THE IRON AGE OF CHRISTENDOM.
Our period is emphatically one of historical studies, as we have had occasion to remark in a former article on the Life and Works of M. Ozanam. Among other illusions swept away by the light of truth which these laborious researches have let in upon the obscurity of the past, there is one great illusion about golden and iron ages. In respect to the Christian period, specifically, it is manifest that it is vain to look, in the apostolic, ante-Nicene, mediæval, or modern ages, for that ideal perfection in real, concrete existence which may have been in our imagination as a pleasing picture. There has never been an age of gold unmixed with baser metal for the church any more than for humanity in general. The analogy of the past, which is the only sure criterion we can apply to the future, forbids us to expect that there ever will be such a purely golden age on the earth. Moreover, those iron ages or dark ages, of Christian or pre-Christian, historic or pre-historic times, which have been imagined to precede or to interrupt the epochs of splendor and light, are seen on inspection not to have been all iron or all darkness. The progress of mankind towards its destination has been continuous from the beginning, although, in larger or smaller local extensions or numerical portions of humanity, there has been in various periods a stoppage or retrogradation of the movement, in appearance, and in respect to individual progress. The earth keeps its regular course, though men walk on its surface in an opposite direction, and they are carried with it unconsciously. The ship goes on and carries with it the passenger, while he is walking from the bow to the stern. Clouds, night, and eclipses are not a destruction or suspension of the irradiation of light from the sun on the earth, but its partial and temporary impediments. The ship which makes a long, dangerous, but successful voyage is making headway while plunging into the trough of the sea as well as while riding the crest of the waves; often is less delayed by beating against adverse winds than by calm weather and light breezes. The bark of Peter, freighted with the treasures of human hope and destiny, is steadily proceeding, under the guidance of her heavenly Pilot, over the waves of time, through calm and stormy seas, toward the port of eternity. Seldom does she seem to be in safety, and show the speed of her motion, to the uninstructed eyes of those who do not possess the sublime science of the stars and charts by which her celestial course is directed. “Never,” says Lacordaire, “is the triumph of the church visible at a given moment. If you look at any one point in the expanse of the ages, the bark of Peter appears to be about to be engulfed, and the faithful are always prompt to cry out: Lord, save us, we perish! But if you look at the whole series of times, the church manifests her strength, and you understand what Jesus Christ said in the tempest: Man of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”[[75]]
There is nevertheless a difference in the character of epochs. The epochs of Constantine, Charlemagne, Gregory VII., of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, are seen in the retrospect to have a special light of glory about them. The seventh, tenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries present a dark aspect. The tenth century particularly, which we are at present bringing under review, is generally called “the iron age” even by our modern Catholic historians, and not without considerable reason, more especially in respect to the state and condition of the Roman Church and the sovereign pontificate. Nevertheless, the common notion, derived from compendious histories and the generalized statements which form the commonplaces of popular literature, respecting the tenth age of Christendom is not correct and is extremely confused. It was not an age of complete barbarism and universal ignorance. Ozanam says: “Indeed, letters did not, at any time, perish. The truth is that the period of complete barbarism, supposed at first to extend over a space of a thousand years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the capture of Constantinople, then gradually reduced to narrower limits, until it remained finally restricted to the seventh and tenth centuries, vanishes away under a more severe scrutiny.”[[76]] Cantù remarks: “This epoch is justly called the iron age, because of the cruel sufferings endured by individuals and nations; but humanity made a sensible progress in the face of these trials. We cannot, therefore, concur in the judgment of those who consider it the most unhappy period of the human race.”[[77]] We cannot make logical divisions of history into epochs exactly corresponding with the numerical notation of years and centuries. It would be absurd to suppose that at 12 A.M. of January 1, A.D. 900, to borrow Carlyle’s expression, “the clock of Time struck and an era passed away”; and that the same venerable old timepiece, from its corner in the parlor of the universe, struck again in just a hundred years, announcing the end of the iron age and the beginning of another of some different metal. The boundaries of epochs are not quite so determinate, and centuries, periods, epochs, run into one another, mix, blend, elude precise delineation. Cantù’s tenth epoch is not the tenth century, but the period beginning A.D. 800 and ending A.D. 1096. This period, between Charlemagne and the Crusades, far from presenting the aspect of a desolate waste to the eye, is crowded and variegated with events and persons of the most important and interesting character, and their history is one great act in the European drama, advancing it sensibly toward the consummation which we are still, in our own age, hastening forward and awaiting in the near or distant future. Within this great period are other and lesser cycles, embracing epochs, phases, temporary states of ecclesiastical and civil prosperity or adversity, alternations of various kinds, in Christendom, in Europe, or in portions of the Christian commonwealth, each having its distinctive notes. That part of it which is in the centre presents the characteristics of an iron age more distinctly marked than the preceding or following periods. The latter half of the ninth and the earlier half of the tenth century, taken together, really constitute the period which can with strict propriety be called the iron age. And within this century a period of about forty years, including the end of the ninth and the first years of the tenth century, was a sort of crisis in which Christian Europe seemed to have reached the dead-point in her progress, and, having passed it, went on again under the attraction of a new force.
This statement must not be taken as rigorously and uniformly applicable to all Europe and Christendom. The Greek Empire and the degenerate Eastern Church were in a state of hopeless decadence, verging toward a permanent downfall. England and Spain, on the other hand, passed through their worst times earlier, and were going upward and onward, led by great men and heroes—Alfred and the forerunners of Ferdinand and the Cid—just at the time when the rest of Europe was in the most disordered and disastrous condition. The crisis of the iron age affected chiefly the countries which had constituted the great domain of Charlemagne—France, Germany, and Italy. Its phases were various, in respect to time and other conditions, in these very countries. The whole panorama, as presented to our view in the pages of historical narrative, is as shifting, varied, apparently capricious, as mountain scenery in the changing aspects of light and shade, produced by sunshine, clouds, and moonlight, by transforming mists and sombre night. It is only when we rise to the logical order and sequence of events, trace effects to their causes, enlarge our scope of vision, ascend into the upper regions of a true philosophy of history whose atmosphere is the Christian idea and whose light is celestial faith, that a real order, harmony, and progression toward an intelligible and grand result are clearly discernible.
Some few general statements borrowed from this higher branch of historical science must be premised before we can come at a satisfactory view of our particular and immediate topic and set its details in systematic order.
The actual evils and miseries which afflicted the Christian people of Europe during the iron age were invasions of Saracens, Scandinavians, and Hungarians, incessant wars among greater and lesser princes, terrible famines and pestilences, and, in general, a state of turbulence, insecurity, social and moral confusion. This whole state of things was a relapse into the condition brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian irruption in the seventh century. The great reason why it occurred is found in the fact that Charlemagne’s great empire and power passed away and that no unifying, organic power succeeded it until Europe had passed through a period of transition. The Roman Empire had to pass away to make room for Christendom, and for a time its débris and the new material lying on the ground for a reconstruction made a state of confusion. Charlemagne’s fundamental work was solid and lasting, but he had to make some temporary structures which were showy but not substantial, and therefore fell down or were torn down; causing more disorder for a time, until they were cleared away to make room for the permanent and splendid walls to be built up according to the idea of the divine Architect. The European, Christian Idea is not that of one, uniform political western empire, ruled by an autocracy which continues or succeeds to the old, imperial Roman power. It is that of a community of nations, bound together by a common faith, common principles, international law, mutual alliance and amity, and preserving full scope for distinct and beautifully various forms of free, spontaneous growth and culture. Its regenerating, vivifying, and controlling spirit is Christianity in the Catholic organization. Its centre of unity and force is Rome and the spiritual supremacy of the pope. The political supremacy of an emperor—understanding by an emperor a universal monarch ruling subordinate kings set over dependent kingdoms—is incompatible with this true idea of a Christendom. Even, supposing this universal political sovereignty united with the sovereign pontificate of the Pope, it is incompatible with that true idea, partly for the same reasons, partly for different reasons from those which militate against it, supposing the two distinct powers to exist separately. It was necessary that the pope should possess his own separate sovereignty in a kingdom of moderate size. It was also necessary that some one powerful king should be endowed by the pope with a special, sacred pre-eminence among other sovereigns, as the protector of his civil princedom and of his spiritual supremacy. This was the meaning of Charles the Great’s imperial coronation. He was, in fact, really the king of almost all Europe. But this was temporary. His kingdom was divided. The imperial dignity was conferred on different sovereigns of France, Italy, and Germany from time to time, and for above thirty years remained in abeyance for want of a proper subject to receive it, until it rested at last on the head of the first of the Saxon line, passing thence to the Franconian house, and afterwards to the Hohenstaufen. The German emperors were, however, by election kings of Germany, and as such governed their states; whereas they were made emperors by papal consecration, and in that capacity were protectors of the Holy See and the church. The authority which they lawfully exercised as emperors in the city and principality of Rome was the authority of a civil magistrate who was not the head but the right arm of the pope, the real political sovereign in his own state.
The European crisis of the tenth century was a period in which the Carlovingian dynasty was going into decadence, and the new dynasties of France and Germany had not yet arisen. There was a great want of able sovereigns, and especially of men who were strong enough to fulfil the functions of the imperial office. To turn now especially towards Italy and Rome, it was the lack of a strong hand to preserve peace and order among the petty princes and states of Italy, and to protect the pope and the Holy See from the rebellions and intrigues of powerful nobles and contending factions within and around the Roman principality, which was the chief cause of the long obnubilation of the sun of Christendom—the Roman Church—during the tenth epoch. We propose to enter now more minutely into the exposition of the historical truth respecting this period, so far as it relates to the popes and the Roman Church directly and immediately.
