SOUTHERN SHORES
Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests of
Stone-pine—Smiles and Tears—The Need of a Little Misfortune—Monte
Gargano—Millions of Spanish Merinos—Primæval Forest—A Forest
Miracle—Church of the Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions
of the Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round
Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden” Fortress of
France.
The real life of the Adriatic coast seems to diminish visibly when
one leaves Venice and drops down towards Ravenna; it has been drawn
away inland to busy cities that turn their backs on the sea, and the
sea itself has sullenly withdrawn, leaving ancient ports empty and
useless, like stranded wrecks that will never feel the leap of the
waves beneath their keels again. One should visit Ravenna either in
the heyday of irrepressible youth or much later in life when twilight
is companionable and sympathetic; otherwise, its melancholy is too
all-pervading, too depressing to be healthy. It is a city of ghosts,
big-eyed, hard-featured Byzantine ghosts; the great mosaics are full of
their portraits, and, with all the beauty of gold and colour, there is
something sinister and deathly in those tall straight figures, stiff
of gesture, rapacious of eye—likenesses caught unawares of people who
in their hearts prized power and wealth above all other things in this
life or the next.
I do not think any one Italian-born can feel much more than judicial
admiration of the severe early architecture, perfect though it be.
The sharp square outlines, the sulky red—that might be rosso antico,
so little has it yielded in tint or surface to the touch of Time,—all
this, to me, seems misplaced under the dreamy blue of the Italian sky.
Within the Churches the long aisles of double-storied arches cramp
the spaces where fancy might soar and prayer take wing. They make an
impression of narrowness, almost of Puritanism, that stifles emotion
and frowns at joy. Of course, all this is rank artistic heresy, or will
seem so to the crowd of submissive art experts who tumble over each
other in their haste to repeat the dictums of a few famous specialists;
but I fancy there are many simple-minded people who will agree with me,
all the same. It has always puzzled my own ignorance to understand how
anything so un-Italian as the early Byzantine style came to take root
and flower successfully on Italian soil. The radiant, light-flooded
climate does so much to soften and humanise the alien growth that it
buys its pardon for it in the end; but when some enthusiast, thrilled
with admiration for what he has seen basking in southern sunshine,
undertakes to reproduce it under the cold and lowering English skies,
its true character is shown at once. It is all too akin to them. One
escapes from the prison gloom of Westminster Cathedral to fly to the
Brompton Oratory and sink down in a corner and thank Heaven that St.
Philip Neri was a Roman, and that his sons and followers can still give
us Churches with big airy domes and broad smooth naves where the light
flows free, and transepts that open wide for worshippers and pool up
the blessed sunshine like any bay in the Mediterranean.
But there was one point on which Ravenna, in my day at least (for it
has suffered since then), yielded the palm to no Mediterranean port—the
stately forest of stone-pines that stood like troops at rest, for
miles along the shore. The stone-pine is always beautiful, whether as
a solitary, striking up, one shaft of grace and strength, against the
sky, or as in great companies sunk to the knees in the deep turfy mould
that their needles have piled below them in the course of centuries.
They grow thus in the South over many a green acre of villa land,
sheltering an unending profusion of the delicate wild flowers that
thrive in that rich soil. But for real forests of stone-pines you
must go further north and skirt the coast. There you will see them
in their glory, miles of them together, and, if you are quiet and
will listen, you will learn a great deal. For, like the sons of the
Prophets, they have secrets of their own that have never been shared
with other tribes, secrets that have only been confided to them, and
that is why the solitary pine is such a true solitary; he invites no
companions from the gregarious world around; towering and alone, he
seems to gaze at unseen horizons, to praise the Lord in the murmur of
the far-spreading branches that crown the fretted column of his stem;
as for Elijah on Mount Carmel, so for him the past and the present and
the future blend into one great chord of trusting acceptance that no
passing storms can shatter, no warm caress lure from its allegiance.
Have you, in some fleeting moment, caught the opening bars of an air
that has haunted you afterwards for years, and then been led to where
some great orchestra gave it to you in all its completeness? That was
what happened to me when I first stood in the “Pineta” of Viareggio
and heard the full-voiced chant of the pines and the sea. I realised
that they were part of one another, so to speak, that the whisper of
the villa pine in the South is an echo and a greeting, brought by the
wind from the family home in the North, where all the secrets of tree
music are guarded as in some jealous ancient academy—no outsiders are
ever privileged to carry them away! Psalms and marches and dirges, the
wild call of the Laga, the C Major of the “Te Deum,” the wail of the De
Profundis—the trees overhead and the surges on the shore will let you
hear it all, and once heard it can never be forgotten.
