Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Charlemagne’s private life has always been described as remarkably pure; his enactments against immorality are terribly stringent, placing illicit connections between unmarried persons on the same footing as the breaking of the marriage vow; and more than once he published these enactments, intended to restrain the license of the nobles, in person, in full council of bishops and the nobles themselves, who, had his own morals been assailable, would not have hesitated to tell him, in their very outspoken way, to mend his practice before preaching to others. There is no record of even a murmur of the kind. Also during the time when, according to his detractors now, he was living in sin, he was the close friend and pupil of two holy Popes—St. Adrian I and St. Leo III, consulting them at every step and following their advice with devout punctiliousness; we know that the Roman Pontiffs never stood on ceremony when it was necessary to remonstrate with Sovereigns as to their morals; yet neither of these saints, supreme in Christendom, ever addressed a word of reproach to Charlemagne. On the contrary, they showed, in their relations with him, the greatest affection and respect. The question of his canonisation, in spite of his heroic virtues and the miracles worked at his intercession, the Church left where it was when Frederick Barbarossa, in the second half of the Twelfth Century, succeeded in having him canonised by one of the anti-Popes, Paschal III, an invalid proceeding, of course. But the Church calls him “The Blessed Charlemagne” and permitted his feast to be kept in numberless Churches of France and Germany; until our own days several French colleges celebrated it by a banquet at which the professors mingled on an equal footing with the most promising of their students. He founded the two great universities of Paris and Pavia, was deeply versed in theology and in such classical literature as was available in the Ninth Century; and is perhaps best known to us moderns by his hymn to the Holy Ghost, which the Church uses not only at Pentecost, but on almost every day of the year, the immortal “Veni Sancte Spiritus” so dear to us all.

It would be too long a task to enumerate his labours and conquests for the faith; these are set forth in detail in the old Breviaries of France; it took him thirty-four years to subdue the idolatrous Saxons, alone, and the only penalty he imposed for the half of a lifetime spent in arduous struggles was that they should listen to instruction and embrace Christianity. Always hard on himself, fasting often for a week at a time, wearing, except on great occasions, rough, simple garments which, we are told, made him appear like one of the humblest of his subjects, his charity was all-embracing and reached to the confines of the known world. His honest humility made it dangerous to attempt to flatter him about his achievements. If any one spoke of his victories, he would point to the lance with which Longinus pierced the Saviour’s side and which he always carried with him, and say, “Give God the glory—that is what overcame!”

Oh, that we might sometimes call up some of the great visions of the past! Surely there was never one more significant and impressive than on the day when Charlemagne, surrounded by his Paladins, knelt on the sacred stone (still marked in the portico of St. Peter’s) and St. Leo took the heavy crown in his aged hands and placed it on that magnificent head. Charlemagne must have been one of those of whom the Prophet spoke, when he said that the kings of the earth should bring their honour and glory into Heaven. Would that he could return to us who so need to see, and so despair of seeing, a born ruler, reigning for God. Like our own Arthur, beloved of grateful and worshipping humanity, the hope of his return never quite died out. In the places where he passed, flashing by at the head of his chosen Paladins, is it only fancy that still makes us hear the thunder of the hoof-beats, the echo of the voice “sweet in music, strong in speech,” whose commands the world obeyed? the echo of the call of Roland’s horn—when he blew that last blast and Charlemagne, hundreds of miles away, leapt forth with his peers to the rescue? They came too late. The last of the Paladins fell fighting at Roncesvalles, far from where Charlemagne lies with his fathers among the Savoyan hills, by the dreamy Lake of Bourget.

Never had monarch a fairer resting-place. In a long past summer I rowed across the lake to the lovely and splendid sanctuary, in the cool of the evening, when twilight was descending, mild as sleep, on the mountains; and earth and lake and sky were all one soft, mysterious blue. There were comrades with me, young and gay as I, but when we stood beside Charlemagne’s tomb in the dim church, a great silence fell upon us. We felt, though we could not see, the great angels standing round that royal grave—guarding it till the day when he who lies there shall come forth, and all the generations that went before and have come after him shall hear from God the praise he would not take from men—“Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”

CHAPTER XII STORY OF ALARIC

Pursuit of the Ideal—Alaric, the Friend of Theodosius—Theodosius’ Dream—The Victory at the Birnbaumer Wald—Defection of Alaric—Pictures of the Plundering of Rome—Marcella and Principia—St. Peter’s Treasures—Plans Against Africa—Alaric’s Death and Last Resting-place.

