when

Urban VIII forbade the nomination of local patron saints by popular

vote. Pious legends are supposed to have their uses as an educative

agency. So be it. But such relations of imperfectly ascertained and

therefore questionable wonders suffer from one grave drawback: they

tend to shake our faith in the evidence of well-authenticated ones.

Thus Saint Patrick is also reported to have raised a cow from the

dead—five cows, to be quite accurate; but who will come forward and

vouch for the fact? No one. That is because Saint Patrick belongs to

the legendary stage; he died, it is presumed, about 490.

Here, with Saint Egidio, we are on other ground; on the ground of bald

actuality. He expired in 1812, and the contemporaries who have attested

his miraculous deeds are not misty phantoms of the Thebais; they were

creatures of flesh and blood, human, historical

personages, who were dressed and nourished and educated after the

fashion of our own grandfathers. Yet it was meet and proper that the

documentary evidence as to his divine graces should be conscientiously

examined. And only in 1888 was the crowning work accomplished. In that

year His Holiness Leo XIII and the Sacred Congregation of Cardinals

solemnly approved the evidence and inscribed the name of Egidio in the

book of the Blessed.

To touch upon a few minor matters—I observe that Fra Egidio, like the

Flying Monk, was “illiterate,” and similarly preserved up to a decrepit

age “the odorous lily of purity, which made him appear in words and

deeds as a most innocent child.” He was accustomed to worship before a

favourite picture of the Mother of God which he kept adorned with

candles; and whenever the supply of these ran out, he was wont to

address Her with infantile simplicity of heart and in the local

dialect: “Now there’s no wax for You; so think about it Yourself; if

not, You’ll have to go without.” The playful-saintly note. . . .

But there is this difference between him and earlier saints that

whereas they, all too often, suffered in solitude, misunderstood and

rejected of men, he enjoyed the highest popularity during his whole

long life. Wherever he went, his footsteps were pursued by crowds of

admirers, eager to touch his wonder-working body or to cut off shreds

of his clothing as amulets; hardly a day passed that he did not return

home with garments so lacerated that only half of them was left; every

evening they had to be patched up anew, although they were purposely

stitched full of wires and small chains of iron as a protection. The

same passionate sympathy continued after death, for while his body was

lying in state a certain Luigi Ascione, a surgeon, pushed through the

crowd and endeavoured to cut off one of his toe-nails with the flesh

attached to it; he admitted being driven to this act of pious

depredation by the pleading request of the Spanish Ambassador and a

Neapolitan princess, who held Fra Egidio in great veneration.

This is not an isolated instance. Southerners love their saints, and do

not content themselves with chill verbal expressions of esteem. So the

biographer of Saint Giangiuseppe records that “one of the deceased

saint’s toes was bitten off with most regretable devotion by the teeth

of a man in the crowd, who wished to preserve it as a relic. And the

blood from the wound flowed so copiously and so freely that many pieces

of cloth were saturated with it; nor did it cease to flow till the

precious corpse was interred.” It is hard to picture such proofs of

fervid popularity falling to the lot of English deans and bishops.

He was modern, too, in this sense, that he did not torment himself with

penitences (decay of Spanish austerity); on the contrary, he even kept

chocolate, honey and suchlike delicacies in his cell. In short, he was

an up-to-date saint, who despised mediæval practices and lived in a

manner befitting the age which gave him birth. In this respect he

resembles our English men of holiness, who exercise a laudable

self-denial in resisting the seductions of the ascetic life.

Meanwhile, the cult of the Mother of God continued to wax in favour,

and those who are interested in its development should read the really

remarkable book by Antonio Cuomó, “Saggio apologetico della belezza

celeste e divina di Maria S.S. Madre di Dio” (Castellamare, 1863). It

is a diatribe against modernism by a champion of lost causes, an

exacerbated lover of the “Singular Virgin and fecund Mother of the

Verb.” His argument, as I understand it, is the _consensus gentium_

theory applied to the Virgin Mary. In defence of this thesis, the book

has been made to bristle with quotations; they stand out like quills

upon the porcupine, ready to impale the adventurous sceptic. Pliny and

Virgil and the Druids and Balaam’s Ass are invoked as foretelling Her

birth; the Old Testament—that venerable sufferer, as Huxley called

it—is twisted into dire convulsions for the same purpose; much evidence

is also drawn from Hebrew observances and from the Church Fathers. But

the New Testamentary record is seldom invoked; the Saviour, on the rare

occasions when He is mentioned, being dismissed as “G. C.” The volume

ends with a pyrotechnical display of invective against non-Catholic

heretics; a medley of threats and abuse worthy of those breezy days of

Erasmus, when theologians really said what they thought of each other.