The ordinary accounts of this epoch in Roman and Italian history produce a singular impression on the mind of the reader. It seems as if the gas had been suddenly turned off and all had become dark, or as if an express-train filled with passengers had all at once been stopped by an impediment in the middle of the night at an obscure way-station, to the surprise and chagrin of all on board when they awoke in the morning. One is puzzled and disgusted by a confused, disconnected story which reads like the record of crimes and disasters in a modern newspaper. The persons mentioned seem to have no reality or distinct character—to be like the spectres of dreams or the personified abstractions in parables. The very names of the popes, such as Formosus, Marinus, Lando, Romanus, have a strange, unpapal sound. They appear and vanish with marvellous rapidity, leaving no trace behind. When we read that the world was generally expected to explode in the year 1000, we are not surprised, but rather wonder why it did not, and are quite relieved to find ourselves safe and sound in the eleventh century, and hear those “whom the Lord hath sent to walk through the earth answer the angel of the Lord, and say: We have walked through the earth; and behold, all the earth is inhabited, and is at rest.”[[78]]
One great difficulty in picking the thread of history out of this snarl is the paucity of contemporary documents. Another cause of misunderstanding and misrepresentation has been the flippant and mendacious character of the most extensive and minute of the chronicles of the period, that of Luitprand. The same kind of gossiping, scandal-mongering centres which exist among us may not have existed in the tenth century. There were no newspapers filled with libels and calumnies, falsifications of news, reports of the army of detectives of the press. But there were the same violent factions, party animosities, intrigues, mutual denunciations, raising a cloud of smoke and dust like that which overhangs a battle-field, in even more virulent activity then than we now behold them in our modern political mêlées. All the condensed scandal, partisan vituperation, indecent gossip, and malicious calumny of the time in which he lived are collected in the memoirs of Luitprand, and from these have been infiltrated through succeeding times, leaving great stains which only the acid of criticism has been able to efface. Even Fleury says of him that he is extremely passionate, excessive both in his abuse and his flattery, and given to buffoonery to a degree which transgresses the bounds of decency. He was originally a subdeacon of the church of Toledo in Spain, afterwards a deacon of the church of Pavia, during which time he was sent by Berenger, King of Italy, on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople. Later he became Bishop of Cremona, but was a disgrace to the episcopate. He was a courtier of Otho the German emperor, who sent him on another mission to Constantinople, a violent adherent of the German party, bitterly hostile to the Italian party and all the popes who favored it, and a participator in the schismatical proceedings of Otho’s anti-pope. His credit is now entirely lost. But at the time of the revolt of Luther all the incriminations of the popes and the Roman clergy, whether true, false, or doubtful, were gathered up and made the most of to sustain the bill of indictment against the Holy See. The same stories, repeated by numbers of writers, produced the effect of concurrent testimony on the general mind of the readers of history. Baronius and other Catholic historians, not having sufficient materials for testing and correcting all these accusations, let a number of them pass uncontradicted or admitted their truth. Fleury and some others of the lowest Gallican school, who always write like advocates who have taken out a brief against the Holy See, have in their historical works neglected and perverted facts in a manner which is equally shallow and perfidious, and as contrary to sound criticism as it is to orthodox doctrine. It is only since the discovery of Flodoard’s Lives of the Popes, the critical and learned researches of Muratori, and the great modern advance of genuine historical science, that the tissue of lies depending solely on the worthless testimony of Luitprand has been swept away. A better appreciation of the great course of events and the essential facts of history is now possible, and even easy. Men of genius, learning, and conscientious devotion to truth have lighted up these dark, buried crypts of the substructure of Christendom, as the zealous archæologists of York have done in the old minster, whose foundations were laid in the very period we are describing.[[79]]
In regard to many particular events and certain individuals whose names figure in connection with the transactions of an obscure epoch we cannot expect to acquire a perfect certainty. Nor is there anything of moment depending on the discovery of the truth in such cases. We have to be content with a probability or with a doubt in thousands of matters of detail. There are a considerable number of popes of whom we know next to nothing. In certain instances it is not easy to determine whether an election of a given individual was valid or invalid. Of the truth or falsehood of the accusations made against several popes and other persons of high ecclesiastical or civil rank, and of the reports of assassinations and other great crimes, which are so frequent in this period of disorder, we cannot always form a certain judgment. There is enough, however, of that which is certain or fairly probable to show the connection, the continuity, and the identity of principles both with the foregoing and the following epochs, and to furnish ample material for the vindication of the cause of the Holy See and the Papacy. There is a sequence in the progress through the struggles of transition; there are great and good men, noble and heroic achievements, interesting and curious episodes—in fine, there is a human and a Christian character showing its lineaments in place of the cloudy spectre with distorted features which has heretofore scared the imagination.[[80]]
We begin our historical sketch with Pope Formosus, who was elected A.D. 891. This is one of the popes of whom we have said above that they seem in our common histories like a mere shadow of a great name without a personal reality. Besides, there is a certain cloud on his memory, arising from the fact that he was deprived of his see of Porto by John VIII., and that he was the subject of a great outrage from his successor, Stephen VI. A careful examination of his history shows, however, that he was no common man and was both a good and an able pope. As Bishop of Porto he was one of the most conspicuous among the Italian prelates. He left his see to become a missionary among the Bulgarians, where he labored zealously and successfully in the work of their conversion. There is nothing to show that his censure by Pope John VIII., which seems to have been chiefly occasioned by his taking an active part in a political opposition to the Emperor Charles the Bald, involved in it any moral dishonor. He was restored by Pope Marinus, and the indignities inflicted on his memory by his successor were a wanton and causeless outrage, which was condemned and repaired by a subsequent pope with the approbation of the Roman people.
Europe was just then in the depths of the disorders and miseries caused by the decay of the imperial authority and the degeneracy of Charlemagne’s successors. Berenger was king in Northern Italy, but Guido, Duke of Spoleto, and his son Lambert had been crowned emperors in opposition to him and to all the French and German claimants. Toward the end of the short reign of Formosus, which lasted less than five years, and after the death of Guido, the dissatisfaction of the pope with the conduct of Lambert and his mother, Ermengarda, induced him to summon Arnulph, King of Germany, to come to the relief of the Holy See and of Italy. He obeyed the summons, made a forcible entry into Rome, where the Lambertine faction had gained the upper hand and thrown Formosus into prison, and was by him crowned emperor. This was the beginning of the appeals of the popes to Germany for intervention in Italian affairs, and of the never-ending conflicts between the Italian and German parties in Italy, whose finale we have but just witnessed in our own day in the exclusion of Austria from her dominion in Venetia. We have no doubt that it was necessary, and on the whole productive of good results, that the imperial crown should be transferred to the German sovereigns. But, without delaying to consider this point, we simply take note of the fact that this was one of the great questions of violent dispute and contention which disturbed the Roman Church and the papal elections so long as there were Italian princes who disputed the imperial dignity with the Germans. Arnulph returned almost immediately to Germany. Formosus died and was followed to the tomb a few weeks after by his immediate successor, Boniface VI. The party of Lambert succeeded in obtaining the election of Stephen VI., the first of the popes who grievously dishonored the tiara. His violent and shameful conduct caused a temporary reaction in favor of the opposite party, by whom he was imprisoned and strangled. Lambert was, nevertheless, acknowledged by the three succeeding popes, Romanus, Theodore II., and John IX., and by two successive councils, and the pact between the church and the empire was solemnly renewed. These three pontificates filled only a space of three years and closed the century. The year 901 saw a new competitor for the imperial crown, which death had taken from Lambert’s head, in the person of Louis of Provence, who was actually crowned by Benedict IV., but very soon driven away by Berenger, who was still reigning in the north of Italy. Berenger was an able and warlike sovereign, in many respects worthy of admiration, and capable of filling the imperial office with honor to himself and advantage to Italy. Circumstances were, however, extremely adverse. He maintained himself in possession of a certain pre-eminence among the petty sovereigns of Italy, and carried on vigorously wars against the Saracen and Hungarian invaders. He was even crowned emperor in 915, but was never able to establish his authority on a solid and permanent basis, and at last, in 924, he was assassinated by a conspiracy of Italian nobles. With him the imperial office became extinct, and remained so until it was resuscitated, thirty-eight years afterward, in the person of Otho the Great.
The failure of the imperial power which had been instituted in the person of Charlemagne left the Holy See and all Italy a prey to contending, petty sovereigns, to powerful and mutually hostile nobles and factions, and to fierce heathen invaders. The Roman pontiffs maintained with difficulty a restricted, often merely nominal, civil sovereignty in the city and principality of Rome. Between the years 900 and 914 six popes succeeded each other: Benedict IV., Leo V., Christopher, Sergius III., Anastasius III., and Lando. Of the nine popes who came between Stephen VI. and John X., it is certain that nearly all were worthy of their exalted position, and the grave accusations made against two of the number, Christopher and Sergius, rest on uncertain testimony. The average length of their reigns being less than two years, and that of the longest among them only seven, most of the number had no time to make a conspicuous figure in history, and their annals are so scanty that very little is known of the acts of their administration.
The reign of John X., which lasted fourteen years, from 914 to 928, was of a different character. He was one of the great popes, and proved himself fully equal to the emergencies of the time and the difficulties of his position. For nine years previously to his election to the Roman See he had been Archbishop of Ravenna, and the extraordinary ability which he had exhibited in his government of that important church had pointed him out as one capable of making head, in conjunction with Berenger, against the perils with which Rome and Italy were beset at this most dangerous crisis in their destinies. In fact, he was obliged to do the work alone; for Berenger was unable to help him, having his hands full in fighting Saracens and Hungarians in Northern Italy. There was no hope to be placed either in Germany or France. The only resource for the pope was to place himself at the head of his own barons and in alliance with the neighboring princes, and to lead the war against the Saracens in person. For this purpose he formed a league among the princes of Southern Italy, and, obtaining also auxiliaries from the Greek emperor, conducted a short and brilliantly successful campaign against the Saracens, by which they were completely discomfited and finally expelled from that part of Italy. The entire reign of John X. was in conformity with its glorious beginning; but soon after the violent and tragical overthrow of the noble Emperor Berenger by the turbulent Italian nobles, a similar catastrophe ended the career of the great pope, his friend and compeer. Alberic, Count of Tusculum, and Theophylact, senator of Rome, had been the two most powerful supporters, and the former had been the chief subordinate leader, of the great military operations of John X. The almost exclusive glory and credit which the popular voice ascribed to John for the liberation of the country from the Saracens, and the great increase and concentration of the sovereign authority under his vigorous administration, stirred up the jealousy and discontent of these great nobles. The wife of Theophylact was the famous Theodora, the younger Theodora was their daughter, and another daughter, Mariuccia, commonly called Marozia, was the wife of Alberic. These women, but especially the last mentioned, were remarkable for their beauty, talents, and ambition. The stream of filthy tradition which has come down through the sewer of Luitprand and the popular romances of the period has transmitted to posterity the names of these women, stained with every kind of foulness and cruelty. How much of calumny and exaggeration there may be in these scandalous stories we cannot determine. It is certain that the family exercised a great sway in Rome for many years both before and after the great coup d’état in which the intrigues of Marozia culminated and collapsed, as we are about to relate. One year after the murder of Berenger, Alberic was killed in an unsuccessful assault on Rome, and Marozia married Guido, Marquis of Tuscany. The sister of Guido, Ermengarda, Marchioness of Ivrea, was another of the group of Italian princesses of that period, remarkable in all respects, except in the special virtues of Christian women. In 926 Marozia set on foot, with these two accomplices, a revolution in Italy, by which Rodolph of Burgundy, the successful rival and successor of Berenger in the kingdom of Italy, was chased out to make room for Hugo of Provence, the half-brother of Guido. After the coronation of Hugo at Pavia, Guido and Marozia took possession of Rome by force of arms and imprisoned Pope John X., who died a few months afterward, it is suspected by violence. Guido also died within a year from his usurpation, and Marozia governed the city alone with the titles of senator and patrician. After the two short, and perhaps abbreviated, pontificates of Leo VI. and Stephen VIII., she caused the younger of her two sons by Alberic to be elected pope under the name of John XI. Still unsatisfied, she aspired to become queen of Italy, and empress, and for this purpose contracted a marriage—which by the ecclesiastical law was null and void[[81]]—with her brother-in-law, Hugo, the King of Italy. The marriage was celebrated in 932, and the imperial coronation was expected to follow in due time. But the violent and imperious temper of the Burgundian Hugo ruined all these plans. Alberic, eldest son of Marozia by her first husband, Alberic of Tusculum, was a youth who inherited all the brilliant qualities of both his parents, and whose character was certainly not derived from his mother or due to her influence. One day at dinner the princely youth was acting as page to the king, and by accident or design poured too much water on his hands, for which he received a buffet on the cheek from his rude step-father. He immediately left the room in a towering passion, and, running out upon the piazza, summoned the people, with words of burning eloquence, to vengeance and rescue. The Castle of St. Angelo was very speedily taken by assault, Hugo was forced to save his life by flight, and Marozia, banished from Rome, repudiated by her husband, thwarted in her wicked schemes, disappeared from view, and, it is to be hoped, passed the rest of her days until her death, which did not occur later than 945, in doing penance for her sins.
