Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures. When a
Magnificent One ordered for his gilded _sala_ a Madonna—even with
himself and his consort superadded—he was, for aught he knew, helping
to decorate Hampton Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a
master-butcher in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And when a
saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his death or of his
ultimate patronage. The fate of St. Francis, to live and die and be
canonised in his birthplace, was of the rarest. His pendant, St.
Dominic, came from Old Castile, and was buried in Bologna.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find St. Giulia, of Carthage, in
possession of Brescia, though I must confess that until I stumbled upon
the frescoes consecrated to her in the church of S. Maria del Solario
her name and fame were unknown to me. Luini painted these frescoes, the
sacristan said, though the connoisseurs omit to chronicle them and will
doubtless repudiate the attribution. The date of 1520 appended to the
somewhat free and easy Latin epigraph beneath does indeed bring them
well within Luini’s working period, but their authenticity interests me
less than the story they tell.
St. Giulia, it would appear, was born in the seventh century of a noble
Carthaginian family, and was endowed with holy learning and every
spiritual grace.
“Stemate præsignis Carthagine nata libellos
Docta sacros, anima, corpus gestuque pudica,
Curatu patiens, humilis, jejuniaque pollens.”
Such a maiden could only become an apostle to the heathen. Accordingly,
we see her arrive at Corsica in a boat with neither oar nor sail, and
start praying to the true God. A good-natured citizen warns her of the
risks of such heresy, and the kindly ruler of Corsica himself adjures
her to discretion, his monitions being emphasised by a man with an axe
who stands behind him. But holding her prayer-book, and already crowned
with her halo, she prays on. The next fresco shows the inevitable
sequel. She is hanging by her hair to the bough of a pretty tree, while
an executioner prods at her bleeding breasts with a three-pronged fork,
though his head is turned away, as if he were not over-proud of his job.
The kindly ruler, however, continues his remonstrances. In the distance
a small, dim angel wings his way to her. Finally, she is stretched on a
cross, and two ruffians batter her with massive clubs, but angels hold
the palm and wreath over her head, and the Dove flies towards her. These
celestial visions are a true interpretation and externalisation of the
psychology of the martyr: these alone could support her. In our own day
the visions of our martyrs are less concrete; they die for some far-seen
ideal of Justice or Freedom, and this suffices to sustain them in
Spanish prisons or under the Russian knout.
But what is peculiarly noteworthy in the story of Giulia is the status
of woman in the Dark Ages and under the Catholic Church. St. Giulia
appears to enjoy as great a roving licence as St. Augustine, her
fellow-citizen in Carthage and “The City of God.” She is not considered
unsexed, nor does her teaching rank below man’s, and she is canonised
equally with the male. In fact, in leaving the home-nest to preach to
the heathen, she is only following the model of Thekla in the Apocryphal
“Acts of St. Paul,” whose story, though it was forged by a pious elder,
is none the less proof of woman’s position in that highest of all
ancient spheres, Religion. “I recommend unto you Phœbe, our sister,”
says the misogynous St. Paul himself (Romans xvi), “for she hath been a
succourer of many and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my
helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own
necks.”
It is, indeed, doubtful whether Christianity would ever have been
established but for the courage and companionship of women. I feel sure
they tidied up the catacombs and gave a feeling of home to the crypts
and caves. “It was the women who spread Christianity in the family,”
says Harnack. St. Augustine’s father was a heathen; it was his mother,
Monica, who taught him to pray. The Virgin Martyr, like Santa Reparata
of Florence, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, is a stock figure of the
Roman calendar. As in all great movements, differences of station were
forgotten, and Blandine, the servant-girl of Lyons, played as majestic a
part as the royal-blooded St. Catherine, whose wheel of martyrdom finds
such quaint perpetuation as a firework.
Popular imagination added the Madonna to the Trinity as a sort of female
representative. In Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, as I have already noted, she
figures as authoritatively as the Christ, and in a picture at Vicenza,
attributed to Tiepolo, she stands on the world, crushing the snake with
her foot.
