Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Final Function of the Pilgrimage—St. John Lateran—A Daring Climb—A Story of St. Francis of Assisi—Dante’s Tribute—Rome’s Ghetto—Yellow Banksia Roses—Fair on the Eve of the Feast of St. John the Baptist—Early Figs—St. Anthony and the Sucking Pig—Rome’s Studios—A Picture of HÉbert’s—Hamon’s Work.

The sixth day of July closes the Octave of the 29th of June with a magnificent function, attended by the whole College of Cardinals, in the Church of St. John Lateran, the outpost of the Eternal City on its southern side. The Basilica faces in that direction and is the last building within the city walls, which still raise their crenellated barrier of Roman masonry between it and the Campagna beyond. This, the real approach to the Church, is very beautiful. The portico is surmounted by statues of the Apostles, which are visible from a great distance away on the Campagna, and is reached by a series of shallow marble steps, where, in my early days, many devout beggars were wont to sit and ask for alms. Below the steps and commanding a glorious view of the Campagna and its encircling hills, stretches a wide grassy terrace where we often walked up and down for a long time, at the end of an afternoon drive, thus following the example of many of the Popes, with whom this was a favourite spot, when in residence at the Lateran Palace. Distances are deceptive where spaces are so great; the grassy stretch never looked very vast; the feathery mulberry trees that grew under the old Aurelian wall seemed almost within reach; but in reality were quite a little way from the green terrace. The wall always fascinated me because of its crown of small loop-holed towers, set near together and connected by a covered way that still looked practicable enough, although I believe there was no mode of reaching it except by scrambling up from the outside. In those days the sturdy ruin was covered with wild flowers and creeping plants, the long garlands of yellow camomile waving like strings of stars in the wind, some lovely things, whose name I never knew, sending out arm-long shafts of pink and purple from every crevice, two or three live-oak saplings finding good root-hold on the top, and every foot of surface covered with the velvety jewelled leaves and tiny lilac flowers of another little old friend, which I think the wise men call the “parietary” and which I found, true to its name, clothing whole walls of our temple home in North China. There the blossoms were much larger, and during the stagnating days of one scorching summer I used to pass hours in the deep, damp court where they grew, and discovered (what I suppose any botanist could have told me) that their strange lucency comes from a sticky liquid effused over the petals, which themselves throw out a network of all but invisible hairs; that flies and gnats settle on these hairs, get caught by the treacherous gum—and then are quietly sucked in and devoured by the flower!

It was always in my mind to make a secret expedition, with my adventurous sister, to that old Aurelian wall, when no one should be about, and somehow or other reach the top, but we never carried out that plan, though we did some pretty risky climbing in other ruins, notably at the Baths of Caracalla, where we scaled the very highest point of the biggest arch and lay at full length—we dared not stand on a block of stone that rocked as we moved—looking down from the dizzy height on a world of tiny people and things below. Some glorious tufts of wallflower were our only companions and I remember how wonderful was that mass of fervid orange swaying in the sun, against the azure of the sky and the deep, dreamy blue of the distant hills. We went there many times—but at last there came a day when the authorities decreed that that particular bit of the ruin was so near falling that it constituted a menace to the remains below. It was removed, and some of the approaches to the other heights were walled up so that no one could risk life and limb upon them any more, and we never cared to go to the Baths again. Now, of course, there is no temptation to linger in any of the ruins, as the ignorant beauty-haters who took possession of our Rome in 1870 declared that the unique vegetation which adorned them was an agent of destruction and must be swept away. Every vestige of flower and shrub was rooted out, the poor old buildings became an eyesore instead of a delight, and the process of stripping off the kindly mantle which the ages had cast over their nakedness inflicted greater damage, the experts now tell us, than five hundred years more of age and weather could possibly have done. My dear brother Marion used to say that the world was peopled chiefly with fools and—blanked fools. What a charming world it would be if the blanked fools never got into power!