Now followed one of the most curious and interesting of episodes in the history of Christian Rome. Alberic reigned during his whole life-time—a period of twenty-two years—as absolute sovereign of Rome, with ability, justice, and popularity. He was in harmony with the popes, a protector of his kingdom and of the Holy See, a munificent patron of religious orders, a benefactor to the church and religion. The period of his reign is like an oasis in the desert of the tenth century. It is true that he kept his brother, John XI., in an honorable yet strict imprisonment during his life-time. Yet, although there is nothing recorded to the discredit of this pope, Alberic’s conduct toward the succeeding pontiffs shows that he must have had strong reasons for his treatment of his brother. The elections of popes during his reign were free and peaceful, and the best men among the Roman clergy were chosen. By degrees the legal form of the administration was so regulated that the sovereign rights and titles of the pope were preserved; and although the actual civil government was entirely in the hands of Prince Alberic, it was administered by him as the pope’s temporal vicar, without discord between the two powers. As a provisional arrangement it worked well, but Alberic was too wise and far-seeing to think its permanent continuance possible or desirable. By a singular stroke of policy he prepared for the restoration of the real sovereignty to the one who had not ceased to retain the title and the right. His son Octavian was educated as an ecclesiastic, and the chiefs of the clergy and nobility were induced to make a solemn engagement before Alberic’s death to elect Octavian pope on the first vacancy of the Holy See. He was accordingly elected pope soon after the death of his father, although he was but eighteen years of age, and assumed the name of John XII.
Of the personal and private character of this youthful pontiff, who died at the age of twenty-six after a reign of eight years, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to form an exact and certain estimate. The accusations made against him during his life-time are atrocious, and they are still repeated by modern writers, although the most judicious and moderate historians soften them down considerably. The learned writer in the Civiltà gives his judgment that as a pontiff all his acts were laudable, and, as a king, worthy of one who was the son of Alberic. In respect to his private morals, he considers that the accusations of his political enemies and of writers attached to the German, imperial party—the almost sole remaining source of information respecting that period—are to be distrusted; but that it is difficult to exculpate him altogether from the reproach of having lived more as secular princes are wont to do than as became the holy state of a bishop. The salient point of his administration was the calling in of the King of Germany, Otho the Great, and the subsequent imbroglio between the pope and the emperor. Otho, who well deserves the name of Great, notwithstanding grievous errors and wrongs in his conduct toward the Holy See, had been reigning twenty years when he was summoned to Rome and crowned emperor. The return of the old disorders in Italy made his intervention necessary, but he carried it too far, and John XII., probably with good reason, and certainly acting in a way which was natural in a high-spirited and youthful sovereign trained in the maxims and sentiments of an Italian prince, joined with the other princes of Italy in opposition to the German domination. A struggle between John and Otho was the consequence. The emperor, misled by the bad advice of Luitprand and other bishops, attempted to depose the pope and substitute an anti-pope, who called himself Leo VIII., in his place. John XII. died suddenly before this conflict had any decisive issue, and Benedict V. was elected in his place, but was soon after carried away into Germany by Otho and kept in captivity at Hamburg. On the death of the anti-pope, which occurred in March, 965, a few months after the death of John, the Romans requested the restoration of Benedict V., which was granted by Otho. The pope, however, died on his journey to Rome, venerated and regretted even by the emperor and by all with whom he had come into personal contact, as well as by the Romans.
The emperor and all the various parties by which Rome was divided agreed together and concurred in the election of John XIII., who favored the German party in politics, and had, on the whole, a peaceful and prosperous reign of six years, sustained by the imperial power, although it was interrupted by one violent sedition, which was repressed and punished in the severest manner.
The close of the reigns of the Pope John XIII. and the Emperor Otho the Great was marked by one extraordinary and most interesting event—the marriage of the young Emperor Otho II. with Theophania, a Greek princess of distinguished beauty, intellectual accomplishments, and personal virtues. She brought with her as dowry all the Greek possessions in Italy, and was regarded as an angel of peace between the two empires.
The death of Otho I. in 973 was the signal for new outbreaks and disturbances in Italy. In Rome a struggle began between two powerful families: the Crescenzi, who were the great lords of the Sabine territory, and the Conti—that is, the Tusculan counts—who were the principal barons of Latium. The latter favored, while the former opposed, the imperial power in Italy. Crescenzio, or Cencio, the first leader of the Italian faction, is supposed by many writers to have been a grand-nephew of Marozia. He attempted an imitation of Alberic, though not by the same honorable means, and endeavored to gain possession for himself of the Roman principality. The pope, Benedict VI., who had succeeded John XIII. a few months before the death of Otho I., was assaulted and dethroned by armed force, imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo, and at last strangled. An infamous ecclesiastic, a partisan and accomplice with Crescenzio in his crimes, was intruded into the chair of St. Peter while he was still, in the language of Pope Sylvester II., dripping with the blood of his predecessor. This so-called Pope Boniface VII., who is commonly regarded as an anti-pope, was dispossessed, after one month, together with his patron, Crescenzio, by a counter-revolution under the counts of Tusculum, and fled to Constantinople. At a later period he returned and succeeded in seizing on the government for a brief period, but came at length to a most tragical and ignominious end. Crescenzio ended his days in a monastery. It is uncertain whether there was or was not a pope named Donus II. who reigned for a few months after the death of Benedict VI. Benedict VII., a nephew of Alberic, Count of Tusculum, and Bishop of Sutri, was enthroned, according to Mansi, on the 28th of December, 974, and governed the Roman Church during his pontificate of nine years in such a manner as to leave no stain upon his reputation. One of his first acts was to excommunicate, in a council of bishops, Cardinal Franco, the anti-pope. In 980 he was obliged to call upon the young emperor, Otho II., to come to his assistance in Rome. He came, in fact, during the following year, but, after an unsuccessful campaign against the allied Greeks and Saracens, died in his imperial palace at Rome, Dec. 9, 983, in the twenty-eighth year of his age—a prince whose character made him worthy of his father, but who was less fortunate in his destiny. His premature death and the infancy of Otho III. seemed to threaten both Germany and Italy with great disasters. Germany was preserved from these menacing evils by the sanctity and ability of two noble and heroic women—St. Adelaide, the widow of Otho the Great, and Theophania, widow of Otho II., and imperial regent in the name of her son, who was but three years old, yet universally recognized as King of Germany and emperor-elect. Rome, however, had still to suffer, and remained for another half-century to come the foot-ball of rival factions. The son of Crescenzio, called Crescenzio Nomentano, obtained the upper hand in Rome, recalled the anti-pope, Boniface VII., imprisoned and put to death John XIV., the successor of Benedict VI., and made himself patrician and governor of Rome. The sudden death of Boniface, however, and the universal hatred in which his memory was held, enabled the clergy and people of Rome to elect a worthy pope in the person of John XV. (April, 986), who held the see ten years, governing with great prudence and success, notwithstanding the great difficulties of his position. In 989 the empress-mother, Theophania, came to Rome and held an imperial court. It was expected that she would put an end to the tyranny of Crescenzio Nomentano, but she was deceived by his extreme cunning and hypocritical promises so far that she confirmed him in his office as patrician. After her departure he became so much worse that the pope was obliged to leave Rome and take refuge with Hugo, Marquis of Tuscany, through whose intervention a pressing request was sent to the emperor-elect, Otho III., now seventeen years of age, to come in person to Italy. So great was now the fear of the imperial power that Crescenzio hastened to reconcile himself to the pope, who returned and was reconducted with great manifestations of honor to the Lateran palace.
On his arrival in Rome at the head of a large army, early in 996, Otho III., who, with precocious vigor of mind and character, had assumed the reins of government, found the Roman See vacant by the death of John XV., and his first care was the election of his successor. The one whom he proposed, and who was accepted by the electors, was a young ecclesiastic but twenty-four years of age, the son of the Duke of Franconia and his own cousin-german. His name was Bruno, and his accomplished education, joined with a mature virtue, made him worthy to fill the see of Peter. He assumed the name of Gregory V., and gave great promise of adorning the Holy See during a long pontificate, as Otho did of becoming an illustrious emperor of Germany. The hopes of the church and the empire were, however, frustrated by the early death of both. Crescenzio had been condemned to banishment, but, at the request of Gregory, his sentence was remitted. The generosity of the two youthful and confiding sovereigns was requited by Crescenzio, as soon as Otho’s back was turned, by an uprising against the German pope and the imperial officers, the expulsion of Gregory, and the creation of an anti-pope, who was John Philagathos, a Greek monk, Bishop of Piacenza, and lately ambassador of the emperor at the court of Constantinople. The bold plan of these two conspirators was nothing less than the restoration of the sovereignty of the West to the Greek emperor, under whose auspices each one hoped to be confirmed in his usurped authority at Rome. In 998 Gregory and Otho re-entered Rome together, and this time showed no clemency either to Crescenzio or Philagathos, both of whom were victims of a terrible vengeance.
Pope Gregory died in 999, in the twenty-seventh year of his age and the third of his pontificate. He was succeeded by the celebrated Gerbert, a French monk, formerly abbot of the famous monastery of Bobbio, and at this present time Archbishop of Ravenna, who took the name of Sylvester II. He had been the guide, the tutor, and the friend of Otho during his boyhood. In his earlier career he had been somewhat hot-headed, and had sustained a sharp and obstinate contest with Pope John XV. in respect to the see of Rouen. Now, however, he was an old man and a wise. No pope so truly great, in the sense of the word most appropriate to a bishop and an ecclesiastical ruler, had ascended the papal throne since the time of St. Nicholas the Great, in the middle of the ninth century. Otho remained always in Rome and Italy, for which he had a special predilection. Nothing can be more beautiful than the picture of this venerable and learned old man, with his gifted and loving pupil by his side, “pulchri Cæsaris pulcherrima proles,” filling together the throne of ancient, eternal Rome with their pontifical and imperial majesty. What a subject for a painter or a poet! Otho is one of the most winning characters to be found in all history. His mother, the Greek princess, had given him an exquisite mental culture, and his grandmother, St. Adelaide, a most pious education. There was something visionary and romantic in his nature which only adds to his personal attractiveness. He dreamed of great things for Rome and the empire, such as the Florentine seer who had the vision of the unseen world dreamed of, but which were not in accordance with the plans of divine Providence, and probably not with the views of Sylvester II. He died at a castle near Civita Castellana, in the twenty-third year of his age, in the arms of Sylvester, who followed him to the tomb in a little more than a year after, on the 12th of May, 1003.
