IN SABINA
We had chosen Castel Gandolfo for our summer quarters and had spent
two or three delightful months in the Villa Brazzà, situated on the
lower edge of the town which climbed up the gentle slope behind, and
having for ourselves the open view of all the Campagna below us,
before. The house did not look very large from the road, but very
little of it showed itself to the road at all. When one had passed
under the arched _portone_ one found a great rambling residence with
a long terraced wing stretching down into the garden, and in the
garden itself pavilions, grottos, terraces, all bowered in flowers
and so artistically disposed that every one seemed isolated and only
approached by long winding walks delightfully shady and green.
Where the chief sitting-room opened towards the garden there was a
small terrace, completely shaded from the morning sun, with a fountain
so disposed that it fell all down one wall like a waterfall, and round
it clambered and waved the wreaths of a hundred creepers, ivy and
stephanotis and jessamine and maidenhair fern, all wet and blooming
in the gentle moisture of its spray. To the left, the wing in which my
own rooms were situated ran far down, affording shade and coolness; a
stairway led up to its roof where vast beds of petunias gave out their
sweet perfume and were visited every evening at sunset by humming-bird
moths who fed on the honey in the white and purple chalices till they
could scarcely fly away.
The house had been full of guests through July and August and the
summer had been divinely bright and cool. Through it all I had looked,
day after day, over towards the Sabine Hills, so remote and mysterious
for all their nearness to Rome, and a great desire was upon me to
penetrate into those blue fastnesses. They had been friends—at a
distance—all my life, since I could remember anything, and probably
before that, for the big eastern window of the room where I was born
looked straight towards them, and doubtless their sun-smitten peaks
were the first outside objects my eyes ever beheld. They are our
Sibyls, in Rome. They reflect every change of sun and wind, and very
early I learnt to tell the signs of the coming weather which they
infallibly gave us.
I made up my mind to reach them at last, and with some difficulty
persuaded my brother and my stepfather to come with me. We were joined
by a friend, an elderly English clergyman much loved by us and always
known as the “Reverendo.” He came of exceedingly well-known people,
but was a younger son with no money—and no encumbrances—and he had long
amused us with his quaint ways. He was rather elderly, very tall, with
a paganly handsome head, and a quiet way of saying incredible things
that made me love him much—and work him hard, for I was a rather spoilt
young person in those days and allowed myself unlimited whims, which my
blessed family helped me to carry out in the most exemplary way.
I always had a very tender spot for the Reverendo, and it became
something uncomfortably near pity when I heard, from our servants, of
certain straits to which he was put in order to appear properly at the
little gatherings to which we were always inviting him. He lived a long
way from our house, and his means quite forbade the luxury of cabs,
so in all weathers he came on foot. The carefully turned-up evening
trousers could be kept out of the mud, but not so the shoes below;
so the Reverendo brought clean ones—and evening socks—with him. The
porter’s lodge was just inside the _porte-cochère_, and he would turn
in there, regardless of what the inhabitants might be doing, sit down,
pull off the condemned foot-gear, toss it into various corners, put
on the clean things, and walk upstairs—all without a single word to
the porter’s wife and children, who put him down, quite smilingly, as
another “mad Englishman.” When the function upstairs was over he would
reappear, change once more, and depart, always in perfect silence.
But one evening Mrs. Porter told my maid she could have wept for the
poor gentleman! He came in as usual, sat down and pulled off boots
and socks, flung them away, and then discovered that he had forgotten
to bring fresh ones. Quite meekly he gathered up the muddy articles,
put them on and disappeared into the night, to return, nearly an hour
later, with his forgotten properties and go through the whole ceremony
over again.
Like so many quiet cultivated Englishmen whom circumstances more than
taste have landed in the “Establishment,” for life, he had the social
instinct very strongly developed, loved bright society, and never
refused an invitation. He caught gladly at the idea of riding through
Sabina with us, and I knew that our expedition would be a success,
which it might not have been without the little spice of interest that
an outsider always brings into an otherwise too strictly family party.
So, one divine September morning, we four rode forth, my dear mother
almost crying at our temerity in facing the brigands who were then
supposed to haunt the Eastern Hills. “Do bring back your ears with
you!” was her parting recommendation, and I know that during the days
of our absence she constantly dreaded receiving the grim packet of
severed ears which the old-time brigands were in the habit of sending,
with their little account for ransom, to the relatives of those they
had captured.
