THE LEGEND OF SANTA RESTITUTA.
Ischia is one of the gems of the Bay of Naples, and fortunately one of the least known and least visited of the tourist-haunted island group.
The Monte Epomeo rises in its midst, a mass of tufa rock, perforated here and there by fumarole, that is, openings through which volcanic exhalations are constantly sending forth their thin blue threads of hazy smoke to mingle with the blue and hazy atmosphere that veils the whole island in a fairy and gossamer robe. Two or three villages are built upon the low girdle of sand that lies at the foot of the mountain; on one side of the island are ledges of rock where the vine grows, on the other is a projection, or rather a separate rock, on which is built a state-prison. Only one road passes through Ischia, and no wheels ever leave their marks there, save when a royal visitor brings a modern carriage with him. The inhabitants walk barefoot, and the strangers ride donkeys, or are carried in open sedan-chairs, called "portantine." The women lounge about at their cottage-doors, spindle in hand, their heads curiously bound up in silken handkerchiefs, and their ears weighed down by huge ear-rings. There is a wonderful and unspeakable charm hanging over the place; the beauties that elsewhere in Italy hardly surprise you, seem to hold you spell-bound here. The sea is now blue, now green, now purple, always of an intense color, and seemingly an inverted firmament, where the white fishing-smack sails stand for clouds, and the little silver-crested wavelets for stars. The air is very pure, yet warm and balmy, and, when the storm visits the island, even the lightning must make itself more softly beautiful than elsewhere, for it is often seen in rose and violet colored flashes, making the heavens like to a vault of opal. The myrtle grows on the mountain-side, and the oleander blooms lower down, the vines climb from the water's edge to the roofs of the few rustic hotels the island boasts, and among all these beauties are hidden springs of medicinal water and hot sea-sands, all of them much used by Italians chiefly in the shape of baths. The sand-bath is a hole within four shanty-like plank walls, and the patient has himself buried in it up to his neck for the time prescribed.
Of course, much is said to strangers concerning the beauty of the sunrise from the top of Epomeo. But, as usual, when you go to see the sun, you find him behind sulky curtains of gray-white clouds that roll like another sea between the blue unseen Mediterranean and the bright purple heaven above. Still, this, too, is beautiful, though coldly so, and very unlike the lovely western sunrise over the Atlantic. But the glory of Italy is in her sunsets, and toward evening sea and mountain, tufa rock and yellow sand, put on a marvellous robe, a veritable "coat of divers colors," and life seems to breathe and sigh in things that before seemed lifeless.
Ischia, like all Italian localities, has its patron saint; they call her Santa Restituta.
When persecution was raging in Egypt, in the third century, says the simple legend, the body of a young maiden, with a millstone tied round her neck, floated across the sea and rested in a creek on the south side of the island. The creek is called after the martyr to this day, and above it are rocks whose black mass literally overhangs and roofs in part of the bay. Just where her body rested, in a sandy, barren place, lilies grew up and continued to bloom; they are there now, and are very peculiar as well as very lovely, a sort of cross between the lily and the iris, with delicate pointed petals, five in number, and a tall smooth stem with very little verdure. Not only do these flowers grow nowhere else in the island or out of it, but they will not even grow in a land of their own sandy soil if transplanted with a quantity of it elsewhere. The millstone that was round the saint's neck is said to be embedded in a wall in the neighborhood of her church: there is such a stone, whether the same or not no one can tell. Later on, a church was erected over the remains of the martyr, and she was chosen patroness of the island. A very curious Byzantine figure, gilt all over and nearly life-size, was made in wood and placed over the altar. In one hand, she was pictured as holding a book of the Gospels, and, in the other, a full-rigged vessel. When the south of Italy was invested by Saracen hordes, Ischia did not escape pillage, and of course, judging the most precious things to be in the church, as they always were in Catholic times, the marauders rushed to Santa Restituta's shrine, and attempted to carry off the golden statue, as they believed it to be. The statue, naturally, was a movable one, and used to be carried in procession on certain stated occasions. But now it remained rooted to the spot, and no effort of the stalwart infidels could move it a hair's-breadth from its pedestal. In rage and disappointment, one of them struck at it savagely with his scimetar, and a mark upon its knee still attests this outrage. The sacrilege was promptly punished, for the men themselves now found they were unable to move, and remained invisibly chained at the foot of the miraculous image. If they were released, the legend does not say; let us hope that they were freed by faith, and that conversion followed this strange sign. The statue remained immovable ever since, and another image was made to be carried in procession, with the addition of the miraculously riveted Saracens, in a small painted group on the same stand as the figure itself. Whether the legend be absolutely true or only partly so, whether fact and figure be mixed together, and things spiritual typified under tangible forms, it is not for us to decide, but the simple faith of the happy islanders is certainly to be admired, and even to be envied. They have yearly rejoicings, fireworks, processions, songs, and services, and a military parade of what national guards they can muster, to celebrate their saint's anniversary; they are proud of her, and point out her statue and tell her history to strangers with the same enthusiasm with which soldiers speak of a favorite general.
