Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

There was every year an exhibition, at the French Academy, of the work of the students, who, having won the “Prix de Rome” in Paris, were privileged to study in Rome for three years at the expense of the French Government. Unfortunately for the attractiveness of the exhibition, it was incumbent on the students to introduce one or more nude figures into their paintings to show what progress they were making in anatomical drawing. The more zealous ones would sometimes cover a fifteen-foot canvas with a crowd of nude warriors in every stress of effort that the most violent conflict could call forth, the copious bloodshed depicted demonstrating, to a thoughtful mind, the young painter’s feelings towards the strict and exigent judges who were to pronounce upon his merits. I remember a “Rape of the Sabines,” where some rather dandified Roman robbers were taking no end of trouble to possess themselves of a mob of huge, beefy viragos who were kicking and struggling with all their might—creatures whom no practical man would attempt for a moment to bring into his home.

But, once free from the drill of training, the French painters of those days gave us some very charming and poetical productions. One of my favourite artists was Hamon, a man whose fancies were usually as delicate and elusive as thistledown floating on a moonbeam. He saw everything through dawnlight or twilight; his nymphs and loves, hovering over flowers, painting the morning-glories, sowing white stars for lilies and golden ones for honeysuckles, were too ethereal to be quite human, too alluring to be all spiritual—but exquisite beyond words. Yet he too painted one serious picture which, once seen, could never be forgotten. It was called “Le triste Rivage.” In the foreground rolled the inky Styx, with Charon, sitting, dark and saturninely indifferent, in his skiff, oars shipped ready to put out as soon as the craft should be full. And to it, down a narrow canyon between high granite walls, pressed a stream of humanity, old men and youths, kings and pontiffs and beggars, mothers with their babies in their arms, young beauties in all the pomp of silk and pearls, sages with calm sapient eyes, and naked criminals dragging their chains, not one conscious of any presence but his own—the awful loneliness of death stamped on every face—yet all crowding and pushing forward to the narrow beach and the waiting boat—every eye strained to catch some glimpse of the land that lay, shrouded in darkness, on the other side. It made one think.

Talking of pictures, I must speak of one that my sister and I saw in Munich or Dresden, in 1867, I think, a year which was considered remarkably rich in good modern exhibitions abroad—where, by the way, the average was immeasurably higher than I ever found it at the Academy shows in London. This that we fell in love with was a painting of a Sphinx—a great white marble creature with globed breasts and a face of bestial beauty, cold as ice. She crouched on her high pedestal in a tangle of white roses flooded with moonlight. A young man, little more than a boy, was falling back from her, his ashy face, sublime in death, still transfigured with the mortal ecstasy of her kiss; and her pitiless marble talons were yet clutching his body. I wish I could remember the name of the painter. He must have been a true poet.

CHAPTER IX ST. CECILIA

Persecution Result of Covetousness—Steady Growth of Christianity—Story of Saint Cecilia—Dress of a Patrician Woman—A Roman Marriage—Cecilia’s Consecration—Apparition of St. Paul—Cecilia’s Guardian Angel—Conversion of Two Roman Nobles—Slaughter of Christians—A Declaration of Faith—Condemnation of the Nobles.

Time passes on; madmen and sages, dolts and fighters succeed one another on the Imperial Throne, and try to hold together such rags of the Purple as are left to them; one and all agree in looking upon Christianity as a pestilential fad, to be stamped out by any means that come to hand. Some institute official persecutions, some merely leave the governors of cities and provinces to deal with the pest according to their own ideas. Even the most careless or the most indulgent never revoke the ancient edicts of proscription, and these edicts are always there in reserve to strengthen the hand of any man in authority, who, for his own ends, desires to destroy and confiscate. For it must be remembered that in the Roman Empire, from the First to the Fourth Century, even as in England under Henry and Elizabeth and their successors, persecution was mostly the result of covetousness, and that the insane law adjudging the property of the condemned to those who procured their conviction was the same in both cases and constituted an appeal to selfish passions far too strong to go unused.

The more energetic or less vicious of the Emperors spent but little time in Rome itself after the middle of the Second Century; the safety of the Empire, surrounded by a fringe of enemies and barbarians, constantly required their presence elsewhere, and so the supreme municipal power fell almost completely into the hands of the governors, men who had rarely reached that prominence honestly and who made haste to reap their private harvest as rapidly as possible. Such an one was a certain Turcius Almachius who became the Prefect of the city under Alexander Severus in the early part of the Third Century. Alexander is generally described as a fair-minded and indulgent man, who, though he permitted the edicts of proscription to remain on the statute books, had no personal hostility to the Christians and did not consider that their existence constituted a menace to the State. Perhaps he thought enough had been done already to annihilate their claims, and believed that the “superstition,” as it was called, would die a natural death. And, all the time, Christianity was growing to be a great force, nullifying the sentence of death pronounced upon it, by the solid irresistible pressure of its own vitality, even as the tender shoot sprung from an acorn will at last rend and shatter the heavy tombstone beneath which it lay.