Years before, when we children were making expeditions from Rocca
di Papa, we had, to our immense joy, been provided with big,
formidable-looking toy pistols, which we were enjoined to carry “in
evidence” so that the report might go about that the party was always
strongly armed! The only brigand we ever caught sight of in our
rambles through the lonely country would be an occasional outlaw who
had escaped from the police to take hiding in the woods (where he was
charitably maintained by his sympathizing fellow-townsfolk) and who
would scuttle away like a startled hare at the approach of a big party
of young foreigners, whose yells would probably reach to Rome itself if
anybody interfered with them. The brigand of Romagna is, or was, a poor
creature, very easily disposed of; his cousin in Calabria or Sicily is
quite a different kind of person, a resolute, unscrupulous gentleman
whom it is not at all pleasant to meet.
In one of his Roman books Mr. Hare speaks of the unearthly beauty of
the Campagna and its surrounding hills in the first moments of the
dawn, and deplores the fact that so many travellers come and go away
again without ever having risen early enough to see it. I think dear
Mr. Hare made the discovery late in life himself, for, if I remember
rightly, it was during a journey of exploration that we made together
somewhere that the fact struck him—and I and my sister regarded him
then as distinctly middle-aged. My poor Annie was always a late riser,
and vehemently deprecated the unripe hours of the morning, as she did
every other kind of discomfort; but to me they were hours of purest
romance, and seldom have they seemed more perfect than on the day when
I and my three cavaliers rode away from Castel Gandolfo through the
woods towards Genazzano (not Genzano), where we were to halt on our way
to Palestrina.
Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods when the sun is still
so low that it only strikes the under branches of the trees, and creeps
up their trunks like a rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a
mist of cool emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open
the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups of the
moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered spikelets into
an upstanding frieze of fairy spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?
Where some stream has cut its way deep through the rich soil the
forget-me-nots have grown so high and thick that they almost meet
across the water; their blue is too dreamy yet to reflect the sky; they
look up to that with the calm unseeing innocence of a newborn child
that as yet knows not day from night. Ah, look well then, for later in
the day the jealous tree-tops will take all the light to themselves,
and every lovely detail, below, only visible in that first fleeting
hour, will be lost in the deep forest shadow that is neither light nor
darkness, but all one quivering mysterious green.
We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in the crystal
freshness of the air; and then, almost before we knew it, we were
out in a blaze of heat, leaving the Alban Hills behind and crossing
the plain that divides them from the Sabines, one of the old roads
to Naples. In that first week of September it was like an unroofed
hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding against each other
till one would hardly have known where to get in the shears or the
sickle; the dust from our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went
along, and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long droning note
of the cicala.
We were glad enough to reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before
the old church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so far,
the Piazza and every street leading to it being full of peasants, who
had come in from all the surrounding district to pay their respects
to the Madonna del Buon Consiglio, on this, September 8, our Blessed
Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes place here on
April 25, the especial Feast of “Our Lady of Good Counsel,” but the
people are always glad to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the
day we visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes
which one very rarely sees now.
The picture round which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one,
rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came to Italy from
the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously transported, probably at
the time when all that country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that
the Holy House of Loreto, when the holy places of Jerusalem fell into
the hands of the Turks, was carried by the angels to Christian shores
and thence to Italy, the dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place
mourning despairingly round the deserted spot from which it disappeared
between dark and dawn on the night of December 9, 1294. I am writing
of Genazzano and not of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark
that this miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed
Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in our own modern
history; yet there are people, who would stake their lives on the truth
of those events, who dismiss the miracle of Loreto with a smile of
incredulity.
This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not interest them. Yet I
would advise even such persons to go and have a look at the beautiful
copy of it in St. John Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length
or less; the Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and He is
reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her heart in her
deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored up for the children who
appeal to her in their perplexities. There is an exquisite expression
of confidence and familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy
Father, Pius X, has such a great devotion to Our Lady of Good Counsel
that, as all Catholics know, he has added the invocation “Mater Boni,
Consilii, ora pro nobis,” to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.
From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving there in time to
go and watch the sunset from the ruined terraces of the Temple of
Fortune. The place has passed from hand to hand, used as a fortress
at one time and another since the fourth century before Christ; but to
me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern developments.
