Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The Gods of the Roman World—Leaven of Christianity—Measures of the Emperors Against the Christians—Nine General Persecutions—Mad Extremes of Heliogabalus—Rescue of the Bodies of the Apostles—Tragic History of the Appian Way—The Joys of Solitude—How Marion Crawford Became the Master of San Niccola—A Solitude of Relaxation and Quiet—A Secluded Garden on the River in Rome—The Contrasts of Life and the Happiness in Hoping—An Artist’s Festival—How a Roman Emperor Looked.

Few things in the records of the past are stranger than the variations of attitude of the Roman Emperors (barring some hÆmatomaniacs like Nero) towards Christianity during the first three or four centuries of our era, quite apart from the moral attributes of the Emperors themselves. One feels, through the edicts, the bored irritation of the rulers at having to trouble themselves at all about a few low-born individuals led away, as was believed, by a crazy illusion about another world, a life after this one, which they promised to all who would renounce the real pleasures—those considered as such by the great ones of the day and their followers—pride and power, riches, ambition, the lust of the eyes, and the lust of the flesh. “Surely,” one seems to hear authority exclaim, “human nature may be trusted to fight for its own, against such fanatics! We have had our Stoics and their disciples, and no one had to legislate against them. All they claimed was the right to despise ease and pleasure, and to find their reward in the admiration or notoriety that they gained in the process. Their very uncomfortable doctrines were never the cause of great social upheavals! What is behind this new teaching that men should be so excited about it?”

Then little by little there creeps in the sign of an unexplained fear, the sense of being confronted by a new mysterious power, great enough to be menacing to the old order of things, which, after all, had served well and should not be interfered with unnecessarily. Few of the upper classes, except in times of great trouble, really relied much on the protection of Rome’s inherited gods, but all felt that their worship was a powerful weapon wherewith to control or drive the great mass of the people. The common herd clung tenaciously to the belief that prosperity followed on faithfulness to the old deities, and misfortune on any affront offered them. These tiresome Christians went out of their way to show their scorn of the very mixed crowd of gods and goddesses whom Rome had enshrined on her altars, and it was imprudent to seem to pass over such offences against the public taste. One ruler tries to suppress the Christians with a high hand; another suggests a compromise—he is willing to place the statue of Christ in the Capitol if they will show equal respect for the earlier residents there. No? Oh, well, let them be exterminated, then, since they are so bent on destruction! The edicts are issued and fiercely followed up, till even the persecutors weary of the diversion and stop as if for want of breath. But the edicts are not repealed, and they lie there at the disposal of bloody-minded governors or covetous informers, who desire to annex some Christian’s estates or to possess themselves of beautiful Christian maids. Nine official general persecutions we count in all, spread over some three hundred years, but it must not be thought that the Church had peace, except occasionally for very short intervals, between. The reigning Emperor might be a monster like Nero or Domitian, or a gentle-minded tolerant man like Alexander Severus, the streams of blood were made to flow with awful continuity just the same, owing to the enormous power placed in the hands of his deputies, the governors of the cities and provinces that made up the unwieldy Empire.

These fluctuations account for the many transportations of the relics of the chief martyrs to different hiding-places during those early centuries. For some hundred and fifty years the bodies of the Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, reposed in the tombs where they had been first placed, and where they now lie, but soon after the accession of Heliogabalus to the throne, the reigning Pope, St. Calixtus, found it necessary to remove them to a distant and secret spot in order to protect them from the most revolting sacrilege. Heliogabalus, the maddest of all the mad Emperors, suddenly decreed that no god but himself should be worshipped in Rome. He built a gorgeous temple to himself on the Palatine, and as the pagan historian, Lampridius, tells us, made arrangements to transfer to this temple not only all the objects of worship most sacred in the eyes of the Romans, and regarded by them as talismans upon the safeguarding of which the destinies of the Empire depended—the fire of Vesta, the statue of Cybele, the Palladium, the Ancilia—but also “the religions of the Jews and Samaritans, and the Christian objects of devotion, in order that the priests of Heliogabalus should hold the secrets of every worship.”

It was well known that the objects most dear to Christian devotion were the bodies of the glorious Apostles, and a hundred and fifty years of continuous pilgrimage to their tombs had marked the way fairly clearly to those once secluded spots. St. Calixtus, it seems, was already preparing to remove the bodies when a new whim of the maniac Emperor caused him to do so with extreme haste. Heliogabalus issued orders for a great exhibition of harnessed elephants on the Vatican plain, and, to procure sufficient space for the show, commanded that all inequalities should be levelled and all the sepulchres, pagan or Christian, should be destroyed.