Her companions were usually divided in sex and united in glory. Luca
della Robbia, in his charming relief in the cathedral of Arezzo,
scrupulously places one male and one female saint on her either hand,
and even one male and female angel: doubtless had cherubs possessed sex
possibilities, his cherubs too would have been impartially distributed.
In the Accademia of Florence, Cimabue’s Madonna is entirely surrounded
by female saints, though a few males loom below her throne; Giotto’s
shows a female surplus; Bernardo Daddi’s redresses the balance. Fra
Angelico gives us _Jesus carried to the Tomb_ by nine women to four men.
Italian art is full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality, and if a
church was decorated with male saints down one aisle, they would be
scrupulously balanced by female saints along the other. An old Byzantine
Basilica of Ravenna, which displays twenty-two virgins arrayed against
thirty saints of the dominant sex, first set me wondering whether, since
the Dark Ages, woman has not gone back in Christendom instead of
forward. Here at least was the atmosphere for the legend, if not for the
reality, of a Pope Joan, whereas at the period in which I first opened
my eyes upon the world and woman, she appears to have become reduced to
an absolute industrial dependence upon her lord like the
fifteenth-century chicken in Giambattista della Porta’s “Book of Natural
Magic.” For according to the delightful recipe (cited by Corvo) for
inducing affection towards you in a chicken, you must—before it has its
feathers—“break off its lower beak even to the jaw. Then, having not
the wherewithal to peck up food, it must come to its master to be fed.”
I might cite in proof of woman’s retrogression since the Dark Ages the
glorification of womanhood through “The Divine Comedy,” but the Italian
poet’s translation of life into literature is, I fear, no more legal
evidence of the real status of woman in the Middle Ages than her
chivalrous deification at the hands of the Germanic or Provençal poets
is a proof that she was treated even as an equal of her worshippers.
Dante’s unknown Beatrice sounds like a woman who was snubbed by her
husband and brothers. But Matilda, who plays second fiddle to her, and
who is equally drawn by Dante as a mild flower-culling “bella Donna” was
in reality the warrior Countess of Tuscany, and the fact that Dante
feminises and floralises her shows that he had no real respect for
feminine dominance in the actual shapes it took in life, and that he was
only prepared to idealise woman on condition of her conforming to his
ideal.
The scholars and commentators who have always been so puzzled at the
metamorphosis of Matilda have forgotten man’s tendency to break off
woman’s beak, whether in reality or in imagination. But even if Preger
be correct in identifying Dante’s Matilda, not with the armoured Amazon
of Tuscany, but with Mechtilde, the nun, whose mystic visions are the
flowers she culls, it remains true that Dante’s ideal was never the
“Virago,” a title of honour which was inscribed on her tomb, and which
even at the epoch of the Renaissance implied nothing but praise. The
word may serve to remind us that there is no sharp bisection of
qualities between the sexes.
Matilda was, in fact, a sufficient refutation in herself of the notion
that there is a rigid division between the qualities of men and women.
Such a difference as is implied does, indeed, exist, but it is between
men and men, and between women and women, as well as between men and
women, and the popular nomenclature, which calls certain women mannish
and certain men effeminate, recognises the possibility of deviation from
the normal. Indeed, considering that both parents affect their child,
the attempt to breed a special feminine psychology, immune from politics
and fighting, must be perpetually thwarted by the criss-cross action of
heredity, as upon the daughters of warriors and statesmen.