The frank polytheism of Montorio is more to my taste. This outpouring

of papistical rhetoric gives me unwarrantable sensations—it makes me

feel positively Protestant.

Another sign of increasing popularity is that the sacred bacchanals

connected with the “crowning” of various Madonnas were twice as

numerous, in Naples, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century.

Why an image of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly

symbol, as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to

those who fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of

southern religion. Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either

puerile or adult; the Englishman remains everlastingly adolescent. . .

.

Now of course it is open to any one to say that the pious records from

which I have quoted are a desolation of the spirit; that they

possess all the improbability of the “Arabian Nights,” and none of

their charm; that all the distempered dreamings to which our poor

humanity is subject have given themselves a rendezvous in their pages.

I am not for disputing the point, and I can understand how one man may

be saddened by their perusal, while another extracts therefrom some

gleams of mirth. For my part, I merely verify this fact: the native has

been fed with this stuff for centuries, and if we desire to enter into

his feelings, we must feed ourselves likewise—up to a point. The past

is the key to the present. That is why I have dwelt at such length on

the subject—in the hope of clearing up the enigma in the national

character: the unpassable gulf, I mean, between the believing and the

unbelieving sections of the community.

An Anglo-Saxon arriving at Bagnara and witnessing a procession in

honour of that Sacred Hat of the Mother of God which has led me into

this disquisition, would be shocked at the degree of bigotry implied.

“The Hat of the Virgin Mary,” he would say—“what next?” Then, accosting

some ordinary citizen not in the procession—any butcher or baker—he

would receive a shock of another kind; he would be appalled at the

man’s language of contemptuous derision towards everything which he,

the Anglo-Saxon, holds sacred in biblical tradition. There is no

attempt, here, at “reconciliation.” The classes calling themselves

enlightened are making a clean sweep of the old gods in a fashion that

bewilders us who have accustomed ourselves to see a providential design

in everything that exists (possibly because our acquaintance with a

providentially-designed Holy Office is limited to an obsolete statute,

the genial _de haeretico comburendo)._ The others, the fetishists, have

remained on the spiritual level of their own saints. And there we stand

today. That section so numerous in England, the pseudo-pagans,

crypto-Christians, or whatever obscurantists like Messrs. A. J. Balfour

and Mallock like to call themselves (the men who, with disastrous

effects, transport into realms of pure intelligence the spirit of

compromise which should be restricted to practical concerns)—that

section has no representatives hereabouts.

Fully to appreciate their attitude as opposed to ours, we must also

remember that the south Italian does not trouble himself about the

objective truth of any miracle whatever; his senses may be perverted,

but his intelligence remains outside the sphere of infection. This is

his saving grace. To the people here, the affair of Moses and the

Burning Bush, the raising of Lazarus, and Egidio’s cow-revival, are on

the identical plane of authenticity; the Bible is one of a thousand

saints’ books; its stories may be as true as

theirs, or just as untrue; in any case, what has that to do with his

own worldly conduct? But the Englishman with ingenuous ardour thinks to

believe in the Burning Bush wonder, and in so far his intelligence is

infected; with equal ardour he excludes the cow-performance from the

range of possibility; and to him it matters considerably which of the

miracles are true and which are false, seeing that his conduct is

supposed to take colour from such supernatural events. Ultra-credulous

as to one set of narratives, he has no credulity left for other sets;

he concentrates his believing energies upon a small space, whereas the

Italian’s are diffused, thinly, over a wide area. It is the old story:

Gothic intensity and Latin spaciousness. So the Gothic believer takes

his big dose of irrationalism on one fixed day; the Latin, by attending

Mass every morning, spreads it over the whole week. And the sombre

strenuousness of our northern character expects a remuneration for this

outlay of faith, while the other contents himself with such sensuous

enjoyment as he can momentarily extract from his ceremonials. That is

why our English religion has a _democratic_ tinge distasteful to the

Latin who, at bottom, is always a philosopher; democratic because it

relies for its success, like democratic politicians, upon

promises—promises that may or may not be kept—promises that form no

part (they are only an official appendage) of the childlike paganism of

the south. . . .

