Part 4 (2/2)
Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in the recent impression of the dimly-lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley, suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings of a.s.sociation which affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible stories. The feeling of the _cenacolo_ blent here with feelings of Ruth's cornfields, and the white square houses with their flat roofs enforced the illusion.
Here we slept in the middle of a _contadino_ colony. Some of the folk had made way for us; and by the wheezing, coughing, and snoring of several sorts and ages in the chamber next me, I imagine they must have endured considerable crowding. My bed was large enough to have contained a family. Over its head there was a little shrine, hollowed in the thickness of the wall, with several sacred emblems and a shallow vase of holy water. On dressers at each end of the room stood gla.s.s shrines, occupied by finely-dressed Madonna dolls and pots of artificial flowers.
Above the doors S. Michael and S. Francis, roughly embossed in low relief and boldly painted, gave dignity and grandeur to the walls. These showed some sense for art in the first builders of the house. But the taste of the inhabitants could not be praised. There were countless gaudy prints of saints, and exactly five pictures of the Bambino, very big, and sprawling in a field alone. A crucifix, some old bottles, a gun, old clothes suspended from pegs, pieces of peasant pottery and china, completed the furniture of the apartment.
But what a view it showed when Christian next morning opened the door!
From my bed I looked across the red-tiled terrace to the stone pines with their velvet roof.a.ge and the blue-peaked hills of Stabiae.
SAN GERMANO.
No one need doubt about his quarters in this country town. The Albergo di Pompeii is a truly sumptuous place. Sofas, tables, and chairs in our sitting-room are made of buffalo horns, very cleverly pieced together, but torturing the senses with suggestions of impalement. Sitting or standing, one felt insecure. When would the points run into us? when should we begin to break these incrustations off? and would the whole fabric crumble at a touch into chaotic heaps of horns?
It is market day, and the costumes in the streets are brilliant. The women wear a white petticoat, a blue skirt made straight and tightly bound above it, a white richly-worked bodice, and the white square-folded napkin of the Abruzzi on their heads. Their jacket is of red or green--pure colour. A rug of striped red, blue, yellow, and black protects the whole dress from the rain. There is a very n.o.ble quality of green--sappy and gemmy--like some of t.i.tian's or Giorgione's--in the stuffs they use. Their build and carriage are worthy of G.o.ddesses.
Rain falls heavily, persistently. We must ride on donkeys, in waterproofs, to Monte Ca.s.sino. Mountain and valley, oak wood and ilex grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike in soft-descending, soaking rain. Far and near the landscape swims in rain, and the hill-sides send down torrents through their watercourses.
The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent and princely solidity. It has a fine inner court, with sumptuous staircases of slabbed stone leading to the church. This public portion of the edifice is both impressive and magnificent, without sacrifice of religious severity to parade. We acknowledge a successful compromise between the austerity of the order and the grandeur befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation. The church itself is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance--costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro dei Medici.
Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in the Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this marble monument--the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco di San Gallo--to their relative. It is singularly stiff, ugly, out of place--at once obtrusive and insignificant.
A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over the convent--boy's school, refectory printing press, lithographic workshop, library, archives. We then returned to the church, from which we pa.s.sed to visit the most venerable and sacred portion of the monastery. The cell of S. Benedict is being restored and painted in fres...o...b.. the Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigid process of re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chambered and very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in the ma.s.sive superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artists adorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen pietism. S.
Mauro's vision of his master's translation to heaven--the ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and the angels watching on the tower walls--might even be styled poetical. But the decorative angels on the roof and other places, being adapted from Egyptian art, have a strange, incongruous appearance.
Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes in search of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and even Monte Ca.s.sino was no exception. This ought not to be otherwise, seeing what a peculiar sympathy with the monastic inst.i.tution is required to make these cloisters comprehensible. The atmosphere of operose indolence, prolonged through centuries and centuries, stifles; nor can antiquity and influence impose upon a mind which resents monkery itself as an essential evil. That Monte Ca.s.sino supplied the Church with several potentates is incontestable. That mediaeval learning and morality would have suffered more without this brotherhood cannot be doubted. Yet it is difficult to name men of very eminent genius whom the Ca.s.sinesi claim as their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio's testimony to their carelessness, and with the evidence of their library before our eyes, can we rate their services to civilised erudition very highly. I longed to possess the spirit, for one moment, of Montalembert. I longed for what is called historical imagination, for the indiscriminate voracity of those men to whom world-famous sites are in themselves soul-stirring.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] These verses are extracted from the second book of Pontano's _Hendecasyllabi_ (Aldus, 1513, p. 208). They so vividly paint the amus.e.m.e.nts of a watering-place in the fifteenth century that I have translated them:
With me, let but the mind be wise, Gravina, With me haste to the tranquil haunts of Baiae, Haunts that pleasure hath made her home, and she who Sways all hearts, the voluptuous Aphrodite. Here wine rules, and the dance, and games and laughter; Graces reign in a round of mirthful madness; Love hath built, and desire, a palace here too, Where glad youths and enamoured girls on all sides Play and bathe in the waves in sunny weather, Dine and sup, and the merry mirth of banquets Blend with dearer delights and love's embraces, Blend with pleasures of youth and honeyed kisses, Till, sport-tired, in the couch inarmed they slumber.
Thee our Muses invite to these enjoyments; Thee those billows allure, the myrtled seash.o.r.e, Birds allure with a song, and mighty Gaurus Twines his redolent wreath of vines and ivy.
MAY IN UMBRIA.
FROM ROME TO TERNI.
We left Rome in clear sunset light. The Alban Hills defined themselves like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the Sabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster thunder-clouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the slopes of Tivoli. To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams. The Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers. Just now poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns infinite and intricate beyond the power of art. They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered _fioriture_.
These are like praying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque whose roof is heaven. In the level light the scythes of the mowers flash as we move past. From their bronzed foreheads the men toss ma.s.ses of dark curls. Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway sideways from firm yet pliant reins. On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising their heads to look at us, with just a flush of crimson on their horns and dewlaps. This is the scale of Mason's and of Costa's colouring. This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome.
Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber and S. Peter's, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flames where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill and l.u.s.trous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fas.h.i.+oned from the clouds are floating.
Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves. The orange deepens into dying red. The green divides into daffodil and beryl. The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars s.h.i.+ne stronger.
Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water.
The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene. No painting could convey their influences. Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river. Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere. And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West. The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods all floating in aerial twilight. There is no definition of outline now. The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow.
We have pa.s.sed Stimigliano. Through the mystery of darkness we hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.
<script>