But to return to the porch of the Lateran and its devout beggars. On a certain day some eight hundred years ago, the Pope was walking on that green stretch just below it, followed by a silent group of Cardinals and Chamberlains, silent because the Holy Father was evidently thinking hard about some high and important problem. Innocent III was a great and good Pope, but he lived in a turbulent age. During fourteen years of his reign two rivals, Philip and Otto, were rending Europe with their struggles for the supreme honours of the Holy Roman Empire; the Albigensian heresy was holding a hideous carnival of sacrilege, carnage, and obscenity in some of its fairest lands; Rome itself was the scene of ever-recurring battles between the great nobles, who would ride forth in the morning followed by great companies of armed men, on the chance of meeting an enemy or an enemy’s retainer to kill. And with all this there were the vast affairs of the Church to govern, and many spiritual matters to regulate. No wonder that the Pontiff, walking in absorbed silence, and meditating on his course of action, should have been extremely irritated when a company of travel-stained, dusty beggars, disregarding the protestations of the horrified guard of officials, came straight towards him and cast themselves at his feet!

He looked down at them in frowning disapproval. What did such conduct mean? Their leader was a pale young man with dark eyes and a face lighted up with a very fire of enthusiasm. Like his companions, he was dressed in a coarse brown robe with a simple girdle, and his bare feet showed many a cut and bruise from which the ragged sandals had not saved them in the long tramp from Assisi down through Umbria and Romagna. For this was the Blessed St. Francis with his “little brothers,” come to ask the Pope for leave to found a new order, the Order of Poverty. And the Pope scarcely answered him. Was it likely that these ragged, ignorant tramps should have been chosen by Divine Providence to found a new family in the Church? Ah, no!—Innocent shook his head, reproved them for their presumption, and ordered them to retire.

They accepted the rebuke, withdrew from his presence with perfect humility, and laid their case before the Lord in prayer. The Pope, doubtless finding that the view from the green terrace had lost its charm at this squalid incursion, retired to his apartments in the Lateran Palace, and when night fell lay down and went to sleep. And in sleep his eyes were opened to that which had been hidden from them by day. He dreamed that a tender young palm-tree sprang suddenly from the ground beneath his feet and in a moment shot up to the sky and threw out strong branches on every side, forming a vast roof of fresh verdure under which millions of men found refuge and refreshment. Then he understood that the poor mendicants who had knelt before him that day were chosen by Heaven to found an order that should cover the world with a mantle of charity; and as soon as he awoke he sent messengers in haste to seek the little brown brothers—who were sure to be found in or near the Lateran Basilica, and bring them to him.

We all know the result of the interview. How the Pope lovingly received the brothers, but how strongly he protested against St. Francis’ apparent imprudence in founding his institution on a vow of absolute poverty. How St. Francis refused to be shaken in his loyalty to his loved bride, the “Lady Poverty,” and how at last the great Pope yielded to the great Saint, discerning that Heaven itself was leading him on this thorny path. So much has been written about St. Francis by heretics, unbelievers, and amateurs, from whose company he would have fled in horror, on earth, who have bespattered him with their poisonous praises, who have each and all insulted him by the lies which they invented in order to represent him as the patron of their abominable errors, that a Catholic pen almost hesitates to write his blessed name. As one good man says: “He has conquered the world, and his victory would make him weep!” But he conquered it in another way too—in the way he intended. Travel where you will, to the very ends of the earth, and you will find the brown robes, the sandalled feet, the arms held open to the poor and the suffering and the despised; you will find the Sons of St. Francis toiling in the stoniest, roughest part of the vineyard, with and of the poor, praying for all men, teaching the children, nursing the sick, baptising the babes and the heathen, burying the dead, begging, more for their poor than for themselves, from door to door, leading the hardest of lives, yet always cheery and contented, the friends of all who need them, the “gente poverella” are indeed friends who never change or fail.

Of all the panegyrics of St. Francis, and of the “Lady Poverty,” I think the one that Dante put into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas in the eleventh canto of the “Paradiso,” is the most perfect and complete. And the description of St. Dominic in the next canto is its match. Here, Dante let his “great, grieved heart” have its way for once, and every line that he wrote about these glorious friends of God throbs with passionate veneration. Brothers in heart they were on earth, and he sees them not separated in Heaven. How one wishes that he had left us, in the two lines that are all he needs to paint an immortal picture, a description of their first meeting in the Church of St. John Lateran!