The dreaded year 1000 had been passed and the eleventh century was begun. It was really one of the most fortunate of all the centuries for Rome and the popes, yet it began under dark and menacing auspices. The Crescenzi regained the predominance in Rome and kept it for twelve years during three pontificates—viz., those of John XVII., which lasted only five months, of John XVIII. and Sergius IV., both of whom ruled the church in peace and with honor to themselves, yet were obliged to tolerate the usurpation of the patrician Giovanni Crescenzio, who seems to have governed with more mildness than his father, Nomentano, had done. In 1012, after his death, the dominion of this family came finally to an end, being supplanted by that of the Conti Tusculani, who retained it for thirty years. Count Gregory, a descendant of Alberic and Marozia, whose later years were rendered illustrious by piety and good works of a splendid munificence, left at his death three sons, Alberic, Theophylact, and Romanus. The second of these became pope under the name of Benedict VIII., and governed the church as well as the Roman principality during twelve years with consummate ability, aided in his civil administration by his two brothers, and in perfect amity with the emperor, St. Henry II., who had succeeded his cousin, Otho III., but had always been prevented by wars and other pressing employments elsewhere from interfering in Italian affairs. In 1014 St. Henry was able to come to Rome with his queen, St. Cunegunda, to receive the imperial coronation from the pope. A rival king of Italy, Arduin, the last of the Italian kings who aspired to the iron crown of Lombardy until Victor Emanuel appeared, had been conquered, and, retiring to a monastery, passed the rest of his days in penance. Henry and Benedict together made successful war upon the Greeks and Saracens, putting an end to the troubles of Italy from both these enemies. The pope and the emperor both died at about the same time in 1024, and with Henry II. was ended the Saxon line of emperors, which was succeeded by the Franconian, called also the Ghibelline from the family castle of Waiblingen, and the Salic, from the tribal name Salii—i.e., dwellers by the river Sala. Benedict’s brother Romanus succeeded him on the pontifical throne under the name of John XIX., and united more strictly in his own person the functions of ecclesiastical and civil sovereignty than had been the case during the reign of his predecessor. His pontificate of eight years was a laudable administration, without any event of note which has been recorded, except the coronation of the first Franconian emperor, Conrad II. This coronation was marked by the presence of an unusually numerous and splendid assemblage of princes and prelates from all parts of Europe, among whom were Rudolph, Duke of Burgundy, and Canute the Great, King of Denmark and England. This grand ceremony was performed in the spring of 1027, but, notwithstanding the new splendor which seemed at that time to environ the Holy See, the greatest disgrace and scandal with which it was ever afflicted was close at hand and came upon it in the next pontificate. On the death of John XIX., in 1032, there was no one of the family of the Conti upon whose head the tiara could be placed with any sort of fitness and propriety. So great and so strongly fixed was the power of that family that they succeeded in securing the election and coronation of a young boy, Theophylact, nephew of the two preceding popes, and the son of Count Alberic, their elder brother. He is said by some historians to have been twelve years old, by others to have been perhaps seventeen. Under the name of Benedict IX. he continued during the thirteen years of his reign, under the protection of the emperor and supported by the power of his family, to harass his subjects by his capricious tyranny, and to afflict and desolate the church by the unrestrained license of his moral conduct. His scandalous life and maladministration of the government brought on a schism headed by an anti-pope calling himself Sylvester III., caused frequent and violent popular tumults, and excited universal contempt and odium against his own person. At last the discontent reached such an extreme that of his own free-will Benedict abdicated his office, that he might have greater freedom to live without any restraint upon his conduct. The most distinguished and the most respected priest of the Roman Church at this time was John Gratian, arch-priest of the church of St. John at the Latin Gate, the preceptor of St. Hildebrand, who was afterwards Pope Gregory VII. Desiring to put an end to the calamities of every kind which were the consequence of a sacrilegious pontificate, Gratian took the extraordinary course of offering a large subsidy in money to Benedict IX. on condition of a complete renunciation of all his rights to the Roman See. He was then himself canonically elected Pope under the name of Gregory VI., and began with zeal the work of reformation in both church and state. Nevertheless, the circumstance that he had given a sum of money to induce Benedict to resign gave occasion to such a plausible outcry of simony and personal ambition against Gregory, and the resistance of the anti-pope Sylvester as well as that of Benedict, who reclaimed his former office, was so violent, that it was necessary to call in the aid of the new emperor Henry III., and to summon a numerous council, that the rival claims might be adjudicated and sufficient measures be adopted for restoring peace and order. The council, which met at Sutri, set aside entirely both Sylvester and Benedict. The decision of his own case was referred to Gregory with great respect, but with a manifest wish that he should resign. The pope disclaimed in the most solemn manner all mercenary and selfish motives for what he had done, yet nevertheless, on account of the scandal which had been occasioned, he judged himself to be unworthy of the papal dignity, and abdicated it with many tears and expressions of humility. The council confirmed his resignation, which St. Hildebrand and many others regretted, but which the greater number, with St. Peter Damian, highly approved, notwithstanding their esteem for Gregory, who retired into a monastery, where he lived a secluded and holy life. Even Benedict at last repented, and spent the few remaining years of his life in prayer and penance in the monastery of Grotta-Ferrata, which his grandfather, Count Gregory, had founded.
On Christmas eve, 1046, Suidger, Bishop of Bamberg, was proposed by the emperor to the Roman clergy and people, and by them elected pope, taking the name of Clement II. He was enthroned on Christmas day, and on the same day crowned the emperor and empress, and, as a safeguard against the abuse of the power of the Roman patrician by the Italian barons, it was transferred to the emperor, who was thus made the recognized head of the Roman aristocracy, with a special right of superintending the election of the sovereign pontiffs. From this moment commenced the dawn of better and brighter days for Rome. The great work of reformation was begun by Clement; and, although his reign lasted but one year, and his successor, another German prelate of high character—Poppo, Bishop of Brixen, who became Damasus II.—survived his enthronization but twenty-three days, a saint was waiting to inaugurate the glorious series of the Hildebrandine popes.
Bruno, Bishop of Toul, who was St. Leo IX., having after long resistance been persuaded by the emperor and the most eminent prelates to consent to assume the tiara, stopped at Cluny to see Hildebrand, a young monk, who became St. Gregory VII. With difficulty he induced him to accompany him to Rome, on the condition that he would make the journey in pilgrim’s garb, and submit the imperial nomination without reserve to the free election of the clergy and people of the Roman Church. He was enthroned on the 12th of February, which was the first Sunday of Lent, 1049. The eleventh century was at its zenith, and the bright sun of a new era shed its rays upon Christendom, as a new St. Leo sat upon the throne of St. Peter, St. Leo the Great, St. Gregory, and St. Nicholas, chasing away the darkness and the clouds of the tenth century, and putting an end to the period of the obnubilation of the Roman Church.
We have confined our attention almost entirely to the local history of the popes, without noticing their administration of the universal church. The general ecclesiastical history of the whole period between St. Nicholas I. and St. Gregory VII. furnishes abundant proof of the universal recognition and continuous exercise of the papal supremacy in the East as well as in the West. Adrian II. celebrated the eighth œcumenical council at Constantinople in 870. John VIII., John X., and John XV. exercised throughout Europe the same spiritual authority which was exercised by Nicholas the Great. The local difficulties of the popes, and even the scandals which disturbed the Roman Church, had no effect throughout Christendom to diminish the authority of the Roman See. During the general anarchy and chaos caused by the new irruption of barbarians the unity and common life of Christendom was oppressed and enfeebled, and the corporate, organic action of the universal church could not manifest itself so vigorously as it had done before and did afterwards. When all the evils which had attacked the church and Christendom at the very centre of life in Rome reached their crisis in the pontificate of Benedict IX., it was certainly felt by all good and honest men that the very existence of the Papacy and the Catholic Church, of the whole European society, and of all civilization, morality, and order on the earth, was in imminent danger. The spectacle of a youth who was no better in morals, and no stronger in intellectual or princely qualities, than the weakest and most dissolute of the Carlovingian monarchs, seated on the throne of St. Peter, shocked and scandalized Christendom to such an extent that the loud outcry has not yet ceased to resound in our ears. Yet we perceive in the action of the Council of Sutri, and of the emperor, Henry III., in respect to Gregory VI., one of the most signal and splendid testimonies to the undoubting and unshaken faith of that age in the supremacy of the pope. Sylvester was judged and condemned to perpetual imprisonment as an intruder and a pseudo-pope. Benedict was set aside, not because the council pretended to judge him for his conduct while pope, but because he had executed a legal and valid abdication of his office. In respect to Gregory, the council examined and judged of nothing except the validity of his election, and, this being ascertained, left the judgment of his own case to his own supreme authority, to his conscience, and to Almighty God.
Just one rapid and parting glance we must cast over Christendom, to take in by a general view its movement through this segment of the great cycle of time, and the state into which it had grown in the middle of the eleventh century. The great barbarian and heathen irruption into Christian Europe was like the casting of an immense mass of fresh coals upon a glowing but gradually-expiring fire in a great foundry furnace. The general aspect was black and dead, and the momentary effect was a suspension of the great works commenced, but the result was a rapid kindling from the burning bed beneath, a stronger and hotter fire, and a more vigorous resumption of operations. The threatened Mohammedan conquest of Europe was averted, the Hungarian invasion completely and finally repelled, the Scandinavian eruptions changed into a most beneficial colonization and infusion of a new element of strength. Many other most remarkable and salutary political and social transformations were effected. The Scandinavians, Hungarians, Russians, and other Sclavonian nations were converted and added to the church. A beginning was made with the Prussians, even, by the martyrdom of their first apostle, St. Adalbert, although the work was not completed until near the close of the thirteenth century and proved to be short-lived. Since they have resumed the persecution of bishops, there may be, perhaps, a hope of their reconversion.
