With this, and many similar recollections in my mind, I own I am disposed to think leniently of Italy’s church-door mendicants. How moderate their demands, how disproportionate their gratitude, how numberless their disappointments, how unfailing their courtesy! I can push back a leather curtain for myself, I can ring a sacristan’s bell. But the patriarch who relieves me of these duties has some dim, mysterious right to stand in my way,—a right I cannot fathom, but will not pretend to dispute. He is, after all, a less insistent beggar than are the official guardians of galleries and museums, who relieve the unutterable weariness of their idle days by following me from room to room with exasperating explanations, until I pay them to go away. I have heard tourists protest harshly against the ever-recurring obligation of giving pennies to the old men who, in Venice, draw their gondolas to shore, and push them out again. They say—what is perfectly true—that it is an extortion to be compelled to pay for unasked and unnecessary services, and they generally add something about not minding the money. It is the principle of the thing to which they are opposed. But these picturesque accessories of Venetian life are, for the most part, worn-out gondoliers, whose days of activity are over, and who are saved from starvation, only by the semblance of service they perform. Their successors connive at their pretence of usefulness, knowing that some day they, too, must drop their oars, and stand patiently waiting, hook in hand, for the chance coin that is so grudgingly bestowed. That it should be begrudged—even on principle—seems strange to those whose love for Venice precludes the possibility of fault-finding. The graybeards sunning themselves on the marble steps are as much a part of the beautiful city as are the gondoliers silhouetted against the sky, or the brown boys paddling in the water. Such old age is meagre, but not wholly forlorn. A little food keeps body and soul together, and life yields sweetness to the end. “It takes a great deal to make a successful American,” confesses Mr. James; “but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility.... Not the misery of Italians, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination.”
THE PILGRIM’S STAFF
Thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a straunge strem;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,
At Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne;
She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.
Chaucer.
The spirit that animated the Crusader animated the pilgrim. Piety, curiosity, the love of God and the love of adventure, the natural sentiment which makes one spot of ground more hallowed than another,—a sentiment as old as religion,—the natural restlessness of the human heart,—a restlessness as old as humanity. With the decay of the Crusades began the passion for pilgrimages, which reached its height in the fourteenth century, but which at a much earlier period had begun to send men wandering from land to land, and from sea to sea, broadening their outlook, sharpening their intelligence, uniting them in a common bond of faith and sympathy, teaching them to observe the virtues of hospitality, courtesy, and kindness. Much has been urged against the pilgrim, even the genuine pilgrim; but it counts for little when contrasted with his merits. His was not the wisdom of Franklin. He spent time, strength, and money with reckless prodigality. He neglected duties near at hand; he ran sharp risks of shipwreck, robbers, and pestilence. But he was lifted, for a time at least, out of the common round of life; he aspired, however lamely, after spiritual growth; and he assisted the slow progress of civilization by breaking through the barriers which divided nation from nation in the remoteness of the Middle Ages.
The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth. Pious Egyptians speeding along the waterways to the temple of Bubastis; pious Hindoos following from hermitage to hermitage the footsteps of the exiled Rama; pious Moslems making their painful journey to Mecca; pious Christians turning their rapt faces to Palestine,—from the dawn of history to the present day we see the long procession of pilgrims moving to and fro over the little earth, linking shore to shore and century to century. Never without disaster, never without privations, never without the echoes of disparagement, never wholly discouraged nor abashed, the procession winds brokenly along. The pilgrims who visit Lourdes in this year of grace are not mere victims of a spasmodic enthusiasm. They are the inheritors of the world’s traditions and of the world’s emotions.