For it was there that they met. St. Dominic had had a strange dream the night before, in which he beheld the Saviour preparing to smite and exterminate the wicked—the proud, the voluptuaries, the misers; but His Blessed Mother suddenly appeared, and stayed His wrath by presenting to Him two monks: one was Dominic himself; the other, a poor holy man clothed in rags, whom he had never seen. Greatly exercised in soul, he went to the Lateran Church in the morning to ask for light and guidance. As he entered his eyes fell on a ragged mendicant who was praying so fervently that his face was all aflame with love and joy. It was the face Dominic had seen in his dream. He rushed to Francis and clasped him in his arms, exclaiming: “Thou art my comrade and my brother! We run one race, we pant for the same goal. Let us be united henceforth, and no enemy can conquer us!”

And so it was. These two suns of warmth and light, as Dante calls them, founded each his own great spiritual family, worked wherever their beloved Master sent them, in separate fields, but from that morning moment in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano to the end of their blessed lives they were, as the old chronicle says, “One heart and one soul in God.”

Of the riches and glories of the Lateran Basilica and the Lateran Palace it is not for me to write. The mere lists of them occupy whole chapters in the guidebooks and even there they have to be much boiled down, often only a word or two indicating objects and places of paramount interest to Catholic travellers; and these slighting mentions are defaced for us, even in such valuable and sweet-minded works as Augustus Hare’s “Walks in Rome,” by a question mark or an exclamation mark, intended to denote ridicule, inserted after the word “miracle” or “relic,” to show that the writer was anxious to be exonerated from any suspicion of sharing the pious beliefs of devout persons on such subjects. I have seen one or two Catholic guidebooks to Rome, but they were meagre and unsatisfactory, more pamphlets than books. If a really good modern one exists, I should be grateful to any reader who would tell me about it.

There are some very ancient ones indeed, compiled between the Seventh and the Tenth centuries, which were apparently well known and readily available for the pilgrims of the age of Faith, although, so far as I know, there are but very few copies of any of them in existence now. They are called the “Salzburg,” the “Einsiedeln,” and the “Malmesbury” guides, and must make interesting reading not only for their own sake, but on account of the actual descriptions of the city which has undergone so many changes and revolutions of its topography during the last thousand years of its history. The changes of the last fifty years have been perhaps the most surprising of all, considering that they were not brought about by the time-honoured means of war and pillage, but forced upon Rome under the comprehensive but sometimes mendacious name of “improvements.” There was plenty of room for improvements, and where these have been genuine nobody would wish to quarrel with them, although even some of them were not needed, as claimed, for the health of the city. The Ghetto, for instance, was an eyesore—and looked, with its squalid crowds of rag-pickers and old-clothes dealers, as if it must be a hot-bed of disease. It was precisely the contrary. When the old pestilence or the new cholera were carrying off many hundreds a day in the better parts of the city, there was not a single case in the Ghetto. My brother points out, in “Ave, Roma Immortalis,” that the regulation confining them to that tiny district, from the gates of which they might not issue after dark, though intended as a measure of repression, was really a great advantage to them, in that behind those gates they were protected from robbery and violence and governed themselves according to their own queer laws without any interference from the municipal authorities. Certain industries they monopolised altogether. I remember that whenever a new carpet was to be put down in my mother’s house, Lucia, the housekeeper, would send one of her underlings to summon “la Giudea” to sew it—and fierce old Lucia would never have let a Jewess cross the threshold had she been able to find a Christian to undertake the task! I was always glad when this happened, for Lucia’s particular Jewess was a most cheery, sociable soul, who would sit on the hard stone floor all day making her huge needle fly in and out of the heavy carpet-stuff, and look up and shake her black ringlets and greet me with the merriest of smiles every time I passed through the room. Not only such coarse work, but all the finest of darning was entrusted to her. Some disastrous rent in new broad-cloth—“un sette” as the Italians call it, because it always outlines the figure seven—would come back from her dark thin hands so deftly mended that it was difficult to find the place; did some careless guest drop a lighted cigarette on one of the satiny damask table-cloths—quick, send it to the Giudea and the Signora herself may forget that it ever was burnt! Darning and patching came to the women naturally, I suppose, seeing that the chief industry of the Ghetto consists in mending old clothes and selling them for new. Pius IX set the Jews free from all the old humiliating restrictions of their life in Rome, but until the Ghetto was swept away by the present Government, they clung to it tenaciously, and no wonder, for it was their very own, a little fortress of Jewry where no Christian ever came to disturb them, either at work or worship.