Fifteen francs will buy you a reliable witness for a south Italian

lawsuit; you must pay a good deal more in England. Thence one might

argue that the cult of credulity implied by these saintly biographies

is responsible for this laxness, for the general disregard of veracity.

I doubt it. I am not inclined to blame the monkish saint-makers for

this particular trait; I suspect that for fifteen francs you could have

bought a first-class witness under Pericles. Southerners are not yet

pressed for time; and when people are not pressed for time, they do not

learn the time-saving value of honesty. Our respect for truth and fair

dealing, such as it is, derives from modern commerce; in the Middle

Ages nobody was concerned about honesty save a few trading companies

like the Hanseatic League, and the poor mediæval devil (the only

gentleman of his age) who was generally pressed for time and could be

relied upon to keep his word. Even God, of whom they talked so much,

was systematically swindled. Where time counts for nothing, expeditious

practices between man and man are a drug in the market. Besides, it

must be noted that this churchly misteaching was only a fraction of

that general shattering which has disintegrated all the finer fibres of

public life. It stands to reason that the fragile

tissues of culture are dislocated, and its delicate edges defaced, by

such persistive governmental brutalization as the inhabitants have

undergone. None but the grossest elements in a people can withstand

enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile nature will survive

its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a few years ago the

nobler qualities which we associate with those old Hellenic

colonists—their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook upon life,

their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature—all these things

had been abraded, leaving, as residue, nothing save what the Greeks

shared with ruder races. There are indications that this state of

affairs is now ending.

The position is this. The records show that the common people never

took their saints to heart in the northern fashion—as moral exemplars;

from beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for

fun and festivals, a means of brightening the catacombic, the

essentially sunless, character of Christianity. So much for the popular

saints, the patrons and heroes. The others, the ecclesiastical ones,

are an artificial product of monkish institutions. These monkeries were

established in the land by virtue of civil authority. Their continued

existence, however, was contingent upon the goodwill of the Vatican.

One of the surest and cheapest methods of obtaining this goodwill was

to produce a satisfactory crop of saints whose beatification swelled

the Vatican treasury with the millions collected from a deluded

populace for that end. The monks paid nothing; they only furnished the

saint and, in due course, the people’s money. Can we wonder that they

discovered saints galore? Can we wonder that the Popes were gratified

by their pious zeal?

So things went on till yesterday. But now a large proportion of the ten

thousand (?) churches and monasteries of Naples are closed or actually

in ruins; wayside sanctuaries crumble to dust in picturesque fashion;

the price of holy books has fallen to zero, and the godly brethren have

emigrated to establish their saint-manufactories elsewhere. Not without

hope of success; for they will find purchasers of their wares wherever

mankind can be interested in that queer disrespect of the body which is

taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East.

It was Lewes, I believe, who compared metaphysics to ghosts by saying

that there was no killing either of them; one could only dissipate them

by throwing light into the dark places they love to inhabit—to show

that nothing is there. Spectres, likewise, are these saintly

caricatures of humanity, perambulating metaphysics, the application _in

corpore vili_ of Oriental fakirism.

Nightmare-literature is the crazy recital of their deeds and

sufferings. Pathological phantoms! The state of mind which engenders

and cherishes such illusions is a disease, and it has been well said

that “you cannot refute a disease.” You cannot nail ghosts to the

counter.

But a ray of light . . .

XXXII

ASPROMONTE, THE CLOUD-GATHERER

Day was barely dawning when we left Delianuova and began the long and

weary climb up Montalto. Chestnuts gave way to beeches, but the summit

receded ever further from us. And even before reaching the uplands, the

so-called Piano di Carmelia, we encountered a bank of bad weather. A

glance at the map will show that Montalto must be a cloud-gatherer,

drawing to its flanks every wreath of vapour that rises from Ionian and

Tyrrhenian; a west wind was blowing that morning, and thick fogs clung

to the skirts of the peak. We reached the summit (1956 metres) at last,

drenched in an icy bath of rain and sleet, and with fingers so numbed

that we could hardly hold our sticks.

