Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete / Series I, II, and III

by John Addington Symonds

On the supposition that Folgore wrote in the second decade of the fourteenth century, it is not impossible that he may have had knowledge of this line from the fifth canto of the Inferno.

Since these words were written, England has lost the poet-painter, to complete whose work upon the sonnet-writer of mediæval Siena I attempted the translations in this essay. One who has trodden the same path as Rossetti, at however a noticeable interval, and has attempted to present in English verse the works of great Italian singers, doing inadequately for Michelangelo and Campanella what he did supremely well for Dante, may here perhaps be allowed to lay the tribute of reverent recognition at his tomb.

THOUGHTS IN ITALY ABOUT CHRISTMAS

What is the meaning of our English Christmas? What makes it seem so truly Northern, national, and homely, that we do not like to keep the feast upon a foreign shore? These questions grew upon me as I stood one Advent afternoon beneath the Dome of Florence. A priest was thundering from the pulpit against French scepticism, and exalting the miracle of the Incarnation. Through the whole dim church blazed altar candles. Crowds of men and women knelt or sat about the transepts, murmuring their prayers of preparation for the festival. At the door were pedlars selling little books, in which were printed the offices for Christmas-tide, with stories of S. Felix and S. Catherine, whose devotion to the infant Christ had wrought them weal, and promises of the remission of four purgatorial centuries to those who zealously observed the service of the Church at this most holy time. I knew that the people of Florence were preparing for Christmas in their own way. But it was not our way. It happened that outside the church the climate seemed as wintry as our own—snowstorms and ice, and wind and chilling fog, suggesting Northern cold. But as the palaces of Florence lacked our comfortable firesides, and the greetings of friends lacked our hearty handshakes and loud good wishes, so there seemed to be a want of the home feeling in those Christmas services and customs. Again I asked myself, 'What do we mean by Christmas?'

The same thought pursued me as I drove to Rome: by Siena, still and brown, uplifted, mid her russet hills and wilderness of rolling plain; by Chiusi, with its sepulchral city of a dead and unknown people; through the chestnut forests of the Apennines; by Orvieto's rock, Viterbo's fountains, and the oak-grown solitudes of the Ciminian heights, from which one looks across the broad lake of Bolsena and the Roman plain. Brilliant sunlight, like that of a day in late September, shone upon the landscape, and I thought—Can this be Christmas? Are they bringing mistletoe and holly on the country carts into the towns in far-off England? Is it clear and frosty there, with the tramp of heels upon the flag, or snowing silently, or foggy with a round red sun and cries of warning at the corners of the streets?

I reached Rome on Christmas Eve, in time to hear midnight services in the Sistine Chapel and S. John Lateran, to breathe the dust of decayed shrines, to wonder at doting cardinals begrimed with snuff, and to resent the open-mouthed bad taste of my countrymen who made a mockery of these palsy-stricken ceremonies. Nine cardinals going to sleep, nine train-bearers talking scandal, twenty huge, handsome Switzers in the dress devised by Michelangelo, some ushers, a choir caged off by gilded railings, the insolence and eagerness of polyglot tourists, plenty of wax candles dripping on people's heads, and a continual nasal drone proceeding from the gilded cage, out of which were caught at intervals these words, and these only,—'Sæcula sæculorum, amen.' Such was the celebrated Sistine service. The chapel blazed with light, and very strange did Michelangelo's Last Judgment, his Sibyls, and his Prophets, appear upon the roof and wall above this motley and unmeaning crowd.

Next morning I put on my dress-clothes and white tie, and repaired, with groups of Englishmen similarly attired, and of Englishwomen in black crape—the regulation costume —to S. Peter's. It was a glorious and cloudless morning; sunbeams streamed in columns from the southern windows, falling on the vast space full of soldiers and a mingled mass of every kind of people. Up the nave stood double files of the Pontifical guard. Monks and nuns mixed with the Swiss cuirassiers and halberds. Contadini crowded round the sacred images, and especially round the toe of S. Peter. I saw many mothers lift their swaddled babies up to kiss it. Valets of cardinals, with the invariable red umbrellas, hung about side chapels and sacristies. Purple-mantled monsignori, like emperor butterflies, floated down the aisles from sunlight into shadow. Movement, colour, and the stir of expectation, made the church alive. We showed our dress-clothes to the guard, were admitted within their ranks, and solemnly walked up toward the dome. There under its broad canopy stood the altar, glittering with gold and candles. The choir was carpeted and hung with scarlet. Two magnificent thrones rose ready for the Pope: guards of honour, soldiers, attachés, and the élite of the residents and visitors in Rome, were scattered in groups picturesquely varied by ecclesiastics of all orders and degrees. At ten a stirring took place near the great west door. It opened, and we saw the procession of the Pope and his cardinals. Before him marched the singers and the blowers of the silver trumpets, making the most liquid melody. Then came his Cap of Maintenance, and three tiaras; then a company of mitred priests; next the cardinals in scarlet; and last, aloft beneath a canopy, upon the shoulders of men, and flanked by the mystic fans, advanced the Pope himself, swaying to and fro like a Lama, or an Aztec king. Still the trumpets blew most silverly, and still the people knelt; and as he came, we knelt and had his blessing. Then he took his state and received homage. After this the choir began to sing a mass of Palestrina's, and the deacons robed the Pope. Marvellous putting on and taking off of robes and tiaras and mitres ensued, during which there was much bowing and praying and burning of incense. At last, when he had reached the highest stage of sacrificial sanctity, he proceeded to the altar, waited on by cardinals and bishops. Having censed it carefully, he took a higher throne and divested himself of part of his robes. Then the mass went on in earnest, till the moment of consecration, when it paused, the Pope descended from his throne, passed down the choir, and reached the altar. Every one knelt; the shrill bell tinkled; the silver trumpets blew; the air became sick and heavy with incense, so that sun and candle light swooned in an atmosphere of odorous cloud-wreaths. The whole church trembled, hearing the strange subtle music vibrate in the dome, and seeing the Pope with his own hands lift Christ's body from the altar and present it to the people. An old parish priest, pilgrim from some valley of the Apennines, who knelt beside me, cried and quivered with excess of adoration. The great tombs around, the sculptured saints and angels, the dome, the volumes of light and incense and unfamiliar melody, the hierarchy ministrant, the white and central figure of the Pope, the multitude—made up an overpowering scene. What followed was comparatively tedious. My mind again went back to England, and I thought of Christmas services beginning in all village churches and all cathedrals throughout the land—their old familiar hymn, their anthem of Handel, their trite and sleepy sermons. How different the two feasts are—Christmas in Rome, Christmas in England—Italy and the North—the spirit of Latin and the spirit of Teutonic Christianity.