This steady yet gentle growth of Christianity during the hundred and eighty years which had passed between the date of St. Peter’s coming to Rome and that of the accession of Alexander Severus, is vividly illustrated in the fact that various wealthy pagan parents of the latter epoch did nothing to oppose the Christian education of their children when accident or the designs of Providence rendered such education possible. One cannot help thinking that even they realised that Christianity taught the boys and girls to be very virtuous and obedient children, from whom they would always receive the highest measure of filial love and duty. So it was that the only daughter of the noble Cecilius, one of the few representatives left of the true aristocracy of better times, was brought up from her infancy in the Christian faith. We are not told who her teacher was—perhaps some poor slave, who thus conferred on her master’s family an honour before which all those of noble ancestry and vast possessions were destined to pale, the honour of giving one of her most illustrious martyrs to the Church.

The maiden Cecilia was so beautiful, so good, so accomplished, and withal such a loving, docile daughter, that it must have been with a great pang at heart that her father and mother saw the hour approach in which she must leave them for the house of the husband they had chosen for her, the young Valerianus, a fit mate in every way for their dear child, in her parents’ eyes. But to Cecilia their decision brought great fear and perplexity. Valerianus was all that they believed him to be—noble, upright, kind-hearted, a distinguished officer, with a heart as clean as his countenance was beautiful—but Cecilia had long ago vowed her life to God; the Pontiff, St. Urban, had approved of her high choice, and she had been assured by her Guardian Angel—constantly visible to her pure eyes in daily life—that God had accepted the sacrifice and would never permit her love for Him to be shared with an earthly spouse. Yet we, who know less of God’s ways than did the holy girl, read with something like astonishment that Cecilia ventured upon no open opposition to her parents’ plans for her. The authority of a Roman father was so supreme that it would have appeared to her an impiety to resist it. That she was consumed with anxiety and fear, we know, and that she spent nights and days in prayer to God, to His Angels, and to the Blessed Apostles, to protect her from the threatened danger. No “Acts of the Martyrs” are more full and authentic than those of St. Cecilia, written by those who had known her in life and who witnessed her death. As the dreaded day approached, she redoubled in fervour, and, fearing her own weakness in presence of the young man whom his high spirit, virtue, and beauty made her love as a brother, she fought down all carnal impulses by prayer and fasting (sometimes for three days together) and mortified her flesh by wearing a hair shirt under her rich dress.

At last the wedding day dawned, and the great palace was all humming with joyous excitement. Her mother came into Cecilia’s room to dress her for her marriage. Her beautiful hair was braided in six long strands, in imitation of that of the Vestal Virgins; her family had always clung to the high ideals of ancient Rome, and no taint from the deluge of luxury and vice in which the Empire was plunged had ever penetrated into their sternly guarded homes. In daily life we are told that Cecilia went clothed, like other patrician ladies, in garments richly embroidered with gold, but on this, the day of her wedding, her mother put upon her a robe of plain home-spun wool spotlessly white, copied from the one woven by her ancestress, Caia Cecilia, hundreds of years before, and which was the original tunic, the model upon which woman’s costume was founded for something like a thousand years afterwards. Good Roman women still looked upon the wise and simple Tanaquil as their pattern in all the matters of domestic life, and at the period of which we are speaking the Etrurian Queen’s spindle and distaff were still preserved among the sacred insignia of the city. A white woollen girdle, like Queen Tanaquil’s, was bound round Cecilia’s waist, and then she was shrouded in the flame-coloured veil with which every Roman girl, noble or simple, covered her face and head when she went to meet her bridegroom. The veil not only signified maiden modesty, but denoted the firm constancy with which the bride was prepared to cling to her husband. It was originally the badge of the women of the Flaminia, a race which, some four hundred years before St. Cecilia’s day, held the Catholic belief as to the inviolability of marriage, and prohibited divorce. The “Flammeum,” as the flame-coloured veil was called, remained, for this reason, in use at Christian weddings, until, at any rate, the Fourth Century, when St. Ambrose spoke of it in his treatise on “Virginity.”