With the inherited aversion and all the old traditions strong in us, we children of Rome never set foot there more than once or twice in all our lives. Our home was at the other end of the city, on the noble heights of the Esquiline, and almost all that we loved best grouped itself in that quarter. I have the most delightful recollections of the walk from Santa Maria Maggiore, our own Church, to the great free spaces round the Lateran. The last part of the way led through the Via San Giovanni, on the right side of which were scarcely any buildings at all, but only a long wall overhung, in the late spring, with masses of yellow Banksia roses, their trailing wreaths hanging so near our heads that we had but to spring and snatch to carry away big handfuls of the flowers, and what flowers! Yard-long arcs of ruffled honey tossed up against that Roman blue, every petal of the million a wing of translucent gold in sun and breeze; no stem, no foliage visible through the crowded blooms, except where the trailers tapered to the last tiny cluster of unopened buds, set like yellow pearls in the green calix, tapered to a point so delicate that the faintest breath would set them waving and quivering as if mad to burst their bonds and flutter in the sunshine like the rest. And their perfume, that perfume of warm wax, the purest and sweetest in this world, filled the whole street—not altogether honestly perhaps, for, by a rare harmony of the eternal fitness of things, the long wall on which they grew sheltered, in the middle of a beautiful garden, a wax factory where Church candles of every size were made, from the four-foot pillar, painted like a missal, that serves for the Paschal candle in Church, to the slim taper that the poorest could buy to light before the picture of their patron saint. It was worth while to be young, with every sense unspoiled, and to go dancing along that road on a summer afternoon; to stop where a low gateway led into the hidden garden and buy from the gardener’s wife some of her fat bunches of red carnations and lavender, for the sake of the Blessed St. John, whose especial flowers they are—also the cones of lavender made by tying a bundle just below the flowers, then turning the stalks back over these and tying them again to form an egg-shaped casket from which nothing could escape, and within which the flowers themselves could crumble to fragrant dust that would keep your linen sweet for at least ten years from the day they were gathered. We never felt the summer had really come till the 24th of June, when the Feast of John the Baptist was kept in and around the Church of St. John the Evangelist. On the eve the Piazza was always the scene of a great fair, the only one held in Rome, during the whole year, except that of the “Befana”[14] in the heart of winter, on the eve of the Epiphany. Of course the “Eve of St. John” is the midsummer eve that was regarded with special and superstitious veneration not only by the pagans of Southern Europe, but by our own Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors as well, from the times of the Druids themselves; for all it has been the festival of fire—because, I imagine, people wanted to scare away the dead who are supposed to leave their graves and. revisit their old haunts on that night, but still more, in the beginning of man-made worships, to render homage to the sun at the moment of his supreme triumph during those two or three days of midsummer. The bonfires were the great feature of the Roman fair; scores of them were lighted in the broad Piazza, and the boys and young men chased each other through them, trying to clear the flames at a leap and screaming out unintelligible old songs that probably served their ancestors for charms. The Feast of St. John is the first day on which it is considered safe to eat fresh figs, and the booths around the Piazza were piled up with baskets of these. We used to get the big purple ones, bursting with crimson syrup, some weeks earlier, but the Romans do not consider them as real figs. They are called “Fior di fico”; the pale green sort, with firm rose-coloured pulp and holding each its drop of amber gum on the tip, is the real fig, and it stays with us right through the summer. In Tuscany I used to climb into a fig tree (their smooth bark and fat low branches afford delightful seats) and stay there half the day, with a book, eating all I could desire of the ripe fruit and quite forgetting the feast when dinner time came. But when I was young the word “dyspepsia” had not crossed the Atlantic, and it had never dawned on any of us that any one could possibly be upset by such a trifle as mere food, whatever the kind or quantity indulged in! Once, I remember, our faithful “O StÉ” of Rocca di Papa was terribly concerned because Marion, aged eight, whom he had conducted to the Fair at Grotia Ferrata, had eaten, as the old man thought, a little too voraciously. “The Signorino has frightened me,” he said tremblingly to our governess as he restored the youngster to her in the evening. “Twelve eggs and half a sucking pig he consumed for his dinner—I could not stop him—but I pray that he may come to no harm!”