Of the superb view—for such it must be—nothing whatever was to be seen;

we were wrapped in a glacial mist. On the highest point stands a figure

of the Redeemer. It was dragged up in pieces from Delianuova some seven

years ago, but soon injured by frosts; it has lately been refashioned.

The original structure may be due to the same pious stimulus as that

which placed the crosses on Monte Vulture and other peaks throughout

the country—a counterblast to the rationalistic congress at Rome in

1904, when Giordano Bruno became, for a while, the hero of the country.

This statue does not lack dignity. The Saviour’s regard turns towards

Reggio, the capital of the province; and one hand is upraised in calm

and godlike benediction.

Passing through magnificent groves of fir, we descended rapidly into

anothsr climate, into realms of golden sunshine. Among these trees I

espied what has become quite a rare bird in Italy—the common

wood-pigeon. The few that remain have been driven into the most

secluded recesses of the mountains; it was different in the days of

Theocritus, who sang of this amiable fowl when the climate was colder

and the woodlands reached as far as the now barren seashore. To the

firs succeeded long stretches of odorous pines interspersed with

Mediterranean heath (bruyère), which here grows to a height of twelve

feet; one thinks of the number of briar

pipes that could be cut out of its knotty roots. A British Vice-Consul

at Reggio, Mr. Kerrich, started this industry about the year 1899; he

collected the roots, which were sawn into blocks and then sent to

France and America to be made into pipes. This Calabrian briar was

considered superior to the French kind, and Mr. Kerrich had large sales

on both sides of the Atlantic; his chief difficulty was want of labour

owing to emigration.

We passed, by the wayside, several rude crosses marking the site of

accidents or murders, as well as a large heap of stones, where-under

lie the bones of a man who attempted to traverse these mountains in

winter-time and was frozen to death.

“They found him,” the guide told me, “in spring, when the snow melted

from off his body. There he lay, all fresh and comely! It looked as if

he would presently wake up and continue his march; but he neither spoke

nor stirred. Then they knew he was dead. And they piled all these

stones over him, to prevent the wolves, you understand——”

Aspromonte deserves its name. It is an incredibly harsh agglomeration

of hill and dale, and the geology of the district, as I learned long

ago from my friend Professor Cortese, reveals a perfect chaos of rocks

of every age, torn into gullies by earthquakes and other cataclysms of

the past—at one place, near Scido, is an old stream of lava. Once the

higher ground, the nucleus of the group, is left behind, the wanderer

finds himself lost in a maze of contorted ravines, winding about

without any apparent system of watershed. Does the liquid flow north or

south? Who can tell! The track crawls in and out of valleys, mounts

upwards to heights of sun-scorched bracken and cistus, descends once

more into dewy glades hemmed in by precipices and overhung by drooping

fernery. It crosses streams of crystal clearness, rises afresh in

endless gyrations under the pines only to vanish, yet again, into the

twilight of deeper abysses, where it skirts the rivulet along

precarious ledges, until some new obstruction blocks the way—so it

writhes about for long, long hours. . . .

Here, on the spot, one can understand how an outlaw like Musolino was

enabled to defy justice, helped, as he was, by the fact that the vast

majority of the inhabitants were favourable to him, and that the

officer in charge of his pursuers was paid a fixed sum for every day he

spent in the chase and presumably found it convenient not to discover

his whereabouts.[1]

[1] See next chapter.

We rested awhile, during these interminable meanderings, under the

shadow of a group of pines.

“Do you see that square patch yonder?” said my man. “It is a cornfield.

There Musolino shot one of his enemies, whom he suspected of giving

information to the police. It was well done.”

“How many did he shoot, altogether?”

“Only eighteen. And three of them recovered, more or less; enough to

limp about, at all events. Ah, if you could have seen him, sir! He was

young, with curly fair hair, and a face like a rose. God alone can tell

how many poor people he helped in their distress. And any young girl he

met in the mountains he would help with her load and accompany as far

as her home, right into her father’s house, which none of us would have

risked, however much we might have liked it. But every one knew that he

was pure as an angel.”