The calendars of the two centuries from 850 to 1050 are crowded with the names of great saints and other illustrious men and women. Among the popes flourished St. Leo IV., founder of the Leonine City, St. Nicholas I., John X., Benedict VIII., and Sylvester II. Among the emperors and kings we may single out Berenger, Henry the Fowler, Otho the Great, St. Henry II., Hugh Capet, Robert, Alfred, Canute, Edward the Confessor; Edward and Edmund, martyrs; Brian Boroihme, Ferdinand, St. Stephen, St. Olaf, Rollo, and Wladimir. In the brilliant group of Christian empresses and queens shine with special lustre Theodora, St. Adelaide, St. Cunegunda, St. Matilda, Theophania, and Olga. As illustrious specimens of the great number of bishops and abbots of high virtue and merit, we mention St. Anscharius, St. Methodius, St. Ignatius of Constantinople, St. Dunstan, St. Odo of Cluny, and St. Romuald. These two centuries contributed but little to the treasury of literature. There is, nevertheless, a considerable list of authors, among whom are worthy of mention Nithart, Flodoard, Suidas, Pascharius Radbert, Wuthikind the German annalist, and John Scotus Erigena. One of the most gifted and clever of the Latins, Luitprand, and the most intelligent and erudite of the Greeks, Photius, were unhappily both so morally despicable that they reflect disgrace rather than honor upon their age.
The epoch we are considering was more remarkable for action than for writing. The vast and strong foundations were laid for the future superstructure. Empires and kingdoms, smaller states, cities, towns, universities, monasteries, and great churches, rose in majesty during the latter part of this epoch upon the ruins made during its earlier period, or upon heretofore waste and desert land. The glorious orders of Cluny and Camaldoli, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Cordova, several of the great minsters, and the first efforts of the new school of Christian art date from this period. It made scanty records of its own history, but it is crowded with the richest materials for the student and the literary artist. M. Ozanam projected a course of lectures at the Sorbonne covering the whole space from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries, but executed only the first and last part of his programme. The middle portion still lies open to any one worthy to complete his work. The Iron Age is worthy of more study than has been given to it, and, when it is carefully examined, there are many great discoveries to be made concerning the ages which preceded as well as those which have followed this hard era. When will intelligent Englishmen and Americans begin to read history and find out how they have been duped? When will the wretched little manuals such as Mrs. Markham’s History of England be driven out of our schools and children’s libraries and replaced by books which tell the truth? Let us lay bare history and search for the hard foundations of society and civilization, and we shall see with ocular evidence that the converging and diverging lines of all the centuries have but two centres, Jerusalem and Rome. The rocky height of Jebus, which David carried by craft and valor; the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus and Numa laid the foundations of Rome, are in the cycle of history what the two foci are in an ellipse. When the fortunes of Juda are at their lowest point, the supernatural providence of God over that royal tribe and the house of David is most signally manifested. It is impossible to read intelligently the history of the Roman See and the popes without perceiving a providence of a higher order, working on a more sublime plane, in the disasters as well as in the glories and triumphs of the New Jerusalem and its line of priestly kings, the vicegerents of David’s royal Son and Lord. The supernatural providence manifest in the destinies of Rome and its dependent Christendom makes also the supernatural end toward which God is conducting mankind equally manifest. The search after natural causes without regard to the first cause being proved absurd, the search for natural effects without respect to the final cause is equally absurd. The ideal kingdom on earth is not to be found. Not only are we unable to find it realized, we cannot even find a tendency toward a future realization. Royal power, national greatness, the achievements of art and science, the external order and splendor of the church, are all, manifestly, only means, and the end is in the spiritual order, in the souls of individual men. Everything external and temporal is built on the shifting, unstable sand of human free-will, and is therefore evanescent and changeable. The only permanent and eternal result is in the great, unknown mass of human beings who have found the gate and the way to the kingdom of heaven, and in the élite of the human race who have found the way to its highest places and wear its brightest crowns. The earth is only a palæstra, a school, an ingenious contrivance of divine art for the acquisition and exercise of virtue, for gaining merit, for nurturing the childhood of the destined citizens of the true and eternal city of God—Cœlestis Urbs, Jerusalem. The whole order of divine Providence in the church and the world, and its chief intention, must be changed, if any ideal and stable state of perfection is established on the earth; for this would require that no longer free scope should be given to the liberty of the human will. We conclude, therefore, that future ages will not differ essentially from those which are past. As the fourth and the seventh centuries differ, as the tenth and thirteenth, the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries mutually differ, so there are possible cycles of change from worse to better, or the reverse, so long as the world continues. There is a perpetual progress toward that consummation which God has in view. But there is no change in the militant state of the Catholic Church. We are informed by divine revelation that the earthly sovereignty of Jesus Christ will continue only so long as he has enemies to conquer, and that when his conquest is completed he will give up this kingdom to the Father, that God may be all in all. His eternal reign, in which all the elect will share, consists in the glory won by merit. All the rest is only scaffolding to be torn down and thrown away for fire-wood; it is scenery and stage-costume, of no use when the play is over. The lessons of history teach us to discern all the illusions which have deceived past ages; if we are wise we shall learn also not to make new illusions for the future. We shall fear nothing for the eternal cause of truth and right, and we shall have no fanciful hopes of a coming millennium. We shall learn the one needful and useful maxim that all effort is a waste of time, except the one effort to make ourselves and others better and more virtuous.
SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE.
CONCLUSION.
The morning they started for Monte Cassino the Signora had a Mass said for her intention, and the intention was that she might be enabled to decide speedily on her state of life, and to decide so clearly and wisely as never again to have a doubt about it. Never had she been nearer to accepting Mr. Vane, and never had she been more tremblingly afraid of doing so. The suspense and trouble were becoming intolerable. She felt that it must be settled within these three days.
But no sooner was the journey begun than all else was lost sight of. It was impossible to pass with a preoccupied mind amid all that beauty; impossible not to feel one’s individual life dwindle in view of the life of centuries there made visible. The Campagna slipped past like an old monotonous song that has been sung over one’s cradle, and heard in quiet intervals all up the years, till every note has grown to be something more than a simple sound, and is rather a long series of octaves caught along the heart-strings. Then
“The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,”
pressing near the track, and looking over each other’s heads at the train as it went, as if wondering what new Jason was ploughing with fiery-snorting monsters down through the green fields of the south. Dim, gray cities stood petrified on their heights, without a sign of life; and the torrent-beds on their sides were like silvery paths up which the souls of all the dead had climbed, and so faded off into space. What fancies went up those converging paths, and spread their wings in the shining clouds that moored themselves on crest after crest! Or, fair as any fancy, what brooks and torrents came rushing down in the rainy October and petulant April, catching the sunshine as they ran, and bringing flowers and harvests and fountains for the thirsty plains. On they went through the smiling, luxuriant paradise waving with solid green and bloom in the valleys. Dark forests hung suspended in gorges, cities lifted themselves between the mountains to look, here and there a castle sat on its rock like a king on his throne. They could no more have pointed out the rapidly-succeeding beauties to each other than they could have indicated the swift flashes of a tempest.
At length, and before they had begun to think they were tired, the cars stopped at the station of San Germano, and here a very tall old man, bent into the shape of a new moon, recognized them as the party he was on the watch for, and informed them that the donkeys were waiting for them outside, and that they were expected to dine at Monte Cassino.
They recollected that they were a little tired and a little hungry, and, very opportunely, a pretty young contadina presented herself with a basket of bread, fruit, boiled eggs, and wine. So they seated themselves in the waiting-room, a circle of admiring contadini standing about and watching every mouthful they ate, as a dog watches.
“Are we expected to take more than we want and give them what remains?” Isabel asked.
The Signora glanced over the company, and demanded to know which men had charge of the donkeys.
Five stout young fellows stood forward, and a sixth made haste to explain that four of them would attend to the party, and a fifth would carry their baggage up on another donkey.
“And have you anything to do with us?” she inquired politely of this informant.
“I belong to the hotel of San Germano,” he replied, and then went on to explain the situation still further.
“Oh! thanks; but don’t trouble yourself,” the Signora interrupted quite coolly. “You need not wait for us. Five men are quite enough to do all we want done.”
He withdrew a little, but did not go away. There was not the slightest sign of resentment or mortification. He was actuated by a simple and unadulterated desire for money, and meant to stay by till the last minute, in the hope that he might snatch at the chance of some small service which would give him a claim.
“Now, girls,” the Signora said, “don’t you give a penny to any one, unless I tell you. Here are twenty people on the watch for money. Don’t let any one do the smallest thing for you, except these five men. We will give them some bread and wine. That is all they will want. The Italian poor live on bread. What does that old man want of us?” she inquired of one of the donkey-men.
The old man, who had been constantly hovering near, came forward at once. He was the letter-carrier for the monastery.
“Oh! I did not know but you had something to do with the donkeys,” she remarked.
He came a step nearer. “I do not go up till evening,” he said with an insinuating smile.
“Go whenever you like,” she answered obligingly. “If you should bring us up any letters, however, we will give you a soldo for each one.”
He glanced longingly at the bread and wine, but she rose without taking any further notice of him.
“How much is your wine a bottle?” she asked of the pretty young vendor.
“Fifteen soldi, Signora,” was the innocent reply.
“Nonsense! I will give you five.”
Exclamations, deprecation, grieved reproach on the part of the young woman. The wine was too good for that, she protested. It was the best dry wine of the country, and sincere, as the Signora could see.
The Signora was not so new as they had supposed. She had bought better wine in larger bottles, in Genzano, close to Rome, for seven cents a bottle, and this was high at six. It was not, however, worth while to multiply words about it, and they made a compromise by paying seven soldi a bottle, with which the young woman seemed to be perfectly well satisfied.
Then they went out and mounted their donkeys, followed by the reproachful eyes and extended hands of fourteen men and children, and closely attended by the young hotel servant, who attached himself to Bianca. Marion, having visited Monte Cassino thoroughly not long before, had not accompanied them, being a little delicate, too, about joining himself to a party without an invitation from the monastery, though he would certainly have been included had his connection with the family been known.
Bianca dropped her pocket-handkerchief, and the young volunteer esquire rushed to pick it up and present it to her with a gallant touch of the cap and a smile that displayed a fine set of teeth. She accepted it with blushing thanks.
“My dear, he counts on half a lira for that,” the Signora remarked. “Don’t get any romantic ideas into your head. He would be as gallant as that to a witch, if he thought she would pay him. You must really put on a more severe expression. You have precisely the look at this moment of some young princess of fairyland who goes about giving bags of gold to everybody. If you keep on that sweet face, you will be as surrounded by beggars as a lump of sugar with flies.”
“You are a terribly forbidding and obdurate woman,” Mr. Vane said, looking into the Signora’s laughing face.
“I am sometimes,” she protested. “I pity one beggar, or two beggars, or sometimes three beggars; but when I see a score of healthy cormorants surround poor travellers, and ready for any pretence or any servility to get money out of them, I lose patience. I’ve been victimized too much in days that are gone to be very long-suffering now. Besides, I work for my money and have a feeling of indignation when I see a strong, healthy person stretch out a hand that has done me no service. Aren’t these donkeys little darlings? I do think they are the most useful, faithful creatures in the world.”