What, then, constitutes the essence of our Christmas as different from that of more Southern nations? In their origin they are the same. The stable of Bethlehem, the star-led kings, the shepherds, and the angels—all the beautiful story, in fact, which S. Luke alone of the Evangelists has preserved for us—are what the whole Christian world owes to the religious feeling of the Hebrews. The first and second chapters of S. Luke are most important in the history of Christian mythology and art. They are far from containing the whole of what we mean by Christmas; but the religious poetry which gathers round that season must be sought upon their pages. Angels, ever since the Exodus, played a first part in the visions of the Hebrew prophets and in the lives of their heroes. We know not what reminiscences of old Egyptian genii, what strange shadows of the winged beasts of Persia, flitted through their dreams. In the desert, or under the boundless sky of Babylon, these shapes became no less distinct than the precise outlines of Oriental scenery. They incarnated the vivid thoughts and intense longings of the prophets, who gradually came to give them human forms and titles. We hear of them by name, as servants and attendants upon God, as guardians of nations, and patrons of great men. To the Hebrew mind the whole unseen world was full of spirits, active, strong, and swift of flight, of various aspect, and with power of speech. It is hard to imagine what the first Jewish disciples and the early Greek and Roman converts thought of these great beings. To us, the hierarchies of Dionysius, the services of the Church, the poetry of Dante and Milton, and the forms of art, have made them quite familiar. Northern nations have appropriated the Angels, and invested them with attributes alien to their Oriental origin. They fly through our pine-forests, and the gloom of cloud or storm; they ride upon our clanging bells, and gather in swift squadrons among the arches of Gothic cathedrals; we see them making light in the cavernous depth of woods, where sun or moon beams rarely pierce, and ministering to the wounded or the weary; they bear aloft the censers of the mass; they sing in the anthems of choristers, and live in strains of poetry and music; our churches bear their names; we call our children by their titles; we love them as our guardians, and the whole unseen world is made a home to us by their imagined presence. All these things are the growth of time and the work of races whose myth-making imagination is more artistic than that of the Hebrews. Yet this rich legacy of romance is bound up in the second chapter of S. Luke; and it is to him we must give thanks when at Christmas-tide we read of the shepherds and the angels in English words more beautiful than his own Greek.

The angels in the stable of Bethlehem, the kings who came from the far East, and the adoring shepherds, are the gift of Hebrew legend and of the Greek physician Luke to Christmas. How these strange and splendid incidents affect modern fancy remains for us to examine; at present we must ask, What did the Romans give to Christmas? The customs of the Christian religion, like everything that belongs to the modern world, have nothing pure and simple in their nature. They are the growth of long ages, and of widely different systems, parts of which have been fused into one living whole. In this respect they resemble our language, our blood, our literature, and our modes of thought and feeling. We find Christianity in one sense wholly original; in another sense composed of old materials; in both senses universal and cosmopolitan. The Roman element in Christmas is a remarkable instance of this acquisitive power of Christianity. The celebration of the festival takes place at the same time as that of the Pagan Saturnalia; and from the old customs of that holiday, Christmas absorbed much that was consistent with the spirit of the new religion. During the Saturnalia the world enjoyed, in thought at least, a perfect freedom. Men who had gone to bed as slaves, rose their own masters. From the ergastula and dismal sunless cages they went forth to ramble in the streets and fields. Liberty of speech was given them, and they might satirise those vices of their lords to which, on other days, they had to minister. Rome on this day, by a strange negation of logic, which we might almost call a prompting of blind conscience, negatived the philosophic dictum that barbarians were by law of nature slaves, and acknowledged the higher principle of equality. The Saturnalia stood out from the whole year as a protest in favour of universal brotherhood, and the right that all men share alike to enjoy life after their own fashion, within the bounds that nature has assigned them. We do not know how far the Stoic school, which was so strong in Rome, and had so many points of contact with the Christians, may have connected its own theories of equality with this old custom of the Saturnalia. But it is possible that the fellowship of human beings, and the temporary abandonment of class prerogatives, became a part of Christmas through the habit of the Saturnalia. We are perhaps practising a Roman virtue to this day when at Christmas-time our hand is liberal, and we think it wrong that the poorest wretch should fail to feel the pleasure of the day.