It is the story of times lost in the mist of ages, when those first
cyclopean blocks were fitted together without the aid of cement—when
a race, whose only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all
and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost of the
mountains—that is the story that I want to hear.
There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the level gold of
the sea—forty miles away, but so clear and calm—I leaned over the
stone bulwark, red in the sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked
in four or five thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly
thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near yet still withheld. It has
come only a few times in my life—once at Torcello, once among the
lost tombs of Etruria, there at Palestrina, and in the great hall of
the unmarked sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That was
modern indeed, a seventeenth-century affair, but the ancient spirit was
there—something that brooded over a lonely mighty country, unchanged,
untampered with, before the beginnings of history.
At Palestrina—or, to give the place its right name, Præneste—the
Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus, who took it and made it an
appanage of Rome four hundred years or so before this time—Marius and
Sulla, and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and left those
amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics and beautifiers as
surprise even our modern beauty-artists) behind them—all these seem
vulgar intruders on that sacredly ancient ground.
For, of all the cities of Romagna, Præneste has, I think, the most
perfect situation. It seems to have grown out of the wall of the
hills to watch over the southern roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna
stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly
outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the
sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain,
midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber;
but the west is the empty west always, left to the sun and the wind,
with the wide heavens above, and that one long sword of light laid on
its farther bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the
shore. To the south, at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills,
near, familiar, friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes
so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest from
Palestrina, the Appian Way leads on to Naples, and that is the way most
of the world travels; but the more beautiful road is the one which
leads, right past the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley
which separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and Valmontone and
Frosinone, following the classic Liris as it takes an almost straight
course through the garden it has ploughed and watered.
Seen from the Campagna, the Albans seem to be a range running east and
west, thrown up to make a frame and background for Rome; but travel
down the Liris and you will realize that all we see from Rome, Monte
Cavo and his lesser brethren, with their scores of white towns, is
simply the culmination of a long branch of the Apennines, set up like
a screen between the central range and the fever-haunted sea-board
called Maremma. When about two-thirds of the distance to Naples is
accomplished the range rises in the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina
to the height of nearly 4,000 feet and becomes merged in the central
Apennines once more. The railway runs through now, but it is still a
wild, remote country, very feudal in its ways, with half-ruined castles
on every point of vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no
longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that has had its
way for centuries has brought forth those stores of corn and wine and
oil which seem to be South Italy’s inalienable dower.
From Palestrina, looking down on that September evening, the bursting
richness of it all seemed almost incredible. Right at the foot of the
hills a deep abandoned watercourse was a golden river of standing
corn, bordered far on either side with dense greenery fringing off
into vineyards so teeming with fruit that seen from above it was like
a great mantle of dark amethyst patterned here and there, where the
white grapes grew, with jade. The woody slopes of the Sabines sank into
the rich carpet, and rose, away to the north, in stormy outlines, now
softened into dreamy rose and lilac, against the clear evening sky.
As the sun sank, even the cold silver of the olive trees, standing
tier above tier on their shallow terraces, took on the flush, as if
bathed in wine, and the darker foliage of oak and chestnut burned with
sombre yet vivid intensity. Then the sun touched the sea—lingered, a
ball of living crimson, for an instant, and plunged out of sight. One
star hung its new-born silver against the paling west; another and
another answered it, till all the dying blue overhead was pierced and
patterned with the faint sparklets in their eternal dance. Then from
behind the wall of peaks a broad fan of misty silver was thrown up
against the sky, growing, spreading, washing purple and crimson to one
untinted sheen; another moment, and the harvest moon heaved a golden
shoulder over the crags, rolled up, rounded itself, and hung, a great
honey-coloured globe, flooding the hills and the Campagna and the
distant sea with calm all-embracing effulgence.
At the time of my first visit to Palestrina I was still sufficiently
attracted by the Middle Ages to find much romance in the struggles of
the Colonnas and their contemporaries, struggles which dragged the
harrow over the vast Temple of Fortune, reputed the biggest in the
world, threw its stones one upon another, and left the place merely
a beautiful tomb. Since then, I confess, my interest has died away.
I can feel no sympathy with the noble cut-throats—Sciarras, Colonnas,
Orsinis, whose deeds are written in blood over every page of the time.
