Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests of Stone-pine—Smiles and Tears—The Need of a Little Misfortune—Monte Gargano—Millions of Spanish Merinos—PrimÆval Forest—A Forest Miracle—Church of the Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions of the Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden” Fortress of France.
The real life of the Adriatic coast seems to diminish visibly when one leaves Venice and drops down towards Ravenna; it has been drawn away inland to busy cities that turn their backs on the sea, and the sea itself has sullenly withdrawn, leaving ancient ports empty and useless, like stranded wrecks that will never feel the leap of the waves beneath their keels again. One should visit Ravenna either in the heyday of irrepressible youth or much later in life when twilight is companionable and sympathetic; otherwise, its melancholy is too all-pervading, too depressing to be healthy. It is a city of ghosts, big-eyed, hard-featured Byzantine ghosts; the great mosaics are full of their portraits, and, with all the beauty of gold and colour, there is something sinister and deathly in those tall straight figures, stiff of gesture, rapacious of eye—likenesses caught unawares of people who in their hearts prized power and wealth above all other things in this life or the next.
I do not think any one Italian-born can feel much more than judicial admiration of the severe early architecture, perfect though it be. The sharp square outlines, the sulky red—that might be rosso antico, so little has it yielded in tint or surface to the touch of Time,—all this, to me, seems misplaced under the dreamy blue of the Italian sky. Within the Churches the long aisles of double-storied arches cramp the spaces where fancy might soar and prayer take wing. They make an impression of narrowness, almost of Puritanism, that stifles emotion and frowns at joy. Of course, all this is rank artistic heresy, or will seem so to the crowd of submissive art experts who tumble over each other in their haste to repeat the dictums of a few famous specialists; but I fancy there are many simple-minded people who will agree with me, all the same. It has always puzzled my own ignorance to understand how anything so un-Italian as the early Byzantine style came to take root and flower successfully on Italian soil. The radiant, light-flooded climate does so much to soften and humanise the alien growth that it buys its pardon for it in the end; but when some enthusiast, thrilled with admiration for what he has seen basking in southern sunshine, undertakes to reproduce it under the cold and lowering English skies, its true character is shown at once. It is all too akin to them. One escapes from the prison gloom of Westminster Cathedral to fly to the Brompton Oratory and sink down in a corner and thank Heaven that St. Philip Neri was a Roman, and that his sons and followers can still give us Churches with big airy domes and broad smooth naves where the light flows free, and transepts that open wide for worshippers and pool up the blessed sunshine like any bay in the Mediterranean.
But there was one point on which Ravenna, in my day at least (for it has suffered since then), yielded the palm to no Mediterranean port—the stately forest of stone-pines that stood like troops at rest, for miles along the shore. The stone-pine is always beautiful, whether as a solitary, striking up, one shaft of grace and strength, against the sky, or as in great companies sunk to the knees in the deep turfy mould that their needles have piled below them in the course of centuries. They grow thus in the South over many a green acre of villa land, sheltering an unending profusion of the delicate wild flowers that thrive in that rich soil. But for real forests of stone-pines you must go further north and skirt the coast. There you will see them in their glory, miles of them together, and, if you are quiet and will listen, you will learn a great deal. For, like the sons of the Prophets, they have secrets of their own that have never been shared with other tribes, secrets that have only been confided to them, and that is why the solitary pine is such a true solitary; he invites no companions from the gregarious world around; towering and alone, he seems to gaze at unseen horizons, to praise the Lord in the murmur of the far-spreading branches that crown the fretted column of his stem; as for Elijah on Mount Carmel, so for him the past and the present and the future blend into one great chord of trusting acceptance that no passing storms can shatter, no warm caress lure from its allegiance.
Have you, in some fleeting moment, caught the opening bars of an air that has haunted you afterwards for years, and then been led to where some great orchestra gave it to you in all its completeness? That was what happened to me when I first stood in the “Pineta” of Viareggio and heard the full-voiced chant of the pines and the sea. I realised that they were part of one another, so to speak, that the whisper of the villa pine in the South is an echo and a greeting, brought by the wind from the family home in the North, where all the secrets of tree music are guarded as in some jealous ancient academy—no outsiders are ever privileged to carry them away! Psalms and marches and dirges, the wild call of the Laga, the C Major of the “Te Deum,” the wail of the De Profundis—the trees overhead and the surges on the shore will let you hear it all, and once heard it can never be forgotten.