That excursion must have been made for the Feast of Sant’ Antonio, our Blessed Saint Anthony of Padua, for, as it falls on the 13th of June, it is the occasion of the sale of the first piglings of the season, and everybody makes it a point of honour to eat roast sucking pig on that day, unless he buys the little pinky white thing to fatten for the winter. This is why, in some of the representations of St. Anthony, there is a little pig lying at his feet. I saw a funny sight in Sorrento once on the day of his feast. There were baby pigs for sale everywhere, all along the deep lanes that intersect the Penisola, and a young seminarist, in ecclesiastical hat and soutane, had made up his mind to take one home as a present to his family. Anxiously he looked at and felt of a dozen or so before he made his choice; then came the bargaining for the price—half the fun to both buyer and seller. The boy was of the country and knew just what he ought to pay; the owner, seeing his costume, had taken him for a greenhorn and tried to impose upon him; the duel was long and vivacious. At last the matter was settled, the right sum paid, and then the seminarist undertook to carry his fairing home. But the pig refused to go, and a much more amusing duel than the first one took place before my eyes, the little pig slipping away from its would-be captor’s hands and scuttling off in a cloud of dust down the lane, the seminarist in pursuit, his soutane flying, his three-cornered hat pushed back, his round young face crimson with excitement, while the man who had sold him the animal looked on in roars of laughter. Finally the pig was conquered, and the last I saw of him was his wriggling hindquarters and curled-up tail protruding from the folds of the cassock in which the boy had rolled him up and tucked him under his arm, while he raced for home, triumphant, yet fearful that the obstinate little beast would get the best of him on the road.

One interest that generally came with the spring and early summer was that of making the round of the studios, where the artists let their friends look at the result of the year’s work before leaving town on their vacation wanderings. Sometimes the studio and its surroundings were more attractive than the productions it contained and then it required some self-control to keep one’s eye, under the jealous observation of the artist, on the canvases or the statues, instead of on the view from the windows or the beautiful draperies and curios which the wealthiest ones were even then beginning to collect around them. This has always seemed to me to be a mistake. The old idea was that the artist’s workshop should contain nothing unconnected with his work or at any rate contributive to it. On entering the studio of a modern successful artist one has to pinch oneself to make sure one is not in a bric-À-brac establishment where spoils from all the curiosity shops in Europe have been tumbled together in view of a quick sale. There is none of the impressive space and concentration of purpose that one felt in the old ascetic studio with its hard north light, its aged painting table, its few seriously thought-out pictures, and its shoals of preparatory drawings and sketches. There were no “studio teas” in those days; the artist opened the door himself and told one frankly whether the visit were well-timed or not; if he were prosperous his one familiar, some humble “Giuseppe” or “Antonio,” came in at the end of the day to wash the brushes and perhaps sweep the floor; most of the time there were no chairs except one for the model and one for the painter. But the atmosphere of work was there, and the respect for it struck every one who crossed the threshold, so that voices were lowered and even the most enthusiastic admiration very soberly expressed.

I always felt like an ignorant intruder when I had penetrated into one of these sanctuaries, but there were some from which I could not keep away. One belonged to HÉbert, the then president of the French Academy in Rome. He was a grave, dark-eyed man with a low voice and much indulgence for youth and ignorance, and he never asked one for comments or ideas—just let one stand before his glowing paintings and dream—as his Madonnas seemed to dream—in silent happiness. Not that his superb Armenian beauties were really Madonnas at all; their loveliness was mysterious but not spiritual; the unfathomable eyes had seen all the glory and the tragedy of earth, but they had never looked on Heaven; the glowing cheeks had never paled with awe, the exquisite idle hands could never have been folded in prayer. It was perfect beauty, but beauty unbaptised, a type which might have served for a Cleopatra, could Cleopatra have lived without sin, but never for Mary of Nazareth.