I used to weep over the sufferings they inflicted on Boniface VIII,
but, apart from the outrage on his sacred office, which can never be
condoned, one cannot help feeling that he deserved something of what
he got, and that in spite of his high courage and notable intellect, he
had treated those his enemies very basely and cruelly.
His election in 1217 had been bitterly opposed by two Colonna
Cardinals, Giacomo and Pietro, who were furious at the thought that
the Papal chair should be filled by one of the Gaetanis of Anagni, the
hereditary rivals and enemies of their own family. The election went
through, in spite of them, and they, fearing the new Pope’s wrath,
fled to Palestrina, taking every member of the family with them. This
was an open declaration of war, and the Pope realized that there would
be no peace for his realm till they were subdued. With truly mediæval
promptitude he at once confiscated all their estates and called on all
good Christians to take up arms against them. Their other strongholds
fell one by one into his hands, but Palestrina, with its tremendous
defences and commanding position, resisted every attack of the
besiegers. It seemed impregnable.
Then Pope Boniface remembered that the most victorious and ruthless
leader of the day, Guido de Montefeltro, was down on his knees in a
convent at Ancona, praying to be forgiven some of his deeds of blood
before death should call him to judgment. He commanded him to leave his
retreat and come to give his advice as to the reduction of Palestrina.
Very unwillingly the old soldier obeyed, and returned to that world
which he had left just in time to save his wicked soul. He went and
looked at the Colonna fortress, examined the defences with the eye
of an expert, and returned to the Pope, who was at Rieti. He told him
that there was no hope of taking Palestrina by force of arms. “What,
then, am I to do?” cried Boniface. Guido knew, but was unwilling to
say. The Pope insisted on his giving his opinion, and the crafty old
fighter proffered the counsel for which Dante, with some justice, put
him in Malebolge—“Prometter lungo e tenere corto!” “Promise much—fulfil
little,” it would run in English.
Boniface instantly acted on the advice. The Colonnas were promised
full forgiveness. They thought it wise to accept and submit. In all the
habiliments of mourning repentance they issued from the stronghold they
were never to see again, and came in a body to Rieti. The Pope received
them, pronounced their crimes against himself forgiven, and kept them
at Rieti as his guests. But prudence, as he apprehended it, forbade
that he should leave that eyrie and refuge of rebellion standing for
them to fly to the next time they picked a quarrel with him. So, while
they were sunning themselves in his favour in the mountain city of the
south, he secretly dispatched a faithful friend, Ranieri, the Bishop
of Pisa, to wipe Palestrina off the face of the earth. Nothing was to
be spared except the cathedral. And very thoroughly did Ranieri do
his work. Every vestige of the fortress and palace and the big town
which had grown up with them was destroyed, “a plough was driven over
the ruins, the ground was sown with salt, and even the famous marble
staircase of a hundred steps, up which people could ride their horses
into the palace,” was swept away.
Then the Colonnas, landless, homeless, penniless, understood how much
the Pope’s forgiveness was worth, and they fled from his domains to
nurse their wrongs and wait for revenge.
That came in good, or rather, very evil time, and Boniface paid in full
during the awful days at Anagni, days so dreadful that one quarrels
with Dante for not regarding them as sufficient expiation for the
harassed Pontiff’s one great sin. He was driven into a quarrel with
Philippe le Bel, the King of France, and Sciarra Colonna, the head of
the proscribed house, caught at the chance, and offered his services to
the French. In company with their leader, William de Nogaret, he broke
into Anagni, Boniface’s own city where he had taken refuge, and, but
for the opposition of Nogaret, he would, apparently, have murdered his
great enemy on the spot.
Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and place. He prepared
to meet death with the dignity of a priest and the courage of a
soldier. “If I am to die, I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every
friend, every Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of
“A Colonna, a Colonna,” rose from the lower streets of the mountain
town. Not a soul was left in the palace but the Pope. He put on his
pontifical vestments, placed the tiara on his head, and mounted his
throne, where he sat like a statue, awaiting certain death.