In fear and haste, St. Calixtus transported the holy remains to the Appian Way, already by that time honey-combed with subterranean vaults and passages. Above ground, the place was marked by the monuments of the CÆcilii, whose illustrious daughter was soon to lie below; but St. Calixtus feared that the existing vaults, now for the first time called “Catacombs,” were already too widely known to offer complete protection to the precious relics; so he caused a new chamber to be dug deep in the rock, to the right of the way, disposing the only entrance to it through a well; and there he laid the Apostles, each in a separate tomb, to abide the hour of the triumph of the Church.

The Appian Way, with its miles of magnificent pagan monuments on the surface, and its far-reaching secret sanctuaries below, has in the course of time taken on something like a personality of its own. It is like a ribbon of marble laid across a sea of beauty even now, when the famous villas and gardens, overflowing with blooms gathered from every clime and shaded by groves of ilex and cedar, of palm and sycamore and cypress, have all been swept into the rich, soft mould; there you can look across twenty miles of waving grasses and wild flowers, broken only by some fragment still majestic in ruin and guarded by the dark, slender watch-towers—memories of a later age, when the few scared shepherds had to fly from Hun or Saracen—that rise at intervals all the way to the sea. The solitude seems boundless, yet gentle and familiar; little blind winds come wandering across from the south and lose their way among the flowers; for the Via Appia leads due south, and one knows that it goes on into the war-ploughed Kingdom of Naples, that “hothouse of Saints and Sinners,” with its fierce suns burning down on castles whose very stones cry tragedy, on scorching hillsides where the black grapes ripen into fiery wine, on flats seething in the heat under the man-high crops of maize. But near Rome, looking towards the soft green outline of the Alban Hills, all that seems illusion; this is reality, this empty space, untroubled by past or future, this sweep of dun gold and fading purple; its surrounding hills that all look towards Rome have seen the place unpeopled, seen it swarming with life; have seen it flaring with pomp and then submerged in blood; now they are guardians of that which modern cataclysms have failed to rend—the peace of a place whence even the memory of humanity is banished and Nature smiles and broods alone over her lovely handiwork.

Often I have longed to withdraw for a time to one of those lonely watch-towers to “think things out.” We Crawfords have never been able to see a really solitary spot without wanting it for our own. A certain empty tomb lost among the Umbrian hills, with the sun turning the red rock to gold and the wild camomile swaying its yellow blossoms in the breeze over the doorway, has been a haven of my spirit through many a breathless, over-peopled hour. I could fly there in mind, for days at a time, into an atmosphere of such still liberty as is only granted to disembodied souls. My dear brother Marion could never resist the call of fortressed solitudes. The story of how he became the master of San Niccola in Calabria is too characteristic not to be told in this connection. San Niccola is an Angevin castle, with walls twenty feet thick in places, perched on the rocks over an inhospitable little bay on the coast of Calabria, a bay too small and shallow to permit of sailing vessels being anchored inside its natural breakwater of tumbled stones. Marion often sailed thither, and, leaving the yacht outside, would scramble on shore and linger for hours in the shade of the huge pile, weaving new stories and calling up pictures of the days when the cry would ring along the coast that a Saracen sail was in sight, and the inhabitants, snatching up whatever they could carry, raced for the nearest tower of refuge. San Niccola looks like a huge dark monolith, wide at the base and tapering slightly towards its truncated summit. It contained but two apartments, a vast square space, without windows, for animals below, and one great hall, as sparsely windowed as possible, above. In this it resembles most of its fellows along the coast, where “Carlo d’AngiÒ,” still almost a living personality to the people, planted them, at short distances from one another, for this very purpose.

It was a roasting hot day in August; the felucca (this was before my brother bought the Alda) was swinging at anchor in deep water, and the “padroni,” Marion and my sister-in-law, were sitting on the rocks in the shade, after lunch—the hour when most people go to sleep, but always a particularly inspiring one to him and responsible for many of his quaint whims. Suddenly he jumped up and announced that he needed a walk—he would go to the town—a tiny hamlet some miles distant—and buy—I forget what—fresh eggs for the morrow’s breakfast, I think. Would Bessie like to come?