“And there was a young fellow here,” he went on, “who thought he could

profit by pretending to be Musolino. So one day he challenged a

proprietor with his gun, and took all his money. When it came to

Musolino’s ears, he was furious—furious! He lay in wait for him, caught

him, and said: “How dare you touch fathers of children? Where’s that

money you took from Don Antonio?” Then the boy began to cry and tremble

for his life. “Bring it,” said Musolino, “every penny, at midday next

Monday, to such and such a spot, or else——” Of course he brought it.

Then he marched him straight into the proprietor’s house. “Here’s this

wretched boy, who robbed you in my name. And here’s the money: please

count it. Now, what shall we do with him?” So Don Antonio counted the

money. “It’s all there,” he said; “let him off this time.” Then

Musolino turned to the lad: “You have behaved like a mannerless puppy,”

he said, “without shame or knowledge of the world. Be reasonable in

future, and understand clearly: I will have no brigandage in these

mountains. Leave that to the syndics and judges in the towns.”

We did not traverse Musolino’s natal village, Santo Stefano; indeed, we

passed through no villages at all. But after issuing from the

labyrinth, we saw a few of them, perched in improbable

situations—Roccaforte and Roghudi on our right; on the other side,

Africo and Casalnuovo. Salis Marschlins says that the inhabitants of

these regions are so wild and innocent that money is unknown;

everything is done by barter. That comes of copying without

discrimination. For this statement he utilized the report of a

Government official, a certain Leoni, who was sent hither after the

earthquake of 1783, and found the use of money not unknown, but

forgotten, in consequence of this terrible catastrophe.

These vales of Aspromonte are one of the last refuges of living

Byzantinism. Greek is still spoken in some places, such as Roccaforte

and Roghudi. Earlier travellers confused the natives with the

Albanians; Niehbuhr, who had an obsession on the subject of Hellenism,

imagined they were relics of old Dorian and Achaean colonies. Scholars

are apparently not yet quite decided upon certain smaller matters. So

Lenormant (Vol. II, p. 433) thinks they came hither after the Turkish

conquest, as did the Albanians; Batiffol argues that they were chased

into Calabria from Sicily by the Arabs after the second half of the

seventh century; Morosi, who treats mostly of their Apulian

settlements, says that they came from the East between the sixth and

tenth centuries. Many students, such as Morelli and Comparetti, have

garnered their songs, language, customs and lore, and whoever wants a

convenient résumé of these earlier researches will find it in

Pellegrini’s book which was written in 1873 (printed 1880). He gives

the number of Greek inhabitants of these places—Roghudi, for example,

had 535 in his day; he has also noted down these villages, like Africo

and Casalnuovo, in which the Byzantine speech has lately been lost.

Bova and Condofuri are now the head-quarters of mediæval Greek in these

parts.

From afar we had already descried a green range of hills that shut out

the seaward view. This we now began to climb, in wearisome ascension;

it is called _Piè d’Impisa,_ because “your feet are all the time on a

steep incline.” Telegraph wires here accompany the track, a survival of

the war between the Italian Government and Musolino. On the summit lies

a lonely Alp, Campo di Bova, where a herd of cattle were pasturing

under the care of a golden-haired youth who lay supine on the grass,

gazing at the clouds as they drifted in stately procession across the

firmament. Save for a dusky charcoal-burner crouching in a cave, this

boy was the only living person we encountered on our march—so deserted

are these mountain tracks.

At Campo di Bova a path branches off to Staiti; the sea is visible once

more, and there are fine glimpses, on the left, towards Staiti (or is

it Ferruzzano?) and, down the right, into the destructive and dangerous

torrent of Amendolea. Far beyond it, rises the mountain peak of

Pentedattilo, a most singular landmark which looks exactly like a molar

tooth turned upside down, with fangs in air. The road passes through a

gateway in the rock whence, suddenly, a full view is disclosed of Bova

on its hill-top, the houses nestling among huge blocks of stone that

make one think of some cyclopean citadel of past ages. My guide stoutly

denied that this

was Bova; the town, he declared, lay in quite another direction. I

imagine he had never been beyond the foot of the “Piè d’Impisa.”