It seems strange that Viareggio, the most prosaic and unpicturesque
of all the Italian watering-places on the Ligurean shores, should
possess this wonder still in its perfection, while the sister forest
on the Adriatic side has been forsaken by the sea and devastated both
by fire and by the frosts of that terrible winter of 1878-1879. We
once abandoned Leghorn and went instead to Viareggio for our September
bathing—a great mistake, only made up to us by the drives through
the Pineta in the evenings. The discomforts and the ugliness of the
town have long since been forgotten—perhaps because the ups and downs
of existence have shown me far less bearable ones—and now the most
vivid recollection is that of the enchanted air and fragrances of the
Pineta. I think it will be so in the next life; if we win through
all right, we shall remember nothing of earth but its sweetnesses,
and the _very_ wise people refuse to look at anything else, even now!
The real philosophers, who are the real Saints, always seem to smile,
though sometimes it is through tears. And there is one queer thing
about tears—the people who have never wept don’t begin to know even
how to smile, much less how to laugh. I am always sorry and frightened
for them if they are nice good people, for we all have to pay our
little tribute to trouble, our tithe to humanity’s debt; some get it
spread all over a lifetime, some all in a moment, and these are the
spoiled ones of the nursery on whom I suppose long discipline might
have lain too heavily for their courage. I remember one startling case
that impressed me very deeply, that of a nice American family—father,
mother, and daughters twain—pleasant, harmless, good-looking people
with plenty of money and perfect health. I liked being with them,
though our views of life were severed as the Poles, mine reaching out
to the impossible and sensational (I was very young!), and theirs so
satisfied with the comfortable half lights of their own surroundings
that they simply could not imagine anything desirable beyond.
One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me about yourself,
Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother. “You look just as young as your own
daughters. I don’t think you can ever have had a trouble!”
“I never have,” she replied, turning on me her mild, satisfied gaze.
“I cannot remember a single sorrow in all my life, not a death in
my family, not an hour’s sickness even, amongst us all. We have all,
_always_, had everything we could wish for.”
It was the first time I had ever heard any one say such a thing, and
I felt awe-struck and envious. A few months afterwards they all went
back to America, at least they started to go. Their ship went down
in mid-ocean, and the dear people reached home sooner than they had
expected. But, for that sharp short suffering, it is just possible that
life and its unending pleasantnesses might have made it hard for them
to get to Heaven at all.
There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of “The Rose and the
Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick frowned at Prince Giglio and said,
“What you need, young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most
obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side to it—that
bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists on our taking from time
to time; the good things, even tiny little ones that we never noticed
before, do taste so wonderfully sweet afterwards!
But we were talking of shore forests. There is one, not of pine but
beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite Naples on the Tyrrhenian
Sea.[13] Here a great promontory runs out towards the east, rising
into mountains which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte
Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides. People call the
isolated district (which really belongs to the Province of Molise)
Manfredonia, from the name of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of
Suabian King Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the Thirteenth
Century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in another way and a
very effectual one. It was meant to be an island; on the western side
the Abruzzi shrinking back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic,
withdrawing slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many miles
wide—flat, marshy, abominably feverish—as a kind of defensive trench to
cut off the Gargano promontory from the rest of Italy, and, as it were,
remind it for ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all,
but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way. This vast
plain (for it stretches far and far past the promontory, towards the
south) refuses to nourish a single tree on the few feet of soil which
cover the mother-rock, but it provides such splendid food for sheep
that, since time immemorial, it has been given up to them. Alphonsus I
annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and imported his Spanish merinos
with such success that two hundred years later four and a half millions
of the beautiful creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on these
pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half million graze on them,
the sheep are lords and owners of all that ground. During the summer
they are led to the mountains, partly for their own sake, partly for
that of their keepers, who could not live in the miasma-haunted plains
in August and September. In crossing, even by train, the twenty-two
miles that separate Foggia from Manfredonia, the traveller is always
warned to close the carriage windows; but in October the sheep are all
driven back, and for weeks the three great roads that converge towards
the flats are just broad ribbons of dust, through which comes the
drumming of invisible millions of little hoofs. Along the edges of the
yellow cloud phantom figures of shepherds dressed in sheepskins take
shape at intervals and disappear again; and the dogs, dear faithful
things, fly round and herd up the stragglers and nip at the legs of
truants with the noisy joy that even long marches through the scorching
plains can never quite suppress.