When Edmond Rostand, the truest poet of our latter day, wrote his “Princesse Lointaine,” he embodied the most ideal passion of the human heart, the desire of beauty unseen. The Eternal City has again and again inspired a like overmastering longing; it has been called by other names—ambition, revenge, desire of conquest—but the primal sentiment, in the most notable cases at least, reveals itself as an imperative craving to behold and possess the highest. In the saints the aspiration leaps from earth to Heaven, for their eyes are opened to the reality and the shadow; but even among mortals denied the Divine Spark, this hunger for the best takes on something of the sublime and translates itself in actions not to be altogether accounted for by merely human motives. Such a mortal was Alaric, the Visigoth, whose name still sounds to us across the ages with compelling power. Driven by the spirit, earth-bound, yet ever straining at his bonds, fiercely ambitious yet ready to renounce the fruits of conquest when the Voice, unheard of others, bade him renounce, his career remains an unexplained mystery, unless we are willing to reckon with the supernatural to which he rendered such prompt obedience when its commands penetrated the din of clamorous necessity and reached the ear of his soul.

His very advent has all the emblems of a portentous allegory. Over the last eastern spur of the Julian Alps the old Roman roadmakers had cut one of their splendid roads to connect the seat of Empire with the North. They worked along the lines of least resistance, thinking only of facilitating the movements of Roman troops, and not at all of possible invaders who might march down to Rome. On the crest of the pass they looked for a commanding spot to serve as the site for a garrison station; the season was early summer and their glance at once fell on an enormous pear tree, a dome of snowy blossoms visible for many a mile around. That decided the question, and they built their military hamlet beside it, and called it “At the Pear Tree,” “Ad Pirum,” a name which was afterwards bestowed on the whole district, which is known to us now as the “Birnbaumer Wald.” To this station came, in the first days of September, 394 A.D., Theodosius the Great, to meet and subdue the “little Graunnarian Emperor,” Eugenius, and his terrible dictator, Arbogast, in the “Battle of the Frigidus,” which turned the course of European history and left the world—as Constantine had hoped to leave it—Christian and not pagan.

With Theodosius came a young Visigothic chieftain of noble birth, Alaric by name, commanding a company of his countrymen, the valiant warriors with whom Theodosius strove to surround himself when there was real fighting to be done. They called their young leader not “Alaric,” but “Balthe,” “the Bold,” revered him as sprung from a line that had for its founders the gods of Walhalla, and were prepared to follow him to Heaven or Hell. Whither they were to follow him in the end, I fancy, was decided on that September day when, having secured a spot for their camp and seen that all things were in order, he went and stood under the big pear tree and looked down on the beautiful vale of Carniola, flushing to harvest, rioting in fruit, sheltered on the north and east by the vigilant Alps, and cooled by the mighty rush of the Frigidus, which we call the Wipbach, and which bursts full-grown, ice-fed, from the foot of the hills, and dashes along under banks so teeming with fruit and grain, at that time of the year, as to be almost hidden from sight. Tearing down from the caves of Adelsberg, it follows the lie of the land till it enters Italy, changes name and nationality, becomes the Isonzo, and finally, joining the other streams flowing down from the north, empties itself into the Adriatic at Aquileia.

This is Alaric’s first appearance in history, and we can hardly doubt that with his first view of the paradise that lay south of the Alps came also the first faint echo of the call that haunted him all his life, “Penetrabis ad Urbem”—“Thou shalt penetrate to the city”—the city towards which every northerner looked with covetous longing and superstitious fear, but which its own rulers, at least in Alaric’s time, regarded rather as a venerable part of the insignia of the Empire than as an active agent in its affairs. Alaric, when he first looked towards Italy, was a loyal ally of Theodosius, and would have hotly resented the assertion that a day would come when he should sweep the country as an invader and a declared foe of the great man’s son. But (how true is the Japanese proverb, “Great generals have no sons!”) the feeble-minded Honorius again and again refused the honest alliance and friendship proffered by the Goth, and was thus alone responsible for those terrible six days of sack and pillage which desolated Rome sixteen years (almost day for day) after Alaric had fought so whole-heartedly for Theodosius in the Battle of the Frigidus.