And, if my surmise be true, they have had her celebrated in art by no less a painter than Paul de la Roche, whose "Martyre" is well known all over Europe as one of the chastest, truest, and most reverent as well as most beautiful representations of martyrdom. He has painted a fair maiden in a white robe, and her hands tied with a cruel rope in front. The long, golden hair is gently moved, like a strange and new sea-weed, by the rippling water that flows over it; the cord cuts into the flesh of the white, delicate hand, and the water seems reverently eager to pour its coolness into the wounds and to stay the cruel fever in them; the face is that of an angel that is looking on the Father's countenance in highest heaven; a coronal of light rests, like a sun-touched cloud, just above her head, and in the dark background a large mass of overhanging rock, just like the rocks of Ischia, frown down upon the sea-green bay, and shadows of muffled, lurking figures are seen watching the floating wonder from above.
If the painter had not Santa Restituta in his mind, the coincidence, at least, is curious. Yet it is true that so many blessed saints died this death that he may have meant to portray a typical rather than an individual representation in this picture, which is one of his masterpieces.
There is another floating figure, with golden hair and folded hands, which is more familiar to most people than this one, and, though the comparison is strange, I cannot help introducing it here. I mean the figure of Tennyson's Elaine, whom Gustave Dore has made his own in his unapproachable illustration of the Idyls of the King, but whose history and especially whose death has been the source of many a painter's inspiration. I hardly know one more touching object in all modern poetry, save that more solemn and more dignified one that closes the idyl of Guinevere, and whose calm sublimity almost touches the divine. But though the analogy of the "Lily Maid of Astolat" borne down the river to the oriel-windowed palace of Arthur's Queen to that other lily maid, the virgin-martyr of Egypt, be brought to mind by the likeness in both cases of the floating waters and the unbound hair; yet here the analogy ends, for we see that as far as heaven is from earth, so far are these two beautiful figures removed one from the other. Both died for love, both died pure; but the love of the one was such as, once quenched in death, would never live again, for she would be "even as the angels;" while the love of the other not only did death not quench, but would make tenfold more ardent, as she would "follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth," and sing "the new canticle" no man could sing but those "who were purchased from the earth."
Tennyson's Elaine is a figure of earth in earth's most sinless form and most innocent meaning, yet still earthly, still imperfect, still embodying the idea of man's natural weakness and inherent decay. Paul de la Roche's "Martyre," or Ischia's Santa Restituta, is a figure of heaven, an already glorified soul, who, having conquered the flesh, the world, and the devil, having offered her body to God "a living sacrifice," and having "put on immortality," has passed beyond our understanding and beyond our criticism into that region of bliss whose very dimmest ray would be unbearable glare to our eyes, and the full vision of which would bring a blessed and a painless death in its inevitable train.
It has been the fashion of our days to think lightly of legends and traditions of saints, to ridicule their so-called inventors, and pity their supposed victims. On the other hand, we see families clinging to certain versions of certain facts relative to their long descent and the doughty deeds of their world-famed forefathers; we see nations dwelling complacently on marvellous explanations concerning their origin, and proudly pointing to distant feats of knightly prowess performed by northern Viking and Frank or Vandal chief; we see tradition already growing up like irrepressible vines around the memory of great men buried perchance but yesterday, and even around the persons of living men to whom the wheel of fortune or the rarer gift of genius has given a temporary prominence; and is it strange that Catholics should love to repeat similar legends concerning their forefathers, the founders of their spiritual nation, their forerunners in the kingdom of heaven? We, too, have in our faith a family pride, a national pride, and a pride born of personal friendship and attachment for some of God's living saints, his yet uncrowned champions. We are all one family, we all call to God "Abba," that is, Father; we are "the sons of God" and the "joint heirs with Christ." We cannot help rejoicing over the glory of one of our brethren or sisters; we cannot help being proud of their virtues and seeking to perpetuate and honor their memory. We are all one nation, too, for there is but one Head, one Lord, one Christ; and in the history of the saints we learn the history of the church, our state, our country, our kingdom. And among our great men, whom no wheel of fortune but the divine decree of Providence has lifted to pre-eminence among us, and with whom, for the most part, holiness and humility take the place of genius—is it strange we should single out some of whom, having known them, we willingly speak and hear little details told, and treasure them up, and weave them into heart-poems for our children's children? So grows tradition, and a mind that has no place in it for tradition's evergreen vines to spread their beautiful network is but a misshapen likeness of the mind that God created in Adam, and endowed with sympathetic tenderness and appreciative discrimination.