Matilda—sired by the Magnificent Monster, Boniface—was a man in ten
thousand. She led her own armies. She patronised learning and founded
the law schools of Bologna. If she kept her husbands in subjection,
casting off one after the other, she had none of the vices of the male
despot; indeed, her second marriage-contract stipulated only a sexless
union. There was nothing, indeed, except these vices in which she ranks
below the Magnificent Monsters who preceded her in the lordship of Lucca
or Lombardy. I must admit that the Countess of Tuscany fell under the
influence of her spiritual director (as the Male Magnificent falls under
the influence of his unspiritual directress), and that she used her
power, and her treasure, as it is feared women will, to bolster up the
Church; in fact, she, with her mother Beatrice, attended the Council of
Rome in 1074, at which investiture by lay hands was declared illegal,
and hers was the Castle of Canossa, to which Henry IV came to abase
himself before the Pope. And that dubious temporal power of the Pope’s
might not have come into such solid being had she not left her
possessions to the See of Rome, and thus practically founded the States
of the Church. This, of course, is the secret of her high position in
the earthly paradise of the Purgatory. But, after all, religious zeal is
not a female monopoly, and even Bloody Mary could not hold a candle to
Torquemada.
Catherine of Siena exercised an equally critical influence upon the
fortunes of the Papacy and upon European history when she persuaded
Gregory XI to move the Papal seat back from Avignon to Rome; a mission
in which Rienzi had failed a generation earlier. Catherine, for all her
ecstasies and self-scourgings, had far more common sense than the male
mystics.
It was in allowing for such divergences from the normal that the Dark
Ages surpassed our electric-lit era, whose logic confounds the optional
with the compulsory, and the individual with the general. It was not
pretended that every woman can or must be a warrior, but she who had
military genius was not debarred from developing it. It was not claimed
that every woman can or must be a saint, but St. Clara stood equal with
St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena with St. Dominic. And at the
Renaissance Boccaccio devotes a book to celebrated females, and
Michelangelo writes most humble love-sonnets to the poetess, Vittoria
Colonna (whose _Rime_ still sell, and who unlike Matilda stood for
religious reform). Vittoria’s noble classic head, especially as seen
helmeted in Michelangelo’s design, suggests a very Minerva, and from
various quarters we hear of the political woman, the learned woman, the
patroness of the arts, and the female physician, while at the foot of
the staircase of Padua University stands a statue of a lady Professor, a
happier Hypatia. I forget if this is Lucrezia Cornaro, who was made a
Doctor of this University and a member of so many learned societies
throughout Europe, but no enumeration of Italian heroines should omit
her brilliant ancestress, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, whose court
at Asolo was one of the centres of the Renaissance.
“The education given to women in the upper classes,” says Burckhardt,
the learned historian of “The Renaissance in Italy,” “was essentially
the same as that given to men. . . . There was no question of ‘women’s
rights’ or female emancipation, because the thing in itself was a matter
of course. The educated woman no less than the man strove naturally
after a characteristic and complete individuality.”
When one remembers the struggle in nineteenth century England for the
higher education of women, and particularly the desperate resistance to
their studying and practising medicine, one realises the fallacy of
expecting melioration from the mere movement of time. There is no
automatic progress. What is automatic is retrogression, so that the
price even of stability is perpetual vigilance.
But what has St. Giulia, born at Carthage and crucified in Corsica, to
do with Brescia? I have already pointed out the free trade in saints, by
which they were liable to posthumous export. St. Giulia’s body was
transported from Corsica by Desiderio, a noble Brescian, who ascended
the Longobardian throne in 735. She was placed in the church dedicated
to St. Michael, the patron saint of the Longobardi, whom she ousted in
915, from which date the Church was known as St. Giulia’s. A Nunnery of
S. Giulia had existed from about 750, and remained in being for over a
thousand years, till its suppression in 1797 by the inevitable Napoleon.
Coryat, who visited it in 1608, describes it as having been in time past
“a receptacle of many royall Ladies.” It is now a Museum of Christian
Art, and there I saw St. Giulia depicted in sculpture by Giovanni Carra,
her figure nude to the waist and stretched on a real wooden cross with
real nails in her hands and feet. Alas for Christian Art!
