A Traveler at Forty

by Theodore Dreiser

As I came up in the bus, looking after my very un-St. Francis-like luggage, and my precious fur overcoat, I encountered a pale, ascetic-looking French priest,—“L’Abbé Guillmant, Vicar General, Arras (Pas-de-Calais), France;” he wrote out his address for me,—who, looking at me over his French Baedeker every now and then, finally asked in his own tongue, “Do you Speak French?” I shook my head deprecatingly and smiled regretfully. “Italiano?” Again I had to shake my head. “C’est triste!” he said, and went on reading. He was clad in a black cassock that reached to his feet, the buttons ranging nicely down his chest, and carried only a small portmanteau and an umbrella. We reached the hotel and I found that he was stopping there. Once on the way up he waved his hand out of the window and said something. I think he was indicating that we could see Perugia further up the valley. In the dining-room where I found him after being assigned to my room he offered me his bill-of-fare and indicated that a certain Italian dish was the best.

This hotel to which we had come was a bare little affair. It was new enough—one of Cook’s offerings,—to which all the tourists traveling under the direction of that agency are sent. The walls were quite white and clean. The ceilings of the rooms were high, over high latticed windows and doors. My room, I found, gave upon a balcony which commanded the wonderful sweep of plain below.

The dining-room contained six or seven other travelers bound either southward towards Rome or northward towards Perugia and Florence. It was a rather hazy day, not cold and not warm, but cheerless. I can still hear the clink of the knives and forks as the few guests ate in silence or conversed in low tones. Travelers in this world seem almost innately fearsome of each other, particularly when they are few in number and meet in some such out-of-the-way place as this. My Catholic Abbé was longing to be sociable with me, I could feel it; but this lack of a common tongue prevented him, or seemed to. As I was leaving I asked the proprietor to say to him that I was sorry that I did not speak French, that if I did I would be glad to accompany him; and he immediately reported that the Abbé said, Would I not come along, anyhow? “He haav ask,” said the proprietor, a small, stout, dark man, “weel you not come halong hanyhow?”

“Certainly,” I replied. And so the Abbé Guillmant and I, apparently not understanding a word of each other’s language, started out sightseeing together—I had almost said arm-in-arm.

I soon learned that while my French priest did not speak English, he read it after a fashion, and if he took plenty of time he could form an occasional sentence. It took time, however. He began,—in no vivid or enthusiastic fashion, to be sure,—to indicate what the different things were as we went along.

Now the sights of Assisi are not many. If you are in a hurry and do not fall in love with the quaint and picturesque character of it and its wonderful views you can do them all in a day,—an afternoon if you skimp. There is the church of St. Francis with its associated monastery (what an anachronism a monastery seems in connection with St. Francis, who thought only of huts of branches, or holes in the rocks!) with its sepulcher of the saint in the lower church, and the frescoed scenes from St. Francis’s life by Giotto in the upper; the church of St. Clare (Santa Chiara) with its tomb and the body of that enthusiastic imitator of St. Francis; the Duomo, or cathedral, begun in 1134—a rather poor specimen of a cathedral after some others—and the church of St. Damiano, which was given—the chapel of it—to St. Francis by the Benedictine monks of Monte Subasio soon after he had begun his work of preaching the penitential life. There is also the hermitage of the Carceri, where, in small holes in the rocks the early Franciscans led a self-depriving life, and the new church raised on the site of the house belonging to Pietro Bernardone, the father of St. Francis, who was in the cloth business.

I cannot say that I followed with any too much enthusiasm the involved architectural, historical, artistic, and religious details of these churches and chapels. St. Francis, wonderful “jongleur of God” that he was, was not interested in churches and chapels so much as he was in the self-immolating life of Christ. He did not want his followers to have monasteries in the first place. “Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire.” I liked the church of St. Francis, however, for in spite of the fact that it is gray and bare as befits a Franciscan edifice, it is a double church—one below the other, and seemingly running at right angles; and they are both large Gothic churches, each complete with sacristy, choir nave, transepts and the like. The cloister is lovely, in the best Italian manner, and through the interstices of the walls wonderful views of the valley below may be secured. The lower church, gray and varied in its interior, is rich in frescoes by Cimabue and others dealing with the sacred vows of the Franciscans, the upper (the nave) decorated with frescoes by Giotto, illustrating the life of St. Francis. The latter interested me immensely because I knew by now that these were almost the beginning of Italian and Umbrian religious art and because Giotto, from the evidences his work affords, must have been such a naïve and pleasant old soul. I fairly laughed aloud as I stalked about this great nave of the upper church—the Abbé was still below—at some of the good old Italian’s attempts at characterization and composition. It is no easy thing, if you are the founder of a whole line of great artists, called upon to teach them something entirely new in the way of life-expression, to get all the wonderful things you see and feel into a certain picture or series of pictures, but Giotto tried it and he succeeded very well, too. The decorations are not great, but they are quaint and lovely, even if you have to admit at times that an apprentice of to-day could draw and compose better. He couldn’t “intend” better, however, nor convey more human tenderness and feeling in gay, light coloring,—and therein lies the whole secret!

There are some twenty-eight of these frescoes ranged along the lower walls on either side—St. Francis stepping on the cloak of the poor man who, recognizing him as a saint, spread it down before him; St. Francis giving his cloak to the poor nobleman; St. Francis seeing the vision of the palace which was to be reared for him and his followers; St. Francis in the car of fire; St. Francis driving the devils away from Arezzo; St. Francis before the Sultan; St. Francis preaching to the birds; and so on. It was very charming. I could not help thinking what a severe blow has been given to religious legend since those days however; nowadays, except in the minds of the ignorant, saints and devils and angels and stigmata and holy visions have all but disappeared. The grand phantasmagoria of religious notions as they relate to the life of Christ have all but vanished, for the time being anyhow, even in the brains of the masses, and we are having an invasion of rationalism or something approximating it, even at the bottom. The laissez-faire opportunism which has characterized the men at the top in all ages is seeping down to the bottom. Via the newspaper and the magazine, even in Italy—in Assisi—something of astronomy, botany, politics and mechanics, scientifically demonstrated, is creeping in. The inflow seems very meager as yet, a mere trickle, but it has begun. Even in Assisi I saw newspapers and a weekly in a local barber-shop. The natives—the aged ones—very thin, shabby and pale, run into the churches at all hours of the day to prostrate themselves before helpless saints; but nevertheless the newspapers are in the barber-shops. Old Cosimo Medici’s truism that governments are not managed by paternosters is slowly seeping down. We have scores of men in the world to-day as able as old Cosimo Medici and as ruthless. We will have hundreds and thousands after a while, only they will be much more circumspect in their ruthlessness and they will work hard for the State. Perhaps there won’t be so much useless praying before useless images when that time comes. The thought of divinity in the individual needs to be more fully developed.

While I was wandering thus and ruminating I was interested at the same time in the faithful enthusiasm my Abbé was manifesting in the details of the art of this great church. He followed me about for a time in my idle wanderings as I studied the architectural details of this one of the earliest of Gothic churches and then he went away by himself, returning every so often to find in my guide-book certain passages which he wanted me to read, pointing to certain frescoes and exclaiming, “Giotto!” “Cimabue!” “Andrea da Bologna!” Finally he said in plain English, but very slowly: “Did—you—ever—read—a—life—of St. Francis?”

I must confess that my knowledge of the intricacies of Italian art, aside from the lines of its general development, is slim. Alas, dabbling in Italian art, and in art in general, is like trifling with some soothing drug—the more you know the more you want to know.