Bessie, dozing over a novel under the shelter of a huge pink parasol, scarcely thought it necessary to reply audibly to such a crazy proposition, but as Marion turned and walked away she signalled to the faithful Luigi to follow and look after him, which Luigi—with what groans one can imagine, just after the midday macaroni and in that blazing heat—obediently did.

The day wore on, the sun began to sink, and the evening breeze ruffled the water. The parasol had long been closed, the novel thrown aside, and Bessie was beginning to look anxiously landward, when the truants reappeared in the distance. As they drew nearer she could see that Marion carried in his hand a huge iron key, while Luigi, directly behind him, was flinging his arms up in the air in gestures of despair. As they came close, the gestures became those of beseeching deprecation, and she realised that he was trying to say, unbeknown to the “padrone,” “It was not my fault, Signora mia, oh indeed, not my fault!” while Marion, a little in doubt as to his reception, stopped before her and held up the great rusty key, saying, “It’s mine, mine, my dear, for the next thirty years!”

“What—this awful place? Oh, why did I let you go away without me?” she wailed. “What on earth are you going to do with it?—and what have you paid for it?”

He mentioned the sum—not a very large one, it is true—but Luigi, hovering near, pale and scared, whispered, with every appearance of sincere grief: “He could have had it for the hundredth part of that, Signora! Alas, for the good money! But it was not my fault—there was no holding the Signore, and those assassins at the Municipio took advantage of him!”

To tell the truth, it was not the money side of the matter which distressed my sister-in-law so much as the prospect of being required to come and pass weeks at a time in this grim dungeon, without a single convenience of life, twelve miles from a market town, and of course lashed to the battlements by every Mediterranean storm. It took her some days to reconcile herself to the new acquisition—poor girl—but Marion had not made a mistake, after all. The family was not invited to San Niccola till he had made several journeys thither himself, with carpenters and materials, and when they did come they found that the lonely keep had been transformed internally to a quite possible dwelling—though certainly an inconveniently isolated one. Generally, however, he went there alone, to rest from everything connected with modern life, and he found it a fine, quiet place for writing in, at any rate.

I fancy that people who take such keen delight as we do in sympathetic and cheery society are probably the ones who most enjoy—and need—the relaxation of seclusion and quiet. I remember a curious nook that my sister and I discovered in Rome itself; we never told any one about it, and used to go there day after day to think the “long, long thoughts” of youth and make wonderful plans for the two or three hundred years we must have expected to live if they were all to be carried out!

From the Via di Repetta, on the right bank of the Tiber, we had noticed on the opposite side two or three very old little houses, with tiny gardens formed on the projecting bastions of a fragment of ancient wall which must have been built to protect the Via Lungara from the periodical overflowing of the river. Over the low parapet of one of them we could see a few flowers, a lemon tree, and an oleander bush in bloom; the owners of the old dwelling were never visible, but we made up our minds to bribe them to let us into their deserted and alluring back yard. Once in the Lungara we had some little trouble in locating the house, as nothing of the river was visible between the closely-set buildings that faced the street, but after one or two wrong shots we found it—in the possession of a good-natured young woman who could not in the least understand why we should offer her a lira for the privilege of passing through to her “loggia,” a place she evidently despised since, to our joy, we found that she never even hung out the clothes to dry there, preferring the lines which run from window to window on the upper stories of most of the poor houses in Rome. She led us across the brick-floored kitchen, opened a door and shut it behind us as soon as we had passed through, and we found ourselves in a tiny paradise of flowers and herbs interspersed with fragments of sculptured marble—a frond of acanthus, a whorl of tracery—and provided with a stone seat inside the parapet. The whole jutted far out into the river, whose rushing water filled the air with drowsy sound. A few jonquils were blooming white and yellow in the clear shade; the pot of carnations—every Italian woman of the lower class has one, which she cherishes jealously—was spilling over with huge red “garofoli,” scenting the air with their spicy fragrance, and from the seat by the wall we could look up and down the river for a long, long way. The coolness, the unassailable privacy yet open-air sweetness of it all was indescribably delightful; for years we used to fly there when we had something to think out; and when the new works for keeping the Tiber within bounds swept the little old houses and their wee gardens away we felt as if we had been robbed of a bit of home.

