* * * * *
I stood before an altar in a little church, but this time a sweet-faced
woman in a wimple stood beside me.
“The wall is behind the altar,” she said. “And once a year the
miraculous image of the Madonna of the Bed is shown to the people of
Pistoja and the pilgrims, exactly as Our Lady of the Graces impressed it
on this piece of wall here when she appeared to the sick girl. Very
beautiful is she in her crown and mantle, clasping to her arms the
crowned Bambino as she flies upwards.”
“And where is the bed?”
“The bed was removed from this sanctuary, which it blocked up
disproportionately. A separate little chapel was built for it.”
We passed to the bed-chapel by way of the old cloisters of the Ospedale,
and saw in a small room a heavy brownish wooden bed with a red quilt,
made as for an occupant. A Madonna and Child was painted on the
headpiece, and a Madonna and Child at the foot, and a Madonna and Child
hung on the wall.
“And when was the miracle wrought?” I asked.
“In 1336.”
The very year of the death of Cino, the poet of Pistoja and the friend
of Dante, I remembered. And Dante and Cino had receded into the dim
centuries while this bed with its prosaic quilt and pillows stood
stolid, inscribed at head and foot with inscriptions dated 1336 and
1334, begging me to pray for the souls of Condoso Giovanni and Fra
Ducchio.
“Here,” explained the sweet-faced sister, “the poor girl had lain many
long years, incurable, when one day the Virgin appeared in dazzling
beauty, holding the Child, and told two little boys who happened to be
in the hospital to fetch brother Jacopo della Cappa. The venerable
brother, being busy confessing, refused to be disturbed, whereupon the
Virgin sent a second message bidding him come at once, for she desired
him to predict a pestilence in Pistoja, of which he would die in a
month. So he came forthwith, but he had scarcely entered the room when
the dazzling apparition disappeared. But she left the invalid girl in
perfect health, and her holy image on the wall.”
“And did Fra Jacopo duly die?”
“To the day. And so great was the plague that there was scarcely any one
left to administer the last office.”
“As disproportionate as the bed to the church,” I thought, “to kill off
all Pistoja and save one bedridden girl.” But how utter such a thought
to this sweet-faced sister?
“Since then the bed and the image on the wall have wrought many
miracles,” she said. “The blind have had their sight, the deaf their
hearing, the paralysed their limbs. That was why the name was changed
from Our Lady of the Bed to Our Lady of the Graces. And countless were
the pilgrims that came. But in 1780 the wicked Scipione Ricci, who was a
secret Jansenist, was made our bishop, and he tried to destroy the faith
in our sanctuary and in the Girdle of Prato. But our neighbours of Prato
rose against him, rushed into the cathedral, smashed his episcopal
chair, and sacked his palace. He had to resign his bishopric, and so our
faith was purged of the heretic, and Maria was avenged. Ah, that jubilee
of her Immaculate Conception in 1904! It was a day of Paradise.”
* * * * *
Again a haze disturbs my vision. For a moment I see the little
olive-eyed Jewess of Nazara, racked between husband and son, wringing
her impotent hands; then my vision clears, and I am reading a printed
Italian prayer before a chapel of the Madonna in a mighty fane.
“TO THE HOLY IMMACULATE VIRGIN OF HOPE VENERATED IN THE BASILICA OF S.
FREDIANO
“Kneeling before you, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, consoler
of the afflicted, refuge of sinners, we pray you to turn upon us
your looks full of goodness, compassion, and love. You see all
our spiritual and temporal needs. Obtain from your divine Son
sincere contrition for sin, light to know the truth, force to
conquer temptations, help to believe and act as true Christians,
patience in tribulations, peace of heart, holy perseverance to
the end. Obtain for us that there may remain far from us
disease, pestilence, hunger, war, earthquakes, fires, drought,
flood, sudden death. Take this City under your particular
protection, preserve it, defend it, cause ever to reign therein
the spirit of religion and of concord, and in private families
mutual charity, domestic content, and good morals. . . . Whoever
will devoutly recite this will acquire forty days’ Indulgence
already conceded by His Most Reverend Excellence Monsignore the
Archbishop Filippo Santi.
“_Lucca_, 1848.”
* * * * *
I seemed to be back in Asia on a burning June day fifteen hundred years
before this prayer was written, much pushed about by the crowd that
surged round a church.
“Is it the Whitsuntide service?” I asked a priest at last in the Greek I
heard on all sides.
“Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou
knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council
of Bishops that is sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to
the Virgin?”
“What insults?” I murmured.
“Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill with our Seven
Sleepers! This blasphemous Patriarch of Constantinople denies our Lady
the title _Theotokos_, would argue that she is not Mother of God, but
that the Christ born through her was only the human part of Him, not the
Eternal Logos.” His voice trembled, his beady eyes flamed with passion.