To-day our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on
prostitution and sex-inequality, demand political rights as leverage for
a nobler society, and, despite the advice of kindly Rulers, they are as
ready as in the seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though
they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures of
aggression. Guariento foresaw the modern militant type when he drew
those charming female angels with red and gold shields and long lances,
and wings of green and gold, who stand on clouds—“suffragette” seraphs,
they seem to me. You may see a battalion of them in the Museo Civico of
Padua, filling a whole corridor, like a procession in the lobby at
Westminster. One of these fair warriors trails by a cord a black demon
with two quills like white horns, doubtless some literary Cabinet
Minister. Another weighs two souls on scales, and Female Suffrage does
indeed weigh men’s souls in the balance, to find them mostly wanting.
For of all forms of modern vulgarity, I deem nothing more dreadful than
the scoffing callousness towards the sufferings of the “Suffragettes.”
They are only self-inflicted, we are told, as if this was not their
supreme virtue. That in this age of blatant materialism women should
still show that they possess souls is wondrous comforting to the
idealist, tempted to believe that the fount of living waters had run
dry, and that Giulia’s only travels were now made by motor-car to smart
country houses.
There is nothing which at first sight seems more puzzling than the
wickedness of good people. For it has often been said that the truly
devout and respectable Christians are the very ones who would crucify
Christ afresh if he appeared again, as indeed Arnold of Brescia, who had
a touch of his spirit, was crucified by Emperor, Pope, and Church. And
St. Bernard, the inspirer of the Second Crusade to recover the dead
bones of Christ, played a leading part in hounding him down, as the
Franciscans played a leading part in hounding down Savonarola.
Now why was St. Bernard—that _santo sene_ who was chosen by Dante to
induct him into the last splendours of the Paradise, and whose noble
hymns to Jesus still edify the faithful—so blind to the divine aspects
of his victim? And why is it that the citizens of Ferrara, whose
excellent statue and eloquent tribute to their illustrious townsman
Savonarola faced my hotel window, could not be trusted not to stone
their next prophet in a cruder sense of the words?
A converse question will conduct us to the answer. Why is the hooligan
in the gallery of the theatre ever the chief friend of virtue? Why is
the wife-bruiser the most fervid applauder of the domestic sentiment?
Because the man in the gallery looks down on the tangle of life like the
god his name implies: he sees it in as clear perspective as the aeronaut
sees the network of alleys through which the pedestrian blunders; the
plot is straightened out for him, the villain duly coloured, virtue in
distress plainly marked by beauty and white muslin, and through no mists
of prejudice or interest or passion he beholds the great outlines of
right and wrong. ’Tis to the credit of human nature that, confronted
with the bare elementals of ethics, and freed from egoistic bias, the
human conscience, even the conscience most distorted in life, reacts
accurately and returns a correct verdict with the unfailingness of a
machine. This it is that preserves the self-respect of the blackest of
us, this capacity of ours for seeing our neighbours’ sins, which is the
chief bulwark of public virtue. Wherefore, could St. Bernard have seen
Arnold of Brescia as history sees him, or as a dramatist of insight
would have drawn him, St. Bernard would have been the first to be
horrified at St. Bernard’s behaviour. But a Saint, no more than a
hooligan, is free from passions, interests, and prejudices of his own,
especially an ecclesiast and a theologian and a founder of monasteries.
Wilful and obstinate as are all the saints of my acquaintance, the most
domineering are the clerical. For all St. Bernard’s genius and holiness,
he could not endure a rival point of view. By him, and not by this
interloping Italian monk, this pupil of the critical Abélard, must the
world be turned to righteousness; nay the heresies of Abélard
himself—“who raves not reasons”—must be condemned by the Council of
Sens.
St. Bernard, if he lived to-day, would write the life of Arnold of
Brescia with holy horror at his tragic fate, and to-morrow, when the
passions and mists of to-day are cleared away, some future Asquith will
find a fresh stimulus to rebellion against the Peers in the noble
sufferings of some St. Giulia of the Suffrage.