Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Sometimes grown-up Venice is a little overpowering; one feels called upon to note every turn and building, for fear of missing some exquisite bit of architecture, some play of light and shade that must be remembered. Then one is glad to get away to one or another of the islands that lie around her, the nurseries where she played, and dreamed of the future, a thousand years ago. The dearest of them all to me is Torcello. We rowed out there one morning in August, when the sea was very calm and the sun a little veiled by clouds sweeping slowly up from the south. As we approached the island it seemed as if its few buildings were flush with the water; so low does it lie that the grasses and wild roses on the shore were dipping in the wash of the ripples. Some peasants had been cutting the grass, the scent of new-mown hay filled the air, and two great boats pushed out from some inlet and passed between us and the land, laden ten feet high with a cargo of fragrant green gold. As they met the breeze, up went the tawny sails and they skimmed away over the blue water like bees heavy with pollen. Then there was the cool rush of the turning prow, our gondola ran in softly to the strand, some one held up an arm, and I sprang on shore—to find myself in another age and another clime. I had to wait a few minutes to realise what it all meant, for the “ambiente” was new to my senses. A stretch of turf and wild roses—that explained itself—youth and roses never need introduction—but the still white Church, so long and low, with its slender columns like altar candles, its grave Byzantine lines—that made me pause. It seemed as if some Saint had turned from his prayers to ask me what I came for, and I could only reply: “You must tell me—there is nothing here that I have a name for, but there is something that was mine—give it back to me!”

When I walk through a familiar room in the dark, a peculiar warning like a ghostly touch is laid on my forehead as I come near any object on a level with it, and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello, I remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me, as if every flower and blade of grass called out, “We were here with you before!”—as if the small forsaken basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for. Its loveliness was so removed, so ascetic that one held one’s breath for fear of disturbing its peace; the marble seats, the central throne, seemed all peopled by grave shades of presbyters, surrounding their Bishop, their long straight vestments marked with the gold cross from shoulder to shoulder and from neck to feet; I could almost fancy I heard their deep chant, first from this side of the mounting tribune and then from that, echoing in the cold spaces overhead and dying away down the nave among the columns. I believed the old story then, that Torcello had been the first resting-place of the hunted exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns; it was not that; I doubt whether the basilica was really built in the Seventh Century as the guidebooks say; Rialto had its Church long before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of Venice’s throbbing vitality too long for any associations to cling to it now, while Torcello has stood aside, a recluse that has never wavered in its loyalty to the Past, and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I was surprised to find that it and I were friends. There are only two of all the dead and gone centuries of Europe that seem really my own besides the one I was born in—and they do not belong to the chaotic times of Barbarian invasion and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless sweetness of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island said something that day that could never be forgotten, and the impression was so strong and so perfect that I have never wished to tamper with it by a second visit.

Strangely enough Torcello dismissed us with contumely, for as we left it in the late afternoon we encountered a fearful storm and came, I think, very near to being swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself from every quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying dimensions, and between them and the rain we were drenched to the skin, and very thankful when Sandruccio, who behaved splendidly, finally landed us on the slippery steps of our hotel.

For a day or two after that we stayed within call, so to speak, and had no fancy for putting out to the Lagoons. There were mornings when it was pleasant to be utterly and frankly frivolous and do nothing but wander under the arcades of the Piazzetta and in and out of the bewilderingly pretty shops. Such a spread of colour and glitter they were, and so tempting was it to pick up some of the alluring trifles for the new home we were going to make in Peking! The Murano glass at Salviati’s I still think the most beautiful product of our own or any other time. Every tint of sea and sky and jewel gleamed in the ethereal beakers and vases; I remember a tall goblet of transparent topaz, shot with gold, that twisted and curled on its tendril stem like a newly opened convolvulus, spreading at last into a cup too ethereal for earthly lips to touch, so full of light that the most sparkling wine would have darkened it; and all round, for handles, were blown wreaths of milky iridescent foam, so faint that it seemed as if they must run down its sides and wet your fingers with salt spray. It was like getting into the Sea-King’s palace under the sea to spend an hour at Salviati’s; every lovely freak and fancy of sun and water, from the brooding sapphire of secret caves to the last bubble of spray on a curling wave, it was all there, caught and crystallised for mortals to love and handle.

Those were the days of beads—one wore as many chains as one liked, the more the better—and for years I went round with a little Venetian rosary of blue and gold flecked with fairy roses round my neck. The mother-of-pearl overcame me altogether—long garlands of the tiny shells strung in fanciful patterns—each perfect in itself and shot with rainbows through its moonlight sheen—but the dignity of a married woman forbade the wearing of such things now. For years they lay about on my dressing-table reflected in the depths of a Venetian mirror which also accompanied me everywhere, a big oval set in a frame of translucent flowers and leaves, neither white nor silver nor pearl, but just the colour of the foam when the sun shines through it.

We went out to Murano once and saw all the processes of glass-blowing, and they made a little vase for me while I was there; but the secrets of those marvellous colours were not explained, and I came away with one cherished illusion intact—I am still sure that the glass-blowers have a tributary tribe of nymphs and fairies who gather their tints for them out at sea, in nets woven of sunbeams and moonrays!