From every point on those plains Monte Gargano can be seen, raising
its peaks against the blue, and clothed down to the very water’s edge
in magic beechwoods, homes of light and shadow and flickering gold,
musical with song, fragrant with wild flowers, and carpeted with the
rich mould that a thousand autumns have spread along its ways. Nothing
is ever disturbed on Monte Gargano. But for the sea and the fever-land,
the forest would long ago have been cut down, its riches dispersed,
its very site perhaps forgotten; but now all stands as it did from
the first, and winter and summer have their own way there, and the
herdsmen fold their cattle in the deep caves of the hills even as they
did fourteen hundred years ago, in the reign of the holy Pope, St.
Gelasius, when Heaven’s gates opened one May morning to let through a
flash of wings and the gleam of an Archangel’s sword, and the fairest
of Gargano’s peaks became Monte Sant’ Angelo.
And this was the way of it. While the rest of Italy was torn with the
struggles of rival barbarians, and desolated by the rapacity of men
like the Galla who drove his poor captives before him to the feet of
St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, the peasants of Monte Gargano, safe
in their isolation, lived as they live to-day, obscure, contented,
minding their own affairs—which are chiefly their own cattle—with all
their mind. In that wild place the cattle stray sometimes and it is
hard to find them again, and so it happened that on the 8th of May,
towards 493, or thereabouts, a young herdsman went climbing into the
hills with some companions to look for a valuable steer that he had
lost. Having wandered and searched for some time in vain, they were
feeling deeply discouraged, when they perceived the creature hopelessly
entangled in a thicket of briars at the entrance of a deep cavern. In
fear, or irritation, one of the pursuers drew his bow and let fly an
arrow at the animal, but, to the man’s amazement, the missile turned
in the air and struck him who had shot it. Terrified at this portent,
they all fled and did not stop till they reached the town of Sipontum,
far below, where they related what had happened to them. Fear fell
on the inhabitants, and no one had the courage to go and examine the
cavern, though all were consumed with curiosity to know what, or who,
it contained. In this dilemma they referred the case to their Bishop,
and he replied that he must lay the thing before the Lord, and ordained
three days of fasting and prayer for all the population, during which
they were to join him in begging that Heaven’s will in the matter might
be made clear.
And the petition was granted, for on the third day the great Archangel
Michael appeared to the Bishop and told him that the portent of the
returning arrow was intended to show that he wished to have a sanctuary
consecrated in that cave to the glory of God and in honour of the
Angels. So immediately the Bishop came forth and, gathering all the
people to him, led them, with prayers and chants, into the heart of
the hills to the mysterious cavern, and, entering in, they found it
hollowed out and disposed in the form of a Church, with all things
ready, so that the Bishop at once said Mass there; and from that hour
so many wonderful miracles took place on that spot that all men knew
certainly that it was greatly favoured by Heaven. And from that day to
this it has been a place of holy pilgrimage, where many sinners have
been converted, and many afflicted with terrible diseases cured.
The Church celebrates the Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel
on Monte Gargano on the 8th of May, but the feast of that spring
morning is not the only one in which she commemorates his glorious
interventions on her behalf. Far away in the North, another promontory,
strangely like that of Monte Gargano, once encircled by forests, too,
but now cut off from the land at each return of the tide, the Mont
Saint-Michel, stands as the last outpost of France, flinging defiance
at its twin peak across the water in Britain. There is something
strangely significant in the choice of these two points for the most
notable apparitions of the great Archangel, who commands the heavenly
hosts and watches with such sublime benignity over the destinies of
men. One in the North and one in the South, the great lonely rocks
rise sheer from the sea as if set apart as resting-places where the
glorious pinions might be folded for a while, and the effulgence of
the angelic countenance, too overwhelming for man to bear as it comes
straight from the Presence of God, a little tempered and veiled by
the mists of sorrowful earth. But one feels, too, that the purity of
the lonely rock, the brave song of the wind, the long roll of Atlantic
surge, and the chant of Adriatic billows were dear and welcome to the
Warrior Angel, who holds our world in his hands as the Creator’s chief
Minister, who carries out His mandates, chastising when he must, but
so tender to the contrite, so inspiring to the valiant, so royal in
protection to the oppressed!