“If I could only know just where the backbone of mine is situated,” Isabel said pathetically; for her saddle had been constantly slipping either backward or forward ever since she mounted. “It really seems to me that I could ride a rail more securely. There I go! Oh!”
The hotel-servant rushed enthusiastically to catch the back of her saddle, and lift the rider from her nearly horizontal position, and help her off while they tightened the girths.
“It’s a sort of knack which you will soon learn,” the Signora said consolingly. “The poor little animals are as thin as a rail, but the saddles are like a chair. Just let yourself go, humor the motion of the donkey, and in a little while you will sit like—like Bianca there. Look at that child! All she wants is an infant in her arms!”
They had passed the narrow and stony loops of the path out of the town, and reached the mountain-side, and, as the Signora spoke, Bianca, leading the procession, went round a turn before them and came back higher up. She sat in the saddle as easily as if in a chair, upright, her hands folded in her lap, and her fair face uplifted as she gazed at the great pile of the monastery on the peak above them.
She needed, indeed, but an infant in her arms to be a ready picture of the Holy Mother and Child in the Flight into Egypt. She had taken off her hat and laid a large veil over her head. A blue mantle hung over her shoulders and came close to her white neck. The beast she rode, the saddle, the rocky path—all were perfect. She passed under a cypress-tree that pressed her eyes down with its black shadow, and, in that downward glance, caught their looks directed to her. She smiled, clasped her hands, and glanced around in mute rapture.
To and fro, to and fro they wound up the height, every turn unwinding and enlarging the scene below. The low hills of the plain disappeared, leaving only a vast level laid out in an exquisite mosaic of varied greens, with houses here and there, single or in clusters, forests that had dwindled to groves, and groves that looked like bouquets. The shining turns of a river lay amid that verdure, like a silver chain dropped and half-hidden in the grass. All round the mountains circled close and jealous, guarding this little paradise. Now they were skirted with trees; now they rose in harsh masses of stone that looked as if not even a blade of grass could find a foothold. A picturesque castle stood on a spur sent off from the mountain they were ascending.
Above them the vast square of the monastery, with its many windows and balconies, grew every moment nearer. After an hour’s ride trees shut them into an avenue, and they found themselves close under the grand walls of the building. They alighted at the lofty open archway and saw before them a long, ascending passage that looked strong enough to support even that pile on its solid arches. The first half was dim, and part way up, at the right, was a shrine in the wall, with its floating flame burning before some saintly face only half-visible behind the wire screen. The upper half was lighted by arched windows at the left, showing a double wall there, with some sort of room or passage between, arched openings in the inner wall answering to the windows. At the upper end of this avenue of stone shut the great black valves of a double iron door, studded thickly with nails, pierced with a little cluster of holes to peep through at one side, and showing the outline of a smaller door in the right valve.
The massive walls and doors, the long, sloping ascent, the light and shade, the one little golden flame, were like nothing of the nineteenth century. The action and business of such a place were not the action and business peculiar and suitable to our times. Ecclesiastical processions might go up there; the scarlet fire of a cardinal’s robe in the midst of a group of attendants would well befit that dim and echoing passage; a cavalcade of knights and ladies, with horn and hound and nodding plumes; a company of soldiers with shield and helmet—these were the figures to animate such a scene. Or, most perfect picture of all, one might imagine there that sublime company, the very thought of which brings tears to the eyes—that long procession of ecclesiastics and people, with their banners and crucifixes and candles, chanting funeral hymns as they ascended, bearing up to the mountain-top for burial the twin saint of the glorious founder and father of the monastery—Santa Scholastica. It is but yesterday, it seems, that the brother and sister parted, having their last conference together under a little roof down the mountain-side, while the tempest stormed about them. It is but this morning that St. Benedict has sent his monks down to bring the holy relics up and lay them in his own tomb under the grand altar, where soon he will join her. So the colossal saints of all time know how to recognize the grandeur of a true woman. These men are so near the most sublime and regal of creatures—the awful, immaculate Virgin—and the very type of penitents—the thrice-purified Magdalen—that the shining veil of the one and the sacred tears of the other flow about their sisters, and woman is honored in whatever work her Creator calls her to do. It was in the times, still illuminated by the twilight of the scarcely-departed presence of the Morning Star and the Son, that St. Gregory the Great ordered his mother’s portrait painted with the mitre of a doctor on her head, and one hand raised in benediction, while with the other she taught her son from the sacred Book on her knees—the queenly St. Sylvia! It was in such days that St. Chrysostom proclaimed that women may participate, as well as men, in combats for the cause of God and the church; that St. Melania, the younger, disputed so eloquently with the Nestorians that she converted many and frightened the rest, showing herself so powerful that Pelagius, who drew away priests and bishops, strove, but in vain, to convert her into an assistant; the same Melania who converted the persecutor, Volusianus, whom all the eloquence of St. Augustine could not convert. It was in such days that saintly women inspired the Fathers of the church to write, and that St. Gregory conceived his Treatise on the Soul and on Resurrection while sitting at his dying sister’s bedside and listening to her discourse on death, as she consoled him for the death of St. Basil.
And not only such thoughts and recollections, dear to women, flowed in as they went up the path that St. Scholastica had passed before them, but other recollections, dear to scholars and precious to the church and to civilization. Here was one of the citadels of learning in times when barbarous invasions overran the land and threatened to extinguish every spark of intellectual and spiritual wealth that the race of man had accumulated. Here the monks, with a zeal kindled to passion, hoarded and preserved the remains of their devastated treasures, and spent unwearied days and nights in multiplying copies of writings that must not die. Here, with the devotion of the bridegroom who brings the most precious gems he can procure to deck his bride, or of parents who shower upon their only child every gift in their power to bestow, genius the most exquisite consecrated itself to the work of adorning the page of the text of praise and prayer with such marvellous miniature beauty of form and color as only the fairy pencil of Nature can rival.
Wrapt and exalted in such recollections, the Signora moved as one in a dream, forgetting her companions entirely. It was only when the great iron doors swung open before her, and she saw a tall gentleman in a black robe hurrying forward, with his hand extended in cordial welcome to Mr. Vane, that she came back to the nineteenth century, and made an effort to salute in a sufficiently-composed manner the prior of Monte Cassino, Father Boniface.
But it was a very beautiful nineteenth century that she recalled herself to. They were within the monastery buildings, which completely surrounded them in a massive square, broken in the middle at the left by a long portico of white travertine supporting a superb terrace called the Loggia del Paradiso, and at the right, in the centre, also, by the grand stairs that go up to the higher level of the mountain peak, around which the monastery is built. This loggia and the grand stairs are at the opposite sides of a court with a picturesque well in the centre, and colossal statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. The paved court is between two others, which are turned into gardens, the three separated by double colonnades and surrounded by porticos. At the head of the stairs, which are the whole width of the court, another portico opens into the upper court—that of the church—and has a door at either side leading back to the Loggia del Paradiso. The church court, also surrounded by porticos and adorned with statues, is closed on one side by the church. This is built on the very mountain-top, the confession being hewn out of the solid rock.
This plan they caught at first, though but in a glance; for, after welcoming them all, the prior conducted them through two or three dimly-lighted rooms, all of stone, unfurnished and unadorned, into a bright parlor, where a balcony window gave them a view of all the beautiful valley with its surrounding mountains. In a few minutes dinner was announced as prepared in the next chamber, and here they found a table laid out with the freshest of linen, old silver as white almost as the cloth, and a well-cooked and well-served dinner.
Weakening their wine before drinking it, they all observed the quality of the water, limpid and light as some third element half-water and half-air, and the prior explained to them that the monastery used rain-water filtered.
“We have a great cistern, ninety feet square, hollowed out in the mountain under the central court. The well you saw there is in the centre of it. The water is thoroughly filtered. Moreover, the conduits that admit it to the cistern are closed during the four hot months, so that only cold water enters.”
This prior, the “urbane librarian” of Longfellow’s recollections of Monte Cassino, was not only a kind and generous host and an intelligent cicerone, but a most agreeable and interesting man. He had a noble figure and a handsome, bright face, and combined in his character qualities which might have been thought to be inharmonious; for he was at the same time an enthusiastic monk, proud of his venerable order, and devoted heart and soul to his monastery, and a man quite up to the times in all that the times have of praise-worthy.
After dinner he led them up to see the church, pointing out the statues as they went. Here were the father and mother of St. Benedict, and with them popes, royal dukes, kings, and emperors. Before entering they paused to look at the great door of bronze, cast in Constantinople, in which is written in silver letters the list of the possessions of the abbey at the time the door was made, in 1066. At this time, more than eight hundred years later, nothing was left of these riches.
Entering the church, they stood astonished. If it had been built of simple marble, moderately varied and ornamented, there would still have been enough to praise warmly in the beautiful form and proportions of the three naves, the grand altar by Michael Angelo, the raised tribune, and the beautiful paintings of the dome, roof, and eight chapels. But these were only the frame-work of a mosaic the most splendid covering every part of the edifice to the dimmest corner or the smallest nook behind a column. And this mosaic is not that comparatively simpler kind, made of small bits, but each flower and figure is cut from a single piece of marble or precious stone, and so perfectly fitted into the groundwork that the point of a pin could not be introduced between them. It was hard at first to believe that the whole was not exquisitely painted in every possible color and shade, and it needed a touch or a near sight of that fine, inimitable gloss of marble to convince one of the incalculable riches of the whole. The very floor was superb enough for the walls of a splendid church; the very steps of the tribune were set with mosaics.
The Signora took pencil and paper, and attempted to make a memorandum of only one chapel, to enumerate its alabaster columns, its flowers of mother-of-pearl, amethyst, agate, and lapis-lazuli, its infinitely-varied marbles and precious stones and its infinitely varied designs, and, after ten minutes’ rapid work, gave up the task. A week would have been necessary for that one chapel; and there were seven more, besides the altar, the confession, and the tribune.
“You like carved wood?” the prior asked, with a smile of anticipated triumph, as they went up the tribune steps.
“Who does not?” the Signora exclaimed. “Carved wood and lace are two of my passions. I have never stolen any lace, and I hope I never shall. Wood-carving is fortunately usually in too heavy pieces to suggest the possibility of being carried away in one’s pocket.”
“We must, however, first visit St. Benedict and Santa Scholastica,” said their guide, too charitable, as well as too enthusiastic for beautiful things, to be shocked at this little escapade.
Thirteen silver lamps burned before the screen at the back of the grand altar, and under that screen reposed the bodies of the twin saints. Above them, written in golden letters, was the inscription:
“Benedictum et Scholasticam
Uno in terris partu editos,
Una in Deum pietate cœlo Redetos,
Unis Hic Excipit Tumulus,
Mortalis depositi pro Aeternitate custos.”