Here, once more, the late earthquake has done some damage, and there is

a row of trim wooden shelters near the entrance of the town. I may add,

as a picturesque detail, that about one-third of them have never been

inhabited, and are never likely to be. They were erected in the heat of

enthusiasm, and there they will stay, empty and abandoned, until some

energetic mayor shall pull them down and cook his maccheroni with their

timber.

Evening was drawing on apace, and whether it was due to the joy of

having accomplished an arduous journey, or to inconsiderate potations

of the Bacchus of Bova, one of the most remarkable wines in Italy, I

very soon found myself on excellent terms with the chief citizens of

this rather sordid-looking little place. A good deal has been written

concerning Bova and its inhabitants, but I should say there is still a

mine of information to be exploited on the spot. They are bilingual,

but while clinging stubbornly to their old speech, they have now

embraced Catholicism. The town kept its Greek religious rites till the

latter half of the sixteenth century; and Rodotà has described the

“vigorous resistance” that was made to the introduction of Romanism,

and the ceremonies which finally accompanied that event.

Mine hostess obligingly sang me two or three songs in her native

language; the priest furnished me with curious statistics of folklore

and criminology; and the notary, with whom I conversed awhile on the

tiny piazza that overlooks the coastlands and distant Ionian, was a

most affable gentleman. Seeing that the Christian names of the populace

are purely Italian, I enquired as to their surnames, and learned what I

expected, namely, that a good many Greek family names survive among the

people. His own name, he said, was unquestionably Greek: _Condemi;_ if

I liked, he would go through the local archives and prepare me a list

of all such surnames as appeared to him to be non-Italian; we could

thus obtain some idea of the percentage of Greek families still living

here. My best thanks to the good Signor!

After some further liquid refreshment, a youthful native volunteered to

guide me by short cuts to the remote railway station. We stepped

blithely into the twilight, and during the long descent I discoursed

with him, in fluent Byzantine Greek, of the affairs of his village.

It is my theory that among a populace of this kind the words relative

to agricultural pursuits will be those which are least likely to suffer

change with lapse of years, or to be replaced by others.

Acting on this principle, I put him through a catechism on the subject

as soon as we reached our destination, and was surprised at the

relative scarcity of Italian terms—barely 25 per cent I should say.

Needless to add, I omitted to note them down. Such as it is, be that my

contribution to the literature of these sporadic islets of mediæval

Hellenism, whose outstanding features are being gnawed away by the

waves of military conscription, governmental schooling, and emigration.

Caulonia, my next halting-place, lay far off the line. I had therefore

the choice of spending the night at Gerace (old Locri) or Rocella

Ionica—intermediate stations. Both of them, to my knowledge, possessing

indifferent accommodation, I chose the former as being the nearest, and

slept there, not amiss; far better than on a previous occasion, when

certain things occurred which need not be set down here.

The trip from Delianuova over the summit of Montalto to Bova railway

station is by no means to be recommended to young boys or persons in

delicate health. Allowing for only forty-five minutes’ rest, it took me

fourteen hours to walk to the town of Bova, and the railway station

lies nearly three hours apart from that place. There is hardly a level

yard of ground along the whole route, and though my “guide” twice took

the wrong track and thereby probably lost me some little time, I

question whether the best walker, provided (as I was) with the best

maps, will be able to traverse the distance in less than fifteen hours.

Whoever he is, I wish him joy of his journey. Pleasant to recall,

assuredly; the scenery and the mountain flowers are wondrously

beautiful; but I have fully realized what the men of Delianuova meant,

when they said:

“To Montalto, Yes; to Bova, No.”

XXXIII

MUSOLINO AND THE LAW

Musolino will remain a hero for many long years to come. “He did his

duty”: such is the popular verdict on his career. He was not a brigand,

but an unfortunate—a martyr, a victim of the law. So he is described

not only by his country-people, but by the writers of many hundred

serious pamphlets in every province of Italy.

At any bookstall you may buy cheap illustrated tracts and poems setting

forth his achievements. In Cosenza I saw a play of which he was the

leading figure, depicted as a pale, long-suffering gentleman of the

“misunderstood” type—friend of the fatherless, champion of widows and

orphans, rectifier of all wrongs; in fact, as the embodiment of those

virtues which we are apt to associate with Prometheus or the founder of

Christianity.