Of all the peaks that bear his name through the length and breadth
of Europe none has been more signally his own than this one on the
coast of Brittany. The East has its own, in Phrygia, where also the
Archangel deigned to manifest his love for us poor mortals by his
visible presence, and where the marvel of that love is commemorated
under the title of “The Synax of Michael, Prince of the Army and of the
other Incorporeal Powers.” The Greeks always give such thunderously
full tides to their Friends in Heaven! But I am sure they cannot
honour their great protector half so heartily as he has been honoured
on the Mont Saint-Michel ever since he touched it and consecrated it
for all time, in the Eighth Century. The details that have come down
to us of that apparition are somewhat less full than those of the one
at Monte Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French Sanctuary,
which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable fortress, is
connected, right through, with humanity as the lonely shrine of the
South has never been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel
au Péril de la Mer”—St. Michael of the Peril of the Sea—and bespeaks
the invincible ally of the race that was once the ardent apostle of
Christianity and its most valiant champion. It was to St. Aubert that
the revelation came, when he was Bishop of Avranches, in the reign of
Childebert III. The Archangel appeared to him in his sleep, says the
Breviary, and bade him build a Church on the sentinel rock, round which
already many pious hermits were gathered to serve God in solitude. Now
St. Aubert was a man who reflected much before taking any new step,
and he hesitated so long that the Archangel had to repeat his visit
three times before he was obeyed—a great encouragement, this, to timid
souls!—but then the Saint went to work valiantly enough. The rock
was of a strange rounded shape, and he built on its summit a great
round Church, as closely resembling the holy cave at Monte Gargano as
possible. Then he sent to that place to fetch stones and relics from
it, all of which he set with great honour in the newer sanctuary;
and when all was done he established and endowed there a monastery
of twelve “holy clerks for the perpetual service of the Blessed
Archangel.” But Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wished still further to
honour St. Michael, so he sent away the clerks and established the
Benedictines in their place; and the fame of the Shrine and of the
many miracles performed there drew a great concourse of pilgrims from
all over the world, especially royal pilgrims, from England and Europe
generally, so that when the order of the Knights of St. Michael was
instituted, this was their Chapter House. By that time it was already
one of the most ancient and one of the few “maiden” fortresses of the
realm, and never, until the monarchy succumbed to the Revolution, did
a single foe to France succeed in setting foot within its walls. For a
thousand years, seven times a day, the praises of God had rang out from
it over the sea; for a thousand years the standard of France floated
stainless above its battlements. “Monsieur Saint-Michel, Archange,
premier Chevalier, qui pour la querelle de Dieu victorieusement
batailla contre le dragon” (it is thus that his titles are given in
the Institutes of the Order founded in 1469) took care of his own—till
France drove him away.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Montalembert.
[2] Montalembert.
[3] This term requires explanation. The two great sins of the Church
in Gaul were first Simony, and secondly, the practice of admitting
unprepared laymen to Holy Orders and often to the Episcopate. This last
vice Gregory called “The heresy of Neophytes.”
[4] In a former volume I stated that Pius IX had for a short time
served in the Noble Guards. This was an error, for he never obtained
admittance, although I believe a portrait of him in the uniform was
extant in the earlier years of the Nineteenth Century. It may have
been altogether a “fake” or else taken to please his father when there
appeared to be some hope of the latter’s ambition being fulfilled.
[5] “Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife” (Dodd, Mead & Co.); “The
Looms of Time” (Isbister).
[6] The Islands, about a hundred in number, but most of them very
small, and uninhabited, have been the cause of sharp contention and
have changed hands several times since their discovery in 1592—France,
Spain, England, and the United States have variously claimed them.
Twice the matter has been decided by an Englishman’s landing and
running up the Union Jack. The last time this occurred was in 1833,
when, in the middle of the quarrel, Captain Falkland took possession of
them on his own responsibility. Great Britain has held them ever since
as one of her recognised colonies. They are self-governing and have
a population altogether of two thousand souls; the capital, Stanley,
claiming nearly half of the number.
[7] “A Popular Life of Pius IX,” Rev. Richard Brennan. (Benziger, 1877.)
[8] St. Peter the exorcist, martyred with the Priest Marcellinus, under
Diocletian. His name occurs in the Canon of the Mass.
[9] “Le Pape Pie VII à Savone,” p. 83. H. Chatard. Plon, Nourrit et
Cie. (Paris, 1887.)
[10] “_Unchangeable principles_,”—unchangeable, that is to say, until,
of course, 1870, since when——!
[11] “Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife.”
[12] “Crimes Célèbres: Jeanne de Naples.”
[13] In our parlance all that it not the Adriatic is the Mediterranean,
but the Italians only give this name to the waters that separate
Italy and Spain from Africa, and differentiate the remainder as the
Ligurean Sea—in the Bay of Genoa, the Tyrrhenian that Rome and Naples
contemplate, and the Ionian, which washes up from Sicily under Italy’s
instep in the Gulf of Taranto.
Transcriber's Notes
Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved as much as
possible. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
End of Project Gutenberg's Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2, by Mrs. Hugh Fraser