Colonna and Nogaret, with three hundred steel-clad men at their heels,
clanked into the hall, and stood dumb for a moment at the sight of
their great enemy, who neither spoke nor moved. Then they rushed upon
him, and Sciarra Colonna assailed him with a fiery torrent of abuse,
his anger feeding on itself till it ran through him like a flame,
and he struck the Pontiff on the face with his mailed hand. Nogaret
protested—Boniface said no word. He meant to suffer for his sins in
silence because so had the Redeemer suffered for sins not His. They
dragged the Pope from his throne, hustled him out into the Square, all
black with the gaping, cowardly crowd of his own subjects, put him on
a vicious horse with his face to the tail, and led him with outbursts
of derision through the streets. Not a hand was raised to defend him,
not a protest was heard. Then his conquerors brought him back to his
palace and locked him up, without food or drink, for three miserable
days, during which they sacked not only the palace, but every house
in the town, riding away at last glutted with plunder, destroying what
they could not carry off, and leaving literally nothing but bare walls
behind them.
Then, all danger being past, Boniface’s loving subjects bethought
themselves of letting him out. They found him fainting from exhaustion,
crying like a starved child for a morsel of bread and a cup of water.
The women wept over him then, and ran to minister to his wants; not so
much as a water-jar had been left in the palace, and they emptied their
bronze _concas_ into a wooden chest. Boniface died soon after, in Rome,
broken-hearted, and the carnival of anarchy in high places, with its
raging hate, and its fury of bloodshed, went on for many a long year
afterwards.
Truly, mediæval history makes depressing reading! How gladly the mind
reverts from it to the dawn of the centuries, when men fought for
their cities and their wives and children, but not for mere hatred of
their kind. And what a relief it is to turn from the endless carnage
of the later Middle Ages to the history that is not written in blood
and that charms and dominates us still, the history of strange, holy
lives every pulse of which was an act of love to God and mankind. It
is but a step from one to the other—from Boniface VIII and the Colonnas
and the Orsinis to Benedict and Scholastica—from smitten Palestrina to
cloistered Subiaco behind it in the hills.
On the way thither one stopped for a day in Olevano, to me the least
Italian, the most completely “foreignized” spot in all that country. It
has been for so many years the haunt of artists of every nationality
that it has none left of its own. Its beauty there is no denying;
it laughs in sunshine and prosperity, and for that, in these bad
times, one is grateful to it. But it is no more Italian than a fine
piece of staging at the Haymarket. The background is perfect, and
the inhabitants are healthy and handsome, but the moment they see a
traveller coming they throw themselves into paintable attitudes; all
naturalness seems gone; everything and everybody is harnessed to the
service of picturesque utility.
The famous inn, about which Gregorovius and Mr. Hare raved so
enthusiastically, resounds with northern tongues and with that
ear-splitting affliction known as German Italian. The walls are a
visitors’ book of untold price, where almost every notable artist of
the last hundred years has left his signature in sketch or portrait.
At every turn you are tripped up by easels, wet canvases, and artists’
umbrellas, and in the evening the beer flows freely and the jolly
brotherhood talks about itself at the top of its German voice, till
Italy—our shy melancholy Italy—fades into the background, and the weary
traveller trying to sleep in one of the bedrooms, which all open out
of the central dining-room, is led to believe that he has taken the
wrong train and been transported unawares to the scene of a “Kneipe” in
Munich or Dresden.
Talking about “wrong trains” reminds me of an absurd incident that
happened in England. A wayfarer who had taken a little more than was
good for him wandered into Victoria Station, having quite forgotten
the name of the place he wished to make for. But he could remember
what it was _not_. Into every train that came along he climbed—and
then asked the guard for what point it was bound. None of the answers
satisfied him, and he tumbled out on the platform again and again,
wailing, “Wrong train! wrong train!” At last, however, he struck the
right one, the guard’s answer to his query brought back the memory of
his domicile, and, much relieved, he sank down against the cushions
and began to smoke. At the first station on the road a clergyman got
into the compartment, and the train steamed on. Harder and harder the
reverend gentleman stared at his companion, who showed all too plainly
the evidences of his spree. Pretty soon, just as they were pulling
into another station, the Christian’s conscience bade him admonish his
erring brother.
“My friend,” he began in solemn tones, “do you know where you are going
to?” The overtaken one was all attention at once, and his monitor went
on, “You are going _straight to Hell_!”
“Oh, Lord!” moaned the sinner on the opposite seat, “wrong train
_again_!” And he sprang out of the carriage and stood weeping on the
platform while his one chance of getting home sped away from him into
the night.