Rising from their knees, they turned and faced the choir—a double row of stalls forming three sides of a large square open to the altar. Looked at from a little distance, these stalls had the appearance of having been closely overgrown at some past time with the finest of vines, which had turned black and petrified there, preserving perfectly every little leaf and tendril, and still covering entirely the plain wood beneath. Looking longer, one saw little figures and faces, and birds and animals. Going nearer scarcely dispelled the illusion, so finely was every particle carved—the vines and leaves in some places quite separated from the ground, so that one slipped the finger-tip behind them. Every stall was different, every one provoked a new exclamation of admiring wonder.
Then they went into the sacristy, a long hall with the sides completely lined with presses of dark wood with gilded metal ornaments. These presses also were carved finely, each department, in front of which a priest would vest himself for Mass, having a bas-relief of a subject suggesting some particular virtue, as that of the Pharisee and the publican in the Temple, suggesting humility.
Back of the sacristy was the relic-chamber, where, in addition to the more sacred treasures, the ladies admired especially two little antique caskets, one of smalt, bright as a jewel, the other of carved ivory of the most delicious tint of creamy white—that tint so soft that it seems as if the material itself must yield like down to the touch. They gave one glance at a crosier by Benvenuto Cellini, on the inner curve of which stood a tiny group, then tore themselves away. The afternoon was waning, and there was left them but a day and a half more, with
“Such rooms to explore,
Such alcoves to importune.”
The air of this place was an ideal atmosphere; one breathed it like a fine wine that exhilarates delicately, but does not inebriate. It was soft but not warm, fresh but not chilly, and as pure as pure can be. The fresh, rosy faces of the troop of young students they met going out showed how this mountain air agreed with them.
“What a place to send boys to!” Mr. Vane exclaimed. “It is a little world in itself, where they can have every amusement and companionship, as well as instruction; and one has but to look at them to see that they are as happy as they are healthy.”
The boys were coming in from their afternoon walk down the mountain-side, and all glowing with just-subsiding fun. Each one, passing the prior, caught at his hand to kiss it; but as he would not permit himself to receive such an homage, they resorted to the amusing substitute of kissing their own hands after they had touched his.
“What beautiful recollections of their school-days those boys will carry with them through their lives!” Mr. Vane remarked, as they went out over the colonnade to the Loggia del Paradiso. “In no way, it seems to me, except by being educated here, unless one spend one’s life here, could one become perfectly familiar with the riches, visible and invisible, of the place; and such a familiarity would be of itself an education, especially for the impressible minds of the young.”
The front of the Paradiso fills the gap in the middle of one side of the monastery—that part opposite the church—and is on a level with the church, or the second story of the monastery. It is probably the same width as the church. Leaning on the parapet there, one looks off on a view which may well give the place its name—the beautiful plain and the beautiful circling mountains, with the still, blue splendor of the southern sky gazing down upon them as if enamored of their beauty. There was no need of imagination in such a place. Simple, literal eyes were enough to flood the soul with beauty.
Familiar as he was with the scene, the prior was sympathetic enough to say but little; and even Isabel, whose impressions, being more superficial, ran a good deal into words, hushed herself out of respect for the others.
“Until we reach Rome again,” the Signora remarked to her friends as they went down the stairs to the great court, “I should like to be excused from all social intercourse, except the mere being with you bodily. I don’t want to speak or be spoken to, except to learn of this place. We have no right to talk; we are ghosts. We have come here in a dream or a vision. Father Boniface talks, of course, because he is a part of the place.”
They laughed and agreed.
“But I hope,” the prior said, “that you are not too ghostly to taste the water they are just drawing up now. See how it sparkles!”
Two columns support a cross-piece over this beautiful well, and from the centre drops an iron chain with a copper bucket at each end. When one goes down the other comes up, dripping full of airy water.
They all drank silently—each, probably, to some friend, absent or present. Bianca blushed as she drank, and her pretty mouth seemed to kiss the water. Then, standing on the upper step of the well, they leaned over the stone curb and looked down to where, far below, the surface of the water shone like a huge black diamond set in a gray border.
Tired out with travel and with pleasure, the ladies were not sorry when the prior proposed that they should go down to the house where they were to sleep.
This house is the only building on the mountain except the monastery, and is under the control of the monastery. It was built merely to accommodate lady relatives of the students who might wish to see their sons, or brothers, or nephews without the fatigue of coming up and going down the mountain the same day, and without suffering the embarrassment of spending the whole day in a house inhabited and served only by men. Now and then some benefactress or a friend of the superiors of the monastery has the privilege of stopping there. The house is small and plain, and kept by a contadine and his wife. The ladies stopping there have their coffee in the house, but they dine always in a private dining-room at the monastery, from whence, also, their supper is sent down to them in the evening—supper being after Ave Maria, when the gates are closed.
Mr. Vane stayed with the prior, and the three ladies followed their guide. Their way led them a five minutes’ walk back as they had come up, then turned through an open gate in the stone wall at the right, where they found their lodgings. A contadina with dark cloth draperies pinned smoothly about her, and a huge white edifice of starched linen on her head, overshadowing a pair of bright eyes, met them at the gate and welcomed them with a pleasant voice, but in a tongue where the soft Roman consonants seemed to have each and every one turned itself into the hardest kind of a Z.
The windows looked out on a long terrace with a parapet, and outside the parapet the mountain dropped steeply to the plain.
A stair, which belonged entirely to the strangers’ house, led up to the second floor, and here they found three pleasant bed-chambers awaiting them. An hour later, as they sat at their windows looking out into the twilight, they saw their donna, Catarina, come into the terrace with a huge basket on her arm. Her head-dress and sleeves shone white in the light of the rising moon, and there was a soft richness where the scarlet stripe ran round her petticoat, and where the rainbow colors of the apron-like upper mantle bound her without a fold. Her solid step sounded on the stair the next minute, there was the spurt of a match in the outer room of the suite, and, looking through the open doors, they saw the woman, more like a picture than any picture they recollected to have seen, standing with a curious brass lamp in her hand, carefully lighting its wick, the basket she had brought sitting on the floor at her feet.
She came into the Signora’s room with that red light all over her from the lamp she carried in her hand, smiled so as to show two rows of snowy-white teeth, and, with a “Buona sera,” announced that their supper had come and would be on the table in a few minutes.
The three went out into the dining-room to witness the preparations and listen to the woman’s pleasant voice as she half-talked, half-sang an account of her life and adventures there, her manner of speech being that so common among the lower classes of Italy, especially at the south—almost a sort of chant, inexpressibly soft and touching. The peculiarity of this manner of speaking consists more, perhaps, in the ending of the sentences than in their progress; for they never come down to the definite tone that ends a period, but stop on some swinging note a little higher up, it may be only half a tone above. It is the voice of weeping, which never has a positive tone, as if the whole gamut were washed over and blurred by tears.
Talking so, the woman brought out from her basket a linen cloth for the table, next a pair of cruets with vinegar and oil, next a decanter of white-wine, next an omelette made with herbs, after that a salad that looked like sliced cucumbers, but was something else. Bread followed, then the necessary dishes.
“I’m ashamed to confess that I am hungry,” Isabel said. “It is a miserable coming down, but we won’t say anything about it.”
“My dear,” responded the Signora, “you are very ungrateful to say so. Let us be just. Our bodies have brought our souls up to this beautiful place, and carried them about from point to point of it, and kept as quiet as possible about their own affairs. Now, if they are hungry, let us feed them. Poor bodies! they have the worst of it. They are extremely useful, and we sublime creatures are always turning up our noses at them; they suffer, and we protest that we want to get rid of them, when, in nine cases out of ten, we have wantonly caused their suffering. Can a body take care of itself, or even know how it should be done? No; the soul has to do it, and ought to do it in gratitude for house-rent, or body-rent. Then, at last, the poor things have got to corrupt, and be devoured by worms, and go to dust. Fortunately, these sufferings will not be felt. It is also a satisfaction to know that this arrogant spirit, which is for ever crowing over its poor companion, will have to suffer consciously for it all and pay the uttermost farthing. You will please to recollect, Miss Isabel Vane, that if ever you should have the happiness of going to heaven, your body will go there too. Sometimes,” she said, holding her hand up before the light, which shone through and made a ruby of it,—“sometimes I think that my poor flesh has a glimmering, a presentiment of the possibility of being one day glorified.”
“Most worshipful body,” said Isabel to herself with great respect, “would you like a piece of that omelette—a large piece, a half of it, say, leaving the other half to those two? Yes? Well, you shall have it.” And she proceeded with all possible dignity to help herself to a hundred and eighty degrees of the circle of herbs and eggs before her.
The donna, who, of course, had not understood a word, looked with astonishment at this shocking piece of voracity; and when Bianca, in protection of her client, clasped her arms around the wine, and the Signora, with an air of determination, took possession of the salad, the poor creature evidently thought that she was waiting on a company of maniacs.
“Do let’s laugh,” said the Signora, and at once set the example. “We are frightening the poor soul to death.”
Their supper and their nonsense finished, the three took possession of their rooms.
A full moonlight was filling all the valley, or plain, which looked like the bottom of an emerald chalice full of golden wine. A pure and sacred silence reigned over all—the silence of peace and lofty contemplation. Had it been some such silence that suggested to Charlemagne, when, almost eleven hundred years before, he came to venerate the relics of St. Benedict, the beautiful thought of bestowing on the abbot, with all the other singular privileges he gave him, that of being the sole mediator between the emperor and the rebellious barons—the only person by whose means they could make their peace? It was doubtless by virtue of this ancient title that the prior had written “Pax” at the head of his letter to Mr. Vane.
Yes, Charlemagne came up here ages ago, and popes, and princes, and kings came, and the Saracens swarmed up with fire and sword, and the Lombards and the Normans; and the Crusaders came to pray at the shrine before going to the East. They had seen on the pilasters of the church the different crosses in precious mosaic of the orders of knights which had been formed under the Benedictine rule, among them the familiar names of Calatrava, Alcantara, St. Stephen, St. James of the Sword, and Templars. Ignatius of Loyola came up and stayed fifty days.
“But, signora mia,” said the lady who was going over all this part, as she gazed out into the night, “since you are not going to stay here fifty days, you will be so good as to shut your mind and your eyes and go to sleep.”
The next morning they went to see the monastery proper, for which they had a special permission from the Pope, and spent hours in the library, archives, printing and lithograph rooms. It would be vain to tell what old books—worth their weight in gold, printed on creamy vellum in characters that modern type has never excelled, if it has equalled—what drawers filled with scrolls, what autographs, what illuminations, they saw. It were vain to fancy with what feelings one sees for the first time the writing of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great, of Frederick II., of Countess Matilda. Then there was the long, long dormitory of the boys, with a row of snowy beds at either side, and the immense arched window at the end framing a superb outside picture, with Monte Cairo in the centre, and long, long corridors that dwindled people seen from opposite ends, with cracks made by earthquakes in their walls, and solid groined arches that only an earthquake could shake down. Then the nooks, courts, and passages, which they came upon without guessing in the least in what part of the building they were; the round window in the wall—occhio, or eye, they call it—through which they looked as through a lens, and saw the three courts and the colonnades. Finally, coming down a stair with a wall at either side and a door at the foot, they were told: “When you have crossed that threshold you cannot return. The cloister ends there.”
