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 step-father 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 sight-seeing. 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 Saint 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 canonization. But we know that Conrad was murdered for the Faith, and may be equally sure that it was owing to Saint 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 Saint 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 canonization, 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 dies 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 chicken pox 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!
CHAPTER XVIII SOUTHERN SHORES
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.