We were little troubled by railways in the Sabines in my young days;
such innovations had not ever been contemplated, and all our travelling
was done on horses or mules. It was rather a long ride from Olevano to
Subiaco, and I was very tired and stiff when our little party straggled
into the road leading up to the town. But—what is youth without some
impossible romance? My “romance” had marched that way the year before,
with his company of Zouaves, condemned to garrison duty for three
dreary months in the hills, and _this_ (“parents, do you think you know
your children?”) was the utterly idiotic motive which had made me drag
my three unsuspecting men to Subiaco! I wanted to pick up a stone that
had been touched by the adored one’s foot! Very gingerly I climbed down
off my weary beast, selected a fine smooth pebble from the side of the
road where I knew my idol must have passed, and, with much difficulty,
scrambled up again. The pebble was afterwards polished, cut, and set in
Etruscan gold as a pendant, marked with a mystic inscription signifying
a challenge to fate to lessen the ardour of my attachment; and when I
found it among my trinkets, long years after my real fate had found and
claimed me, I could have wept for the delicious rainbow-tinted sorrows
of first youth!
But the treasure once secured, and the luxury of tears reserved for
some future unoccupied moment, I gave myself up to the magic of the
consecrated cleft in the hills, and, in spite of my own profound
ignorance in those days, in spite of the sceptical attitude of my
Presbyterian step-father and the Anglican Reverendo, and my dear
Marion’s bubbling fun and laughter—for he was a mere boy then, of the
most irrepressible kind—the “Sacro Speco” made a profound impression on
me.
It was as if a door leading out of some gay ball-room, all lights and
flowers and dance music, had suddenly been opened and I had passed
through it from the things of time to those of eternity. Fifteen
hundred years were wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called
from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to
be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in
the lives of the great founders—they had not at first the smallest
forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their
souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from
all occasions of sin and prayed for purification.
It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider
ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. _Our_
question is, “How much pleasure and amusement can I get in without
actually falling into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission we
grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors, that refused
would have prevented, or at least delayed, a hundred falls. It is so
terribly easy to do what all the rest are doing—to go and see the
problem play, read the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the
country house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the old
snares for our destruction and his own! We know all about it; it has
happened so often; but we go ahead, telling our hearts the lie they
know so well—“Oh, it doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!”
Steeped in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory
awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our already huge
burden, and imagine we can lay it down with a good deathbed confession
and slip into Paradise with the best!
Very different was the point of view of the great Saints. For one
who was converted late in life, we read of scores to whom Perfection
called in the very dawn of reason; and it is precisely these, who
never committed a mortal sin in their lives, who were most severe with
themselves—most nervous, as we should say, about their final salvation.
Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw even in the most
trifling failings a heinous offence against the Divine Majesty, and its
infinite purity, visible to them, made their own fallen nature black
by contrast. So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called
Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another blessed name
written in the _libro d’oro_ of the recording angel), and thought a
lifetime would not be too much to give to the task of subduing it. And
the Heavenly Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and never,
till the predestined moment came, did He let them dream that their
years of prayer and fasting were just a preparation for generalship
in His army, that in humbly striving to save their own souls they were
fitting themselves to save millions and millions of others.
The first symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard
of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the Church calls
it “human respect.” We quite understand that great men should kick it
out of the way—who ever heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking “What
are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling place them
above the reach of considerations by which we ordinary mortals are
content to regulate our actions. We admire, rave over, their splendid
carelessness. But when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken
measure, try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads. Their
whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought nothing of inflicting
most damaging shocks on public opinion—what a pity! And if we see
any of our acquaintances beginning to follow in their steps we look
the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into the street
half-dressed.
I wonder how many of her friends cared to bow to the late Countess of
Denbigh when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the crossing
near Farm Street, and swept it diligently, and stretched out her
blessed hand for the pennies, and never thought she was doing anything
heroic—just keeping old Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to
Mass! I believe the very angels wanted to throw down their shining
mantles for her to walk over when she went to heaven—but I am sure
some of her friends on earth thought she was putting them in a most
embarrassing position.
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has
described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages
in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in
each individual case, but the same note runs through all. “Permission
to labour first—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that
result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for
that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule
of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! How accordant their
practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the
house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop: the marriage-feast, it may
be, for some; and at last ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for
which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in
the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or
on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the
reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a
few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.”