It seems strange that Viareggio, the most prosaic and unpicturesque of all the Italian watering-places on the Ligurean shores, should possess this wonder still in its perfection, while the sister forest on the Adriatic side has been forsaken by the sea and devastated both by fire and by the frosts of that terrible winter of 1878-1879. We once abandoned Leghorn and went instead to Viareggio for our September bathing—a great mistake, only made up to us by the drives through the Pineta in the evenings. The discomforts and the ugliness of the town have long since been forgotten—perhaps because the ups and downs of existence have shown me far less bearable ones—and now the most vivid recollection is that of the enchanted air and fragrances of the Pineta. I think it will be so in the next life; if we win through all right, we shall remember nothing of earth but its sweetnesses, and the very wise people refuse to look at anything else, even now! The real philosophers, who are the real Saints, always seem to smile, though sometimes it is through tears. And there is one queer thing about tears—the people who have never wept don’t begin to know even how to smile, much less how to laugh. I am always sorry and frightened for them if they are nice good people, for we all have to pay our little tribute to trouble, our tithe to humanity’s debt; some get it spread all over a lifetime, some all in a moment, and these are the spoiled ones of the nursery on whom I suppose long discipline might have lain too heavily for their courage. I remember one startling case that impressed me very deeply, that of a nice American family—father, mother, and daughters twain—pleasant, harmless, good-looking people with plenty of money and perfect health. I liked being with them, though our views of life were severed as the Poles, mine reaching out to the impossible and sensational (I was very young!), and theirs so satisfied with the comfortable half lights of their own surroundings that they simply could not imagine anything desirable beyond.
One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me about yourself, Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother. “You look just as young as your own daughters. I don’t think you can ever have had a trouble!”
“I never have,” she replied, turning on me her mild, satisfied gaze. “I cannot remember a single sorrow in all my life, not a death in my family, not an hour’s sickness even, amongst us all. We have all, always, had everything we could wish for.”
It was the first time I had ever heard any one say such a thing, and I felt awe-struck and envious. A few months afterwards they all went back to America, at least they started to go. Their ship went down in mid-ocean, and the dear people reached home sooner than they had expected. But, for that sharp short suffering, it is just possible that life and its unending pleasantnesses might have made it hard for them to get to Heaven at all.
There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of “The Rose and the Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick frowned at Prince Giglio and said, “What you need, young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side to it—that bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists on our taking from time to time; the good things, even tiny little ones that we never noticed before, do taste so wonderfully sweet afterwards!
But we were talking of shore forests. There is one, not of pine but beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea.[13] Here a great promontory runs out towards the east, rising into mountains which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides. People call the isolated district (which really belongs to the Province of Molise) Manfredonia, from the name of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of Suabian King Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the Thirteenth Century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in another way and a very effectual one. It was meant to be an island; on the western side the Abruzzi shrinking back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic, withdrawing slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many miles wide—flat, marshy, abominably feverish—as a kind of defensive trench to cut off the Gargano promontory from the rest of Italy, and, as it were, remind it for ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all, but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way. This vast plain (for it stretches far and far past the promontory, towards the south) refuses to nourish a single tree on the few feet of soil which cover the mother-rock, but it provides such splendid food for sheep that, since time immemorial, it has been given up to them. Alphonsus I annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and imported his Spanish merinos with such success that two hundred years later four and a half millions of the beautiful creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on these pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half million graze on them, the sheep are lords and owners of all that ground. During the summer they are led to the mountains, partly for their own sake, partly for that of their keepers, who could not live in the miasma-haunted plains in August and September. In crossing, even by train, the twenty-two miles that separate Foggia from Manfredonia, the traveller is always warned to close the carriage windows; but in October the sheep are all driven back, and for weeks the three great roads that converge towards the flats are just broad ribbons of dust, through which comes the drumming of invisible millions of little hoofs. Along the edges of the yellow cloud phantom figures of shepherds dressed in sheepskins take shape at intervals and disappear again; and the dogs, dear faithful things, fly round and herd up the stragglers and nip at the legs of truants with the noisy joy that even long marches through the scorching plains can never quite suppress.