One year, I remember, HÉbert had devoted all his time to one great allegorical canvas, the Shunamite of the Canticle seeking news of her Beloved from the maidens by the gate. The faint eastern dawn was paling the sky and bringing out mistily a few features of the city in the background, as a train of girls who had been to fetch water were returning from the well. They were human girls, and had been chattering gaily as they approached the gate; then the words died on their lips, the foremost ones fell back, crowding those behind, for they were met by the Shunamite, a maid in all the white beauty of first youth, undraped, naked as truth, and pure as Eve on the morning of her creation, her eyes shining with love through brimming tears, and her hands stretched out entreatingly as she asked, “Have ye seen my Beloved, ye daughters of Jerusalem?”

It was a strange picture; the thought was the same that Titian expressed in his “Divine and Earthly Love,” which is, to me, the most beautiful of his paintings. HÉbert had got away from his own gorgeous traditions altogether and had painted with true inspiration. The girl’s body was like a slender reed of flame, just hovering on earth before rising to Heaven.

There was every year an exhibition, at the French Academy, of the work of the students, who, having won the “Prix de Rome” in Paris, were privileged to study in Rome for three years at the expense of the French Government. Unfortunately for the attractiveness of the exhibition, it was incumbent on the students to introduce one or more nude figures into their paintings to show what progress they were making in anatomical drawing. The more zealous ones would sometimes cover a fifteen-foot canvas with a crowd of nude warriors in every stress of effort that the most violent conflict could call forth, the copious bloodshed depicted demonstrating, to a thoughtful mind, the young painter’s feelings towards the strict and exigent judges who were to pronounce upon his merits. I remember a “Rape of the Sabines,” where some rather dandified Roman robbers were taking no end of trouble to possess themselves of a mob of huge, beefy viragos who were kicking and struggling with all their might—creatures whom no practical man would attempt for a moment to bring into his home.

But, once free from the drill of training, the French painters of those days gave us some very charming and poetical productions. One of my favourite artists was Hamon, a man whose fancies were usually as delicate and elusive as thistledown floating on a moonbeam. He saw everything through dawnlight or twilight; his nymphs and loves, hovering over flowers, painting the morning-glories, sowing white stars for lilies and golden ones for honeysuckles, were too ethereal to be quite human, too alluring to be all spiritual—but exquisite beyond words. Yet he too painted one serious picture which, once seen, could never be forgotten. It was called “Le triste Rivage.” In the foreground rolled the inky Styx, with Charon, sitting, dark and saturninely indifferent, in his skiff, oars shipped ready to put out as soon as the craft should be full. And to it, down a narrow canyon between high granite walls, pressed a stream of humanity, old men and youths, kings and pontiffs and beggars, mothers with their babies in their arms, young beauties in all the pomp of silk and pearls, sages with calm sapient eyes, and naked criminals dragging their chains, not one conscious of any presence but his own—the awful loneliness of death stamped on every face—yet all crowding and pushing forward to the narrow beach and the waiting boat—every eye strained to catch some glimpse of the land that lay, shrouded in darkness, on the other side. It made one think.

Talking of pictures, I must speak of one that my sister and I saw in Munich or Dresden, in 1867, I think, a year which was considered remarkably rich in good modern exhibitions abroad—where, by the way, the average was immeasurably higher than I ever found it at the Academy shows in London. This that we fell in love with was a painting of a Sphinx—a great white marble creature with globed breasts and a face of bestial beauty, cold as ice. She crouched on her high pedestal in a tangle of white roses flooded with moonlight. A young man, little more than a boy, was falling back from her, his ashy face, sublime in death, still transfigured with the mortal ecstasy of her kiss; and her pitiless marble talons were yet clutching his body. I wish I could remember the name of the painter. He must have been a true poet.