During that honeymoon summer, Venice indoors, with all its matchless art treasures, appealed to me less than Venice out of doors. At the time of my first stay there I was only sixteen, but mature enough to appreciate what I was seeing, and my dear old stepfather was a splendid guide and allowed us to miss nothing. He was a strange combination, dear man—an expert at explaining beauty of colour and technique and stonily impervious to impression or atmosphere. All that remained to him of his Calvinistic New England education was a giant conscience, to which other people’s inclinations had to bow wherever he took the lead, as he did, imperiously, in matters of sightseeing. Often I would have begged off some expedition, feeling surfeited already with beauty and history, and longing to be healthily frivolous for a few hours, as youth needs to be sometimes. But it was of no use—go with him I must, and very glad I was of it afterwards, for, returning in later years to the places where he had piloted me about, I could make at once for the things I wanted to see again, without troubling my head about the others. One of these, alas! was gone when Hugh and I, just married, came to Venice. The St. Peter Martyr of Titian had perished in a fire. I had lingered before it long, as a girl, for there was something more than mere beauty in the painting; one felt there was truth, relatively as absolute as that for which the Saint gave his life—a picture not only of himself but of what he died for, loyalty to the unalterable essence of things as they are.

It is as hard to describe a beloved picture as a beloved face, but this one had been seldom copied or reproduced, and it is gone, now, so I will try. In a dark glade of the woods through which flamed red bars of sunset, two ruffians were attacking the Saint and his companion; Peter knelt between them in the foreground, looking up to Heaven, ere the last blow fell, with a wonderful expression of mingled pain and joy. The sweep of the drapery, the slight sinking to one side, showed that his strength was gone already, but through the physical anguish on his face there shone such radiance that one knew Heaven was already opened to his eyes—it was not trust, it was certainty. The assassins, great bulky brutes, towered over him, but their figures were shadowed and dark and formless as evil itself; all the light, all the reality, were centred on the bending head, the dying eyes, the praying hands, the mystic cross that barred the priestly garment. I think there were palms and angels hovering overhead; but in a very old drawing, half life-size, of this picture—to all appearance contemporary with the painting—that I found among my dear father’s possessions they were absent. In the background lay the body of the martyr’s slain companion, martyred, too, but all the glory and the promise seemed to be for Peter—none for him. As I have said, I was only sixteen then, and knew less about Peter the Martyr than I did about Confucius or Genghis Khan, and for many years I wondered why the other martyr had remained nameless and unsainted. It shows the incompleteness of my education when I confess that it was only a year or two ago that I pieced his story together for myself. Let some one correct me if I am wrong, but I think the neglected companion was Conrad, the confessor of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a man of high learning and much piety, but to whom, on account of his harsh treatment of the “dear Saint,” the Church refused the honours of canonisation. But we know that Conrad was murdered for the Faith, and may be equally sure that it was owing to St. Elizabeth’s prayers that Heaven allowed him to expiate his fault by a heroic death.

The Thirteenth Century, so rich in Saints, was appallingly prolific in heresies, too, and of these the Manichæan, ancient as the Devil himself, was just then the most aggressive. It had gained much ground in the north of Italy, and when Peter was born in Verona his whole family had been led away by it. But the true faith was still taught in the schools, and by the time the boy was seven years old he had learnt the Apostles’ Creed, and neither blows nor caresses at home could shake him in his loyalty to it. Later he was sent to Bologna to pursue the studies considered necessary for a gentleman in those days, but Providence had other designs and uses for him. He was yet in his teens when the call came; he answered it at once, renounced the world, and took the Habit of the Preachers, the sons and followers of St. Dominic. The Breviary says, “With great splendour did his virtues shine in Religion,” especially in his gifts of preaching, which brought the strayed lambs back to the Fold by thousands at a time. He had always prayed for the crowning grace of martyrdom, and when it approached he told those who loved him that his end was close at hand. The Manichæans feared him as much as they hated him, for he was as stern with the recalcitrant as he was tender to the contrite. He was returning, in the exercise of his ministry, from Como to Milan, when they murdered him. With his last breath he repeated the Apostles’ Creed. The antiphon for his feast repeats the words used by Innocent IV in the Bull of his canonisation, which took place the year after his death, an immense number of authentic miracles having already testified to the honour and glory God had bestowed upon him in Paradise. “As purest flame leaps up from the depths of smoke, as the rose blooms on the thorny branch, so Peter, Teacher and Martyr, is born of faithless parents.” “Soldier in the Preachers’ camp, he stands now in the ranks of the warriors triumphant.” “His soul was all-angelic, his tongue fruitful, his life apostolic, and his death precious.” “The unconquered athlete battles strong in death, professing aloud the Faith for which he bleeds. It is thus that the martyr triumphs as he does for the Faith.”

To all but us benighted Catholics “the Faith,” in these latter days, is a mere sun-myth, and the blackest heresy a disease that has lost all its terrors—as harmless as chickenpox or a cold in the head. Let us who know better at least have the grace to acknowledge our debt to the great ones who fought for our heritage and kept it clean with their blood!