“What!” exclaimed Isabel, “if I should run out a minute, couldn’t I come back on to the stairs again for another minute?”
The prior shook his head. “It would be excommunication. That seems unreasonable; but listen: This is a cloister which women can enter only by special permission of the Pope. That permission is not lightly granted, and is for but once. Your running back a minute would do no harm in itself, but would do harm to the principle. If you can return in one minute, you could come back in five, or ten, or half an hour, or an hour, or a day, and so on; and so one visit might be made to cover an indefinite time. The only way, you see, is to be strictly literal in excluding from a second entrance.”
That afternoon they were presented to the Abbot—“Abbot of Abbots” he was called in the palmy days of Monte Cassino—and received, not only his benediction, but each a little souvenir of the place: a tiny photograph of the tomb of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, with a wreath of flowers pressed round it that had been on the tomb, and at the back his own name written, with the date, and under it “Ora pro me.”
They stood in the church speaking with him a few minutes, then went out to the Paradiso.
A storm was coming up from the east, and round the angle of the building they could just see that the mountains in that direction were obliterated and mists fast filling the plain. Standing up against these mists, as if to impede their progress, was the lower end of a rainbow, set straight and solid on the green like a jewelled column. The cloud advanced and pushed the column before them.
“It is like the pillar of light leading the Israelites,” Isabel said.
The cloud unrolled itself above, and down through the rainbow ran a crinkling line of white fire.
“How plainly lightning asserts its own force!” Mr. Vane remarked. “Seeing it for the first time, without knowing what it was, one would know at once that it is an irresistible power. What an experience it would be to stand just near enough to a passing flash to perhaps hear it hiss through the air, to be between it and its thunder, and yet not so near nor so in its track as to be smitten!”
Little by little the sun was vanquished, and the rainbow grew dim, faltered, blushed along the line of the advancing shadows, and disappeared. There was an odd murmur growing up, fine and pervading—the sound of rain in the plain below. All the tiny noises of each falling drop joined in a multitude, countless nothings making themselves heard in pauses of the thunder. It was to solid sound as fine carving is to plain wood, as embroidery is to a fine web—a continued succession of millions of infinitesimal watery strokes separated by millions of infinitesimal silences.
The others went into the house at the first drop that splashed on the Paradiso, but the Signora went back to the portico and seated herself under its shelter. Behind her the court of the church looked weird and strange. The pillars of the porticos appeared to move as the lightnings came and went, the statues and busts behind them seemed to lean forward and retreat, and the one window in the church front looked blue, as if there were light inside it.
She took herself out of the draught, and went to lean on the wall between the doors. In front of her the grand stairs went down to the central court, and the gardens shone green and wet through the colonnades at either side. On a level with her, across the space, stretched the Paradiso, and under the portico that supported it a large, arched door led from the court out on to a beautiful loggia. Two or three monks, who had been standing in this loggia watching the storm, were driven in by the rain, and in a minute the whole place seemed to be deserted. The rain and the lightning had it to themselves and were washing and purifying all “so as by fire.”
This one visible witness felt her soul expand as she gazed. If only she also might be purified and enlightened in that time and place! If the littlenesses of life might be washed away from her, and only the realities remain!
“Come, Holy Spirit!” she said, and blessed herself.
Then, content and confident, without saying another word, she waited with her two inarticulate but eloquent companions—Art, consecrated to God, and Nature, informed by God—and felt above and about the illuminating Presence. For faith is the rod that calls the divine Lightning down, whether it came as a dove, or a tongue of fire, or a pointing finger, or a whispering voice.
The landscape of the plain, seen through the arched door under the Paradiso, was dim and gray with rain, or glittering and red with lightning; the mountain-tops above it, and the sky, were a changing tumult of shadows veined with threads of fire, and rolled hither and thither in visible thunders. The white pavement of the court below changed every instant into jaspers, the beautiful columns and curb and steps of the well became jewels, and one of the copper buckets that stood on the brink was like a vessel of red gold brimming over with red wine.
St. Benedict with his crosier, and St. Scholastica with her dove, stood immovable but living, and their calmness in that tumult was like a song of triumph. Did he sing with Moses?—“Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thy inheritance, in thy most firm habitation which thou hast made, O Lord; thy sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.” And did she reply, like Miriam with her timbrel?—“Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified, the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea.” Such silence in a tumult seems ever a singing.
When the Signora went down, slipping from colonnade to colonnade, dry-shod, the storm was spent. From the little balcony of the parlor, where she found her companions, she saw a grand arch of rainbow trembling out over the east, as if astonished at its own glory, trembling as it grew, but as strong and bold as light.
Flocks of birds were swinging by in a great circle, screaming impudently as they passed the balcony, as if to say, “Catch us, if you can!” There was a little parallelogram of garden under the window, with a rough pole frame-work supporting a dripping vine, and, below the dropping fields, a crest of land and rock, curling over like a pointed wave, rose boldly in the foreground; then, the plain.
Mr. Vane came to stand beside her, looking at her keenly one instant, then averting his eyes.
“Well,” he said, “what has the storm been saying to you up there?”
“It has washed the drift-wood out of my path, and made it as clear and white as one of those torrent-beds up the mountain-side,” she answered. “I think I ought to work a little harder for the future. Life is short, and I have, perhaps, sometimes played with my talents. They were given me for serious use. When you shall have left me alone, instead of sitting weakly down and thinking that it is rather lonely, I shall begin to carve a new book out of the next year. Do you know that year to come looks to me as the block of marble looked to Michael Angelo when he said, 'I will make an angel of it.’ I am not a Michael Angelo,” she added, smiling; “but I am something, and, firmly and intelligently set to work, I may do what need not be despised. My mind is clear.”
He was answered.
If a shade passed over his face, it was slight. If his lips were compressed a moment, she did not look to see. He stood and watched the rainbow grow and fade, and, as its colors went out, so faded out of his life a sweet hope. But he reflected: “Denials make strong. And the light that made the rainbow is not dead.”
“Yes, life is short,” he said presently, and half-turned away. “God bless you!” he added and hastily left her.
The next morning they made their last visit to the monastery, and the prior, after showing them the tower of St. Benedict and the fine collection of pictures there, had some of the choir-books brought into the parlor for them to see. There are fifty-seven in all of these great volumes, bound in leather, with metal corners and knobs. These are all in manuscript, beautiful black scores and lettering on white parchment. Every capital letter is painted, every one different and every one beautiful, and occasionally the page has a border, and in some cases a picture in the corner, so exquisitely beautiful that one could never tire of examining it—such leaves and flowers, and birds and figures and arabesques, fine as the finest pencil and most delicate imagination could make them, and so executed that one had to touch them to be sure they are not in relief. One long, silver leaf slightly curled over to show a golden lining; Bianca stretched her finger to touch, and drew it back immediately, fearing to break.
Not a tint was faded of them all, though they had been in constant use three hundred years. They are not used every day now, however.
One page was especially rich—the first page of the Christmas service. The whole ground of this inside the border is a deep velvety crimson, the score and text being of gold. On the border imagination had exhausted itself, and in the left upper corner is a picture of the Nativity, delicate and pure, with its cool, pale mountains of Syria, and the heavenly faces of the Mother and Child.
“You should see that at the Midnight Mass of Christmas,” the prior said, “with the light of all the candles shining on it as it lies open on the desk. It is splendid then. I copied that picture in the corner of the page to send the Pope on his great anniversary,” he added, “and it took me a year.”
For the prior was an artist as well, and not only made exquisite copies from these old manuscripts, but played the organ, and had the evening before done the honors of their grand instrument for his visitors, displaying its orchestra stops.
The hours slipped away, and regretfully at length they took leave of this beautiful and sacred place, and the kind host who had made it so pleasant for them. The donkeys stood ready at the gate, and they mounted and went down into the world again. In the valley, before going to the station, they stopped a minute and gazed back with a mute farewell to Monte Cassino. The Signora thought, but did not say aloud: “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh help.”
The road they took through the plain to the station ran along the river-side. This river—the Rapido—narrowed to a swift, yellow sluice that one could toss a penny across, to be caught by the beggar at the other side, did not look very imposing to American eyes, accustomed to the grand crystalline floods of the New World; but every drop of it moved to the tune of a memory, and farther on it meets the Carnello, and the two, the ancient Vinius and Liri, join to make the Garigliano, the river made famous by Bayard.
Then back to Rome, through crowding mountains at first. But, by dark, the mountains began to draw back, the level widened, they passed the city wall by the stars, and rolled into the Città vecchia.
“Now we must begin to look respectfully at the guide-book,” Mr. Vane said the next morning. “We have been sipping the foam of the wine as it came. We must drain the cup, if we can.”
There was nothing more to be said. Their story was finished, and the remaining few weeks were but a study of what all travellers study in Rome.
“I am laying up riches for my life,” Mr. Vane said to the Signora. “I have learned of you to work, and I hope that the last of my life will be more useful than the first has been. These memories that I am preparing now will be the only recreation of my future and my only dream.”
He did not trouble her with sadness or importunities, but took his life up with manly cheerfulness, and she honored him for it and liked him better than ever. But never for an instant did she waver in her decision. Her mind, once cleared, was cleared for ever. She would not have married him, nor any other man, to have possessed the world.
One bright October day they left her. There was sadness and tears, but no heart-break for any one. Marion’s tender sympathy threw a rainbow on Bianca’s gentle sorrow, and Isabel clung to her father’s arm and dropped her head on his shoulder, soothing and soothed.
“I shall never leave you, papa,” she whispered.
Did she suspect what he had missed?
The Signora watched the train roll away, then went back to her silent house, wiping her eyes as she entered.
“What a pity it is that you will have to be alone now!” said Annunciata.
“Alone!” the Signora’s eyes flashed out through the tears. “I am not alone. I never was alone in my life!”
She smiled as she shut herself into her room. “Alone? How little they know!”
What, indeed, did they, who cannot live a day without their gossip, without trying to fill their emptiness with the husks which make up by far the greater part of the world’s talk, of the life of one whose mind was as a fountain for ever overflowing, who had eyes in her finger-tips, and who listened with every pore of her body? What knew the readers of daily newspapers of the hoarded treasures of literature, ever ready with eloquent voices? What knew the Christians of one communion in the year, and one Mass when there was obligation, of long, delicious hours in churches when there was no function to stare at, nor music to talk through? The world has no such society as the cultivated mind can fill its house with; and there are no receptions so splendid as those given by the imagination. Bores never come, tattlers and enemies never are admitted, late hours never weary, and the wine never inebriates. And, better yet, those who are invited are always present and ready to stay. How the possessors of such a society laugh at the “societies” of the outer world, and how truly they can exclaim, “Alone? I never was alone in my life!”