My dear sister Annie was usually the pioneer of our discoveries and expeditions; she was of a bolder spirit than I, and was ever on the alert for material for her painting, which was not always done with the brush. She shared in particular my love of things Etruscan. We used to fancy that we had both lived among the mysterious, beauty-loving people of Etruria some three thousand years earlier. Everything connected with them had a haunting power over us, and sometimes we used to put words to the scenes on the vases and act them out with much fidelity for our own satisfaction. Only one friend was admitted to share these archaic sympathies and diversions; if these lines ever fall under “Minnie’s” eyes, will she remember one notable night when she and Annie acted the parts of the devoted maidens, in clinging drapery and fillet-bound hair, who rescued the beautiful young warrior—myself—from the hideous fate decreed for him by the (necessarily) invisible hierophants of the sacred fane in the wardrobe—the dressing table serving for the altar upon which he was to have been sacrificed? We were all three so overcome at the conclusion of the drama that we broke down and wept in each other’s arms! “La gioventÙ È un fiore che non ritorna piÙ!”

But those whose youth has been fed with colour and imagination and beauty keep young in spite of the passing of years. In looking back, those stand out as the real things—the prosaic grind of existence falls away and shows itself as mere illusion. After all, what would life be without contrasts? They are the chief elements of drama. They furnish all its spice. The blackest shadows prove the existence of the brightest sun. It is the people who have nothing to wish for who are to be pitied. The very poorest can dream and hope for some lightening of their lot; and when pleasures come to them—little tiny pleasures even—they enjoy them intensely; whereas those to whom nothing has been denied find life so atrociously dull that only a constant series of fictitious excitements enables them to bear it at all. Two men I know were walking down Fifth Avenue one day and paused to admire a magnificent diamond necklace displayed in a jeweller’s window. One of them said, with a sigh, “What wouldn’t I give to be able to buy that for my wife!” The other, a poor multi-millionaire, turned to him with a snarl of envious rage: “You lucky fellow! You have something still left to wish for!”

The best—in the way of mere pleasure—that some of us could desire would be to live some hours over again and see once more the pictures that filled them. There used to be a day in May when all the artists in Rome united to hold high festival out in the country, and—speaking of pictures—one such day comes back to me and claims its record. Nobody was allowed to know beforehand what the brotherhood was planning to do, but it was sure to be something very picturesque—and no wonder, considering the elements and facilities brought to bear on it!

All who could do so went out towards the appointed spot, the caves of Cervara, that morning, and we passed so many vehicles on the road that we decided to turn off and make for our point across the turf, all unenclosed in that part of the plain. We almost forgot what we had come to look for, in the pleasure of moving soundlessly over the short, new grass which gave out a warm fragrance of mint and thyme as it was pressed by the horses’ feet. The velvety undulations between which we threaded our way, shut out everything but the blue overhead and some glimpses of the Sabines, swimming like huge sapphires in a haze of airy gold. Suddenly, on the sky-line of a low ridge just ahead of us, a towering car moved into view, drawn by four white oxen, whose gilded horns were hung with wreaths of roses. The heavy wheels were smothered in roses too, scattering pink and white petals as they revolved over the newly-sprung grass. The sides of the car were all of fretted gold, catching the sun in a hundred lovely scrolls and arabesques; raised high on a gold and ivory throne sate—a Roman Emperor, his white robes covered with jewels, the laurel wreath on his brow, his smooth young beauty facing the radiant morning with bland immobile insolence, his dark eyes fixed on the horizon, as if seeing his empire stretching away till its confines were lost in the unknown East. Behind him two black slaves held huge fans of white feathers over his head to protect him from the heat; at his feet, on a swirl of panther skins, sate his favourite of the moment, a beautiful, lithe Greek woman, her golden hair crowned with roses, her bare arms covered with bracelets and gleaming like marble in the sun, while a score or more of lovely girls in classical draperies leaned over the gilt balustrades that sank, tier below tier, from the sides of the throne down to the upper ledge of the rose-wreathed wheels. Black slaves in scarlet tunics led the oxen, urging them on with pointed gilt wands, and behind the Emperor’s car, as far as one could see, followed a long procession of others, nearly as splendid as the first, crowded with all his attendants, gorgeous in raiment, grouped to perfection—and all, saving the ox-drivers, motionless as statues. It was a dream of Imperial times, too surprising to be real, till, as the first car passed close to us, one of the girls began to laugh and flung a handful of rose-petals in my face.

How those young artists had enjoyed themselves in planning and producing the marvellous show! Painting pictures on canvas is all very well, but fancy the delight of making them live, on such a background, before people’s eyes—of handling all that superb material to embody visions that had haunted one despairingly for years, crying out to be used and shown! Upon my word, if I could start life over again and choose my own vocation, I believe I would make it that of a theatrical manager—an artist in flesh and blood!