“And he dares come defend his thesis here—in Ephesus, where the Holy
Virgin lies buried! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn up
twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he stamped out that minx
Hypatia.”
“Is Cyril here too, then?”
“Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached! ‘Hail, Mary, Mother of
God, spotless dove! Hail, Mary, perpetual lamp at which was kindled the
Sun of Justice! Hail, Mary! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and
sing; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star; thanks to Thee the
college of Apostles was established. . . .’” His voice died away in
reminiscent ecstasy.
“Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate?”
“Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing—he pretexts that all the
bishops are not arrived, and he induced the Emperor’s commissioner to
protest against the sitting. But as thou seest, the Council is going
on—hath been going on from early morn—there are two hundred bishops.”
“There are only a hundred and fifty,” put in a voice. “It is
scandalous.”
“Ay,” assented another voice. “Where is the Patriarch of Antioch?”
The priest turned on the Nestorians. “It is beasts like you with whom
Paul fought here,” he said.
“Beast thyself,” retorted a physician in a long robe, “to suggest that
God could be contained in the womb.” It was the beginning of a scuffle
that grew to a bloody battle between the Nestorian minority and the
orthodox. Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group of
Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it again, leaving a
trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle. The survivors made for the
harbour, hoping doubtless for safety in the multitude of boats and
ships.
And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the Council-chamber, till
at last as the long summer day closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder
was heard from within—“Anathema! Anathema!” And the cry passed to the
crowd—“Anathema! Anathema!”—till the whole firmament seemed to crash
and rock with it and men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in
air. And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the word came
that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches leapt as by magic into
flame, and men escorted the Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and
singing, and lo! round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires.
And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian _bottegas_ with
immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out through the centuries portraits
of the Madonna and Child, to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a
symbol of the true faith: delectable, innumerable, filling the whole
earth with their glory.
* * * * *
The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded
humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at
Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such
rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily
caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many
banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy
of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of
bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the
roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there
came from parted lips, “_Ave Maria purissima_” or “_Viva nuestra
Señora_,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “_Sin peccado
concebida_.”
Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the
bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the _Fiesta_. All this
overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the
Bull—_Regis Pacifici_—which after centuries of passionate controversy
had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and
seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the
opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public.
Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed
from her perfection.
“Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely
Señora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have
purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the
protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more
glorious than her past.”
But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was
trailed off at a gallop.
“_Ave Maria purissima!_”
“_Sin peccado concebida!_”
* * * * *
I am still in Spain, watching Señor Bartholomé Estéban Murillo polish
off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently
under the guidance of Señor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he
paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels
floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped
hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two
centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the
Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull
_Ineffabilis_, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from
original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the
“Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young
shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a
White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a
chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who
announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a
Procession to her shrine.
And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal
colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and
holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of
Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the
Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed
in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and
jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and
litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic
bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the
night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic
canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in
leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the
perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of
the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.
* * * * *
The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by
the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza
and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I
was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame
that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain
that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this
dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio?
In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks
were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria!_”
And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy
Mother, was the _civitas Virginis_, and that the Madonna was its feudal
suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from
the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the
weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the
Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was
carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias;
and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her
white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories
to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a
slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the
region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was
abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and
the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous
processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna
rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain
of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the
trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver
basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the
Virgin did her duty as suzerain——
But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment.
“Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror.
“Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now
distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”
“We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled.
“No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd
underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.
“They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found
another!”
And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a
little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise
under her dishevelled head-shawl.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!_”
* * * * *
The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off
these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond
the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still
tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb
to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets
recommenced—“_Debellatrix Incredulorum_,” “_Janua Coeli_,” “_Turris
Davidica_,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her
countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our
Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the
Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed
Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches
and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from
Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine
of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all
the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in
wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude
little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender
marble Pietà of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had
created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of
the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies,
lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the
melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve
Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation,
sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “_Sancta
Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!_” And her figure
floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before
millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing,
vitalising.
And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis:
in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that
looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for
“maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led
to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the
vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty
with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the
brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born
as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the
growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had
grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and
maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four
feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls
from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with
her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had
been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard
opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma
against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so
serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the
popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of
heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular
emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of
purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of
schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the
centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the
carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need,
her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna,
the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And
what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy,
from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and
twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!
And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters,
to the _Vergine Bella e di sol vestita_—the beautiful Apocalyptic
Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of
Tasso, and the _Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio_ of Dante, and the
images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna
sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the
poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural
loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or
space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude;
who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in
strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or
within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the
shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara.
But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple
crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of
temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn
face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little
olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the
terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”