Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

CHAPTER XVIII SOUTHERN SHORES

Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests of Stone-pine—Smiles and Tears—The Need of a Little Misfortune—Monte Gargano—Millions of Spanish Merinos—Primæval Forest—A Forest Miracle—Church of the Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions of the Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden” Fortress of France.

The real life of the Adriatic coast seems to diminish visibly when one leaves Venice and drops down towards Ravenna; it has been drawn away inland to busy cities that turn their backs on the sea, and the sea itself has sullenly withdrawn, leaving ancient ports empty and useless, like stranded wrecks that will never feel the leap of the waves beneath their keels again. One should visit Ravenna either in the heyday of irrepressible youth or much later in life when twilight is companionable and sympathetic; otherwise, its melancholy is too all-pervading, too depressing to be healthy. It is a city of ghosts, big-eyed, hard-featured Byzantine ghosts; the great mosaics are full of their portraits, and, with all the beauty of gold and colour, there is something sinister and deathly in those tall straight figures, stiff of gesture, rapacious of eye—likenesses caught unawares of people who in their hearts prized power and wealth above all other things in this life or the next.

I do not think any one Italian-born can feel much more than judicial admiration of the severe early architecture, perfect though it be. The sharp square outlines, the sulky red—that might be rosso antico, so little has it yielded in tint or surface to the touch of Time,—all this, to me, seems misplaced under the dreamy blue of the Italian sky. Within the Churches the long aisles of double-storied arches cramp the spaces where fancy might soar and prayer take wing. They make an impression of narrowness, almost of Puritanism, that stifles emotion and frowns at joy. Of course, all this is rank artistic heresy, or will seem so to the crowd of submissive art experts who tumble over each other in their haste to repeat the dictums of a few famous specialists; but I fancy there are many simple-minded people who will agree with me, all the same. It has always puzzled my own ignorance to understand how anything so un-Italian as the early Byzantine style came to take root and flower successfully on Italian soil. The radiant, light-flooded climate does so much to soften and humanise the alien growth that it buys its pardon for it in the end; but when some enthusiast, thrilled with admiration for what he has seen basking in southern sunshine, undertakes to reproduce it under the cold and lowering English skies, its true character is shown at once. It is all too akin to them. One escapes from the prison gloom of Westminster Cathedral to fly to the Brompton Oratory and sink down in a corner and thank Heaven that St. Philip Neri was a Roman, and that his sons and followers can still give us Churches with big airy domes and broad smooth naves where the light flows free, and transepts that open wide for worshippers and pool up the blessed sunshine like any bay in the Mediterranean.

But there was one point on which Ravenna, in my day at least (for it has suffered since then), yielded the palm to no Mediterranean port—the stately forest of stone-pines that stood like troops at rest, for miles along the shore. The stone-pine is always beautiful, whether as a solitary, striking up, one shaft of grace and strength, against the sky, or as in great companies sunk to the knees in the deep turfy mould that their needles have piled below them in the course of centuries. They grow thus in the South over many a green acre of villa land, sheltering an unending profusion of the delicate wild flowers that thrive in that rich soil. But for real forests of stone-pines you must go further north and skirt the coast. There you will see them in their glory, miles of them together, and, if you are quiet and will listen, you will learn a great deal. For, like the sons of the Prophets, they have secrets of their own that have never been shared with other tribes, secrets that have only been confided to them, and that is why the solitary pine is such a true solitary; he invites no companions from the gregarious world around; towering and alone, he seems to gaze at unseen horizons, to praise the Lord in the murmur of the far-spreading branches that crown the fretted column of his stem; as for Elijah on Mount Carmel, so for him the past and the present and the future blend into one great chord of trusting acceptance that no passing storms can shatter, no warm caress lure from its allegiance.

Have you, in some fleeting moment, caught the opening bars of an air that has haunted you afterwards for years, and then been led to where some great orchestra gave it to you in all its completeness? That was what happened to me when I first stood in the “Pineta” of Viareggio and heard the full-voiced chant of the pines and the sea. I realised that they were part of one another, so to speak, that the whisper of the villa pine in the South is an echo and a greeting, brought by the wind from the family home in the North, where all the secrets of tree music are guarded as in some jealous ancient academy—no outsiders are ever privileged to carry them away! Psalms and marches and dirges, the wild call of the Laga, the C Major of the “Te Deum,” the wail of the De Profundis—the trees overhead and the surges on the shore will let you hear it all, and once heard it can never be forgotten.

It seems strange that Viareggio, the most prosaic and unpicturesque of all the Italian watering-places on the Ligurean shores, should possess this wonder still in its perfection, while the sister forest on the Adriatic side has been forsaken by the sea and devastated both by fire and by the frosts of that terrible winter of 1878-1879. We once abandoned Leghorn and went instead to Viareggio for our September bathing—a great mistake, only made up to us by the drives through the Pineta in the evenings. The discomforts and the ugliness of the town have long since been forgotten—perhaps because the ups and downs of existence have shown me far less bearable ones—and now the most vivid recollection is that of the enchanted air and fragrances of the Pineta. I think it will be so in the next life; if we win through all right, we shall remember nothing of earth but its sweetnesses, and the very wise people refuse to look at anything else, even now! The real philosophers, who are the real Saints, always seem to smile, though sometimes it is through tears. And there is one queer thing about tears—the people who have never wept don’t begin to know even how to smile, much less how to laugh. I am always sorry and frightened for them if they are nice good people, for we all have to pay our little tribute to trouble, our tithe to humanity’s debt; some get it spread all over a lifetime, some all in a moment, and these are the spoiled ones of the nursery on whom I suppose long discipline might have lain too heavily for their courage. I remember one startling case that impressed me very deeply, that of a nice American family—father, mother, and daughters twain—pleasant, harmless, good-looking people with plenty of money and perfect health. I liked being with them, though our views of life were severed as the Poles, mine reaching out to the impossible and sensational (I was very young!), and theirs so satisfied with the comfortable half lights of their own surroundings that they simply could not imagine anything desirable beyond.

One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me about yourself, Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother. “You look just as young as your own daughters. I don’t think you can ever have had a trouble!”

“I never have,” she replied, turning on me her mild, satisfied gaze. “I cannot remember a single sorrow in all my life, not a death in my family, not an hour’s sickness even, amongst us all. We have all, always, had everything we could wish for.”

It was the first time I had ever heard any one say such a thing, and I felt awe-struck and envious. A few months afterwards they all went back to America, at least they started to go. Their ship went down in mid-ocean, and the dear people reached home sooner than they had expected. But, for that sharp short suffering, it is just possible that life and its unending pleasantnesses might have made it hard for them to get to Heaven at all.