We continued our way and finally we found a Franciscan monk who spoke both English and French—a peculiar-looking man, tall, and athletic, who appeared to be very widely experienced in the world, indeed. He explained more of the frescoes, the history of the church, the present state of the Franciscans here, and so on.
The other places Franciscan, as I have said, did not interest me so much, though I accompanied my friend, the Abbé, wherever he was impelled to go. He inquired about New York, looking up and waving his hand upward as indicating great height, great buildings, and I knew he was thinking of our skyscrapers. “American bar!” he said, twittering to himself like a bird, “American stim-eat [steam heat]; American ’otel.”
I had to smile.
Side by side we proceeded through the church of St. Clare, the Duomo, the new church raised on the site of the house that belonged to Pietro Bernardone, the father of the saint; and finally to the Church of San Damiano, where after St. Francis had seen the vision of the new life, he went to pray. After it was given him by the Benedictines he set about the work of repairing it and when once it was in charge of the poor Clares, after resigning the command of his order, he returned thither to rest and compose the “Canticle of the Law.” I never knew until I came to Assisi what a business this thing of religion is in Italy—how valuable the shrines and churches of an earlier day are to its communities. Thousands of travelers must pass this way each year. They support the only good hotels. Travelers from all nations come, English, French, German, American, Russian, and Japanese. The attendants at the shrines reap a small livelihood from the tips of visitors and they are always there, lively and almost obstreperous in their attentions. The oldest and most faded of all the guides and attendants throng about the churches and shrines of Assisi, so old and faded that they seemed almost epics of poverty. My good priest was for praying before every shrine. He would get down on his knees and cross himself, praying four or five minutes while I stood irreligiously in the background, looking at him and wondering how long he would be. He prayed before the tomb of St. Francis in the Franciscan church; before the body of St. Clare (clothed in a black habit and shown behind a glass case), in the church of St. Clare; before the altar in the chapel of Saint Damiano, where St. Francis had first prayed; and so on. Finally when we were all through, and it was getting late evening, he wanted to go down into the valley, near the railroad station, to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the cell in which St. Francis died, is located. He thought I might want to leave him now, but I refused. We started out, inquiring our way of the monks at Saint Damiano and found that we had to go back through the town. One of the monks, a fat, bare-footed man, signaled me to put on my hat, which I was carrying because I wanted to enjoy the freshness of the evening wind. It had cleared off now, the sun had come out and we were enjoying one of those lovely Italian spring evenings which bring a sense of childhood to the heart. The good monk thought I was holding my hat out of reverence to his calling. I put it on.
We went back through the town and then I realized how lovely the life of a small Italian town is, in spring. Assisi has about five thousand population. It was cool and pleasant. Many doorways were now open, showing evening fires within the shadows of the rooms. Some children were in the roadways. Carts and wains were already clattering up from the fields below and church-bells—the sweetest echoes from churches here and there in the valley and from those here in Assisi—exchanged melodies. We walked fast because it was late and when we reached the station it was already dusk. The moon had risen, however, and lighted up this great edifice, standing among a ruck of tiny homes. A number of Italian men and women were grouped around a pump outside—those same dark, ear-ringed Italians with whom we are now so familiar in America. The church was locked, but my Abbé went about to the cloister gate which stood at one side of the main entrance, and rang a bell. A brown-cowled monk appeared and they exchanged a few words. Finally with many smiles we were admitted into a moonlit garden, where cypress trees and box and ilex showed their lovely forms, and through a long court that had an odor of malt, as if beer were brewed here, and so finally by a circuitous route into the main body of the church and the chapel containing the cell of St. Francis. It was so dark by now that only the heaviest objects appeared distinctly, the moonlight falling faintly through several of the windows. The voices of the monks sounded strange and sonorous, even though they talked in low tones. We walked about looking at the great altars, the windows, and the high, flat ceiling. We went into the chapel, lined on either side by wooden benches, occupied by kneeling monks, and lighted by one low, swinging lamp which hung before the cell in which St. Francis died. There was much whispering of prayers here and the good Abbé was on his knees in a moment praying solemnly.
St. Francis certainly never contemplated that his beggarly cell would ever be surrounded by the rich marbles and bronze work against which his life was a protest. He never imagined, I am sure, that in spite of his prayer for poverty, his Order would become rich and influential and that this, the site of his abstinence, would be occupied by one of the most ornate churches in Italy. It is curious how barnacle-wise the spirit of materiality invariably encrusts the ideal! Christ died on the cross for the privilege of worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” after he had preached the sermon on the mount,—and then you have the gold-incrusted, power-seeking, wealth-loving Papacy, with women and villas and wars of aggrandizement and bastardy among the principal concomitants. And following Francis, imitating the self-immolation of the Nazarene, you have another great Order whose churches and convents in Italy are among the richest and most beautiful. And everywhere you find that lust for riches and show and gormandizing and a love of seeming what they are not, so that they may satisfy a faint scratching of the spirit which is so thickly coated over that it is almost extinguished.
Or it may be that the ideal is always such an excellent device wherewith to trap the unwary and the unsophisticated. “Feed them with a fine-seeming and then put a tax on their humble credulity” seems to be the logic of materialism in regard to the mass. Anything to obtain power and authority! Anything to rule! And so you have an Alexander VI, Vicar of Christ, poisoning cardinals and seizing on estates that did not belong to him: leading a life of almost insane luxury; and a Medicean pope interested in worldly fine art and the development of a pagan ideal.
CHAPTER XXXVI
PERUGIA
We returned at between seven and eight that night. After a bath I sat out on the large balcony, or veranda, commanding the valley, and enjoyed the moonlight. The burnished surface of the olive trees, and brown fields already being plowed with white oxen and wooden shares, gave back a soft glow that was somehow like the patina on bronze. There was a faint odor of flowers in the wind and here and there lights gleaming. From some street in the town I heard singing and the sound of a mandolin. I slept soundly.