Only to those who know nothing of local conditions will it seem strange

to say that Italian law is one of the factors that contribute to the

disintegration of family life throughout the country, and to the

production of creatures like Musolino. There are few villages which do

not contain some notorious assassins who have escaped punishment under

sentimental pleas, and now terrorize the neighbourhood. This is one of

the evils which derange patriarchalism; the decent-minded living in

fear of their lives, the others with a conspicuous example before their

eyes of the advantages of evil-doing. And another is that the innocent

often suffer, country-bred lads being locked up for months and years in

prison on the flimsiest pretexts—often on the mere word of some

malevolent local policeman—among hardened habitual offenders. If they

survive the treatment, which is not always the case, they return home

completely demoralized and a source of infection to others.

It is hardly surprising if, under such conditions, rich and poor alike

are ready to hide a picturesque fugitive from justice. A sad state of

affairs, but—as an unsavoury Italian proverb correctly says—_il pesce

puzza dal capo._

For the fault lies not only in the fundamental perversity of all Roman

Law. It lies also in the local administration of that law,

which is inefficient and marked by that elaborate brutality

characteristic of all “philosophic” and tender-hearted nations. One

thinks of the Byzantines. . . . That justices should be well-salaried

gentlemen, cognizant of their duties to society; that carbineers and

other police-functionaries should be civilly responsible for outrages

upon the public; that a so-called “habeas-corpus” Act might be as

useful here as among certain savages of the north; that the Baghdad

system of delays leads to corruption of underpaid officials and

witnesses alike (not to speak of judges)—in a word, that the method

pursued hereabouts is calculated to create rather than to repress

crime: these are truths of too elementary a nature to find their way

into the brains of the megalomaniac rhetoricians who control their

country’s fate. They will never endorse that saying of Stendhal’s: “In

Italy, with the exception of Milan, the death-penalty is the preface of

all civilization.” (To this day, the proportion of murders is still 13

per cent higher in Palermo than in Milan.)

Speak to the wisest judges of the horrors of cellular confinement such

as Musolino was enduring up to a short time ago, as opposed to capital

punishment, and you will learn that they invoke the humanitarian

Beccaria in justification of it. Theorists!

For less formidable criminals there exists that wondrous institution of

_domicilio coatto,_ which I have studied in the islands of Lipari and

Ponza. These evil-doers seldom try to escape; life is far too

comfortable, and the wine good and cheap; often, on completing their

sentences, they get themselves condemned anew, in order to return. The

hard-working man may well envy their lot, for they receive free lodging

from the Government, a daily allowance of money, and two new suits of

clothes a year—they are not asked to do a stroke of work in return, but

may lie in bed all day long, if so disposed. The law-abiding citizen,

meanwhile, pays for the upkeep of this horde of malefactors, as well as

for the army of officials who are deputed to attend to their wants.

This institution of _domicilio coatto_ is one of those things which

would be incredible, were it not actually in existence. It is a school,

a State-fostered school, for the promotion of criminality.

But what shall be expected? Where judges sob like children, and jurors

swoon away with emotionalism; where floods of bombast—go to the courts,

and listen!—take the place of cross-examination and duly-sworn

affidavits; where perjury is a humanly venial and almost praiseworthy

failing—how shall the code, defective as it is, be administered?

Rhetoric, and rhetoric alone, sways the decision of the courts.

Scholars are only now beginning

to realize to what an extent the ancient sense of veracity was tainted

with this vice—how deeply all classical history is permeated with

elegant partisan non-truth. And this evil legacy from Greco-Roman days

has been augmented by the more recent teachings of Jesuitry and the

Catholic theory of “peccato veniale.” Rhetoric alone counts; rhetoric

alone is “art.” The rest is mere facts; and your “penalista” has a

constitutional horror of a bald fact, because _there it is,_ and there

is nothing to be done with it. It is too crude a thing for cultured men

to handle. If a local barrister were forced to state in court a plain

fact, without varnish, he would die of cerebral congestion; the judge,

of boredom.