Some among us have had the happiness to be brought into contact with men greatly favored by God. And who that had daily seen his humble, hidden convent-life, that sweet soul-poet and child-like priest, Frederick Faber, could fail to accumulate concerning him loving traditions, and what our descendants may hereafter call fond and vain legends? And who that had once heard the voice of Henry Newman, the leader of the school of thought of our days in the simple converse he loves best, or in the plain instructions to his school-children at catechism, could help treasuring up such a recollection as more precious by far than a token of royal friendship, or the memory of some unexampled intercourse with state minister or powerful diplomat? There are others who have lived or are living in the same cold, beliefless days as ourselves, and whose presence, either tangible through personal acquaintance or reflected through their sermons or their books, is a perpetual fragrance, which we seek ever to keep alive in the garden of our hearts by heaping up and stowing away in our minds all manner of details belonging to their useful and everyday lives.
Pius IX. and Montalembert, and the Curé d'Ars, and Father Ignatius Spencer, and the Père de Ravignan; Lacordaire and the convert Jew, Hermann, the musician and Carmelite who has but lately passed away, and will be remembered, let us trust, even as the Fra Angelico of the nineteenth century; Mother Seton and the Sœur Rosalie; Thomas Grant, the saintly Bishop of Southwark, who meekly laid down his burden in the City of the Catacombs when his Lord called him from the Council of the Vatican to the foot of the throne; and Henry Manning, and John Hughes, and others yet whose names are known only to a few friends on earth, but widely known among the hosts of heaven, sons of Benedict and daughters of Scholastica, all these are among the chosen ones whose names cannot but be speedily wreathed in legendary and traditional history. And even if it happens that some detail lovingly told comes to be exaggerated, and have accessories linked to it by earnest—if indiscreet—zeal, shall that be accounted as a crime and a malicious distortion of truth? An error of love can be surely forgiven by mothers who are proud of their battle-stained sons; by children who worship the mother that taught them, and the father who guided and corrected them; by soldiers who tell round the camp-fire of the iron men who led them to victory, or who bore with them and for them an equally glorious captivity and defeat; by sick men who do not forget the "Sister's" care; by all, in a word, who have a heart wherewith to be grateful, a mind wherewith to admire, a memory wherewith to give honor.
What is true of the saints of to-day is so, and was so from the beginning, of the saints of long ages ago. And if their history has come down to us woven of fact and legend both, it is thus only the more historical to us, for it tells us the history of the church's love for her glorified children, as well as the record of the real life of those children themselves. Santa Restituta has thus led us far from Ischia's scarcely known beauties and simple island shrine, but she now leads us back to her own sanctuary by the thought here suggested, that, even as many hidden saints walk among us now, so there are many hidden nooks of the earth, like her sea-girt home, where faith is still the daily bread of the people, and where an almost primeval innocence reigns under the protection of that happy, childlike ignorance which, according to modern civilization, is the root of all evil.
Hidden saints are like to these little inclosed gardens of faith; their hearts are valleys sequestered from the glare of the world's unbelief and the world's selfishness; their souls are as rock-bound creeks where lilies grow and wavelets ripple over golden sands; with them, too, the sunset of life is ever the most glorious hour, as it is with Ischia's myrtle-clad rocks and vine-crowned cottages.
Santa Restituta, pray for us, and, if we are not worthy to be of the number of the saints ourselves, suffer us to be the historians, the biographers, the poets of such saints as those who are known only by name in one remote corner of God's universe, or of such other saints of whom glimpses are now and then revealed to us by the very simplicity and utter unguardedness of their sweet and undefiled nature.