In early times, these provinces had a rough-and-ready cowboy justice

which answered simple needs, and when, in Bourbon days, things became

more centralized, there was still a never-failing expedient: each judge

having a fixed and publicly acknowledged tariff, the village elders, in

deserving cases, subscribed the requisite sum and released their

prisoner. But Italy is now paying the penalty of ambition. With one

foot in the ferocity of her past, and the other on a quicksand of

dream-nurtured idealism, she contrives to combine the disadvantages of

both. She, who was the light o’ love of all Europe for long ages, and

in her poverty denied nothing to her clientèle, has now laid aside a

little money, repenting of her frivolous and mercenary deeds (they

sometimes do), and becoming puritanically zealous of good works in her

old age—all this, however, as might have been expected from her

antecedent career, without much discrimination.

It is certainly remarkable that a race of men who have been such ardent

opponents of many forms of tyranny in the past, should still endure a

system of criminal procedure worthy of Torquemada. High and low cry out

against it, but—_pazienza!_ Where shall grievances be ventilated? In

Parliament? A good joke, that! In the press? Better still! Italian

newspapers nowise reflect the opinions of civilized Italy; they are

mere cheese-wrappers; in the whole kingdom there are only three

self-respecting dailies. The people have learnt to despair of their

rulers—to regard them with cynical suspicion. Public opinion has been

crushed out of the country. What goes by that name is the gossip of the

town-concierge, or obscure village cabals and schemings.

I am quite aware that the law-abiding spirit is the slow growth of

ages, and that a serious mischief like this cannot be repaired in a

short generation. I know that even now the Italian code of criminal

procedure, that tragic farce, is under revision. I know, moreover, that

there are stipendiary magistrates in south Italy

whose discernment and integrity would do honour to our British courts.

But—take the case out of their hands into a higher tribunal, and you

may put your trust in God, or in your purse. Justice hereabouts is in

the same condition as it was in Egypt at the time of Lord Dufferin’s

report: a mockery.

It may be said that it does not concern aliens to make such criticism.

A fatuous observation! Everything concerns everybody. The foreigner in

Italy, if he is wise, will familiarize himself not only with the

cathedrals to be visited, but also, and primarily, with the technique

of legal bribery and subterfuge—with the methods locally employed for

escaping out of the meshes of the law. Otherwise he may find unpleasant

surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to

acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have

undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a

byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these

strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians

themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called “La

Quistione Meridionale” (What’s Wrong with the South), that throws a

flood of light upon local conditions. It contains the views of

twenty-seven of the most prominent men in the country as to how south

Italian problems should be faced and solved. Nearly all of them deplore

the lack of justice. Says Professor Colajanni: “To heal the south, we

require an honest, intelligent and sagacious government, _which we have

not got.”_ And Lombroso: “In the south it is necessary to introduce

justice, _which does not exist, save in favour of certain classes.”_

I am tempted to linger on this subject, not without reason. These

people and their attitude towards life will remain an enigma to the

traveller, until he has acquainted himself with the law of the land and

seen with his own eyes something of the atrocious misery which its

administration involves. A murderer like Musolino, crowned with an

aureole of saintliness, would be an anomaly in England. We should think

it rather paradoxical to hear a respectable old farmer recommending his

boys to shoot a policeman, whenever they safely can. On the spot,

things begin to wear a different aspect. Musolino is no more to be

blamed than a child who has been systematically misguided by his

parents; and if these people, much as they love their homes and

families, are all potential Musolinos, they have good reasons for

it—excellent reasons.

No south Italian living at this present moment, be he of what social

class you please—be he of the gentlest blood or most refined culture—is

_a priori_ on the side of the policeman. No; not _a priori._ The abuses

of the executive are too terrific to warrant such an

attitude. Has not the entire police force of Naples, up to its very

head, been lately proved to be in the pay of the camorra; to say

nothing of its connection with what Messrs. King and Okey

euphemistically call “the unseen hand at Rome”—a hand which is held out

for blackmail, and not vainly, from the highest ministerial benches?

Under such conditions, the populace becomes profoundly distrustful of

the powers that be, and such distrust breeds bad citizens. But so

things will remain, until the bag-and-baggage policy is applied to the

whole code of criminal procedure, and to a good half of its present

administrators.