From every point on those plains Monte Gargano can be seen, raising its peaks against the blue, and clothed down to the very water’s edge in magic beechwoods, homes of light and shadow and flickering gold, musical with song, fragrant with wild flowers, and carpeted with the rich mould that a thousand autumns have spread along its ways. Nothing is ever disturbed on Monte Gargano. But for the sea and the fever-land, the forest would long ago have been cut down, its riches dispersed, its very site perhaps forgotten; but now all stands as it did from the first, and winter and summer have their own way there, and the herdsmen fold their cattle in the deep caves of the hills even as they did fourteen hundred years ago, in the reign of the holy Pope, St. Gelasius, when Heaven’s gates opened one May morning to let through a flash of wings and the gleam of an Archangel’s sword, and the fairest of Gargano’s peaks became Monte Sant’ Angelo.
And this was the way of it. While the rest of Italy was torn with the struggles of rival barbarians, and desolated by the rapacity of men like the Galla who drove his poor captives before him to the feet of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, the peasants of Monte Gargano, safe in their isolation, lived as they live to-day, obscure, contented, minding their own affairs—which are chiefly their own cattle—with all their mind. In that wild place the cattle stray sometimes and it is hard to find them again, and so it happened that on the 8th of May, towards 493, or thereabouts, a young herdsman went climbing into the hills with some companions to look for a valuable steer that he had lost. Having wandered and searched for some time in vain, they were feeling deeply discouraged, when they perceived the creature hopelessly entangled in a thicket of briars at the entrance of a deep cavern. In fear, or irritation, one of the pursuers drew his bow and let fly an arrow at the animal, but, to the man’s amazement, the missile turned in the air and struck him who had shot it. Terrified at this portent, they all fled and did not stop till they reached the town of Sipontum, far below, where they related what had happened to them. Fear fell on the inhabitants, and no one had the courage to go and examine the cavern, though all were consumed with curiosity to know what, or who, it contained. In this dilemma they referred the case to their Bishop, and he replied that he must lay the thing before the Lord, and ordained three days of fasting and prayer for all the population, during which they were to join him in begging that Heaven’s will in the matter might be made clear.
And the petition was granted, for on the third day the great Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop and told him that the portent of the returning arrow was intended to show that he wished to have a sanctuary consecrated in that cave to the glory of God and in honour of the Angels. So immediately the Bishop came forth and, gathering all the people to him, led them, with prayers and chants, into the heart of the hills to the mysterious cavern, and, entering in, they found it hollowed out and disposed in the form of a Church, with all things ready, so that the Bishop at once said Mass there; and from that hour so many wonderful miracles took place on that spot that all men knew certainly that it was greatly favoured by Heaven. And from that day to this it has been a place of holy pilgrimage, where many sinners have been converted, and many afflicted with terrible diseases cured.
The Church celebrates the Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel on Monte Gargano on the 8th of May, but the feast of that spring morning is not the only one in which she commemorates his glorious interventions on her behalf. Far away in the North, another promontory, strangely like that of Monte Gargano, once encircled by forests, too, but now cut off from the land at each return of the tide, the Mont Saint-Michel, stands as the last outpost of France, flinging defiance at its twin peak across the water in Britain. There is something strangely significant in the choice of these two points for the most notable apparitions of the great Archangel, who commands the heavenly hosts and watches with such sublime benignity over the destinies of men. One in the North and one in the South, the great lonely rocks rise sheer from the sea as if set apart as resting-places where the glorious pinions might be folded for a while, and the effulgence of the angelic countenance, too overwhelming for man to bear as it comes straight from the Presence of God, a little tempered and veiled by the mists of sorrowful earth. But one feels, too, that the purity of the lonely rock, the brave song of the wind, the long roll of Atlantic surge, and the chant of Adriatic billows were dear and welcome to the Warrior Angel, who holds our world in his hands as the Creator’s chief Minister, who carries out His mandates, chastising when he must, but so tender to the contrite, so inspiring to the valiant, so royal in protection to the oppressed!
Of all the peaks that bear his name through the length and breadth of Europe none has been more signally his own than this one on the coast of Brittany. The East has its own, in Phrygia, where also the Archangel deigned to manifest his love for us poor mortals by his visible presence, and where the marvel of that love is commemorated under the title of “The Synax of Michael, Prince of the Army and of the other Incorporeal Powers.” The Greeks always give such thunderously full tides to their Friends in Heaven! But I am sure they cannot honour their great protector half so heartily as he has been honoured on the Mont Saint-Michel ever since he touched it and consecrated it for all time, in the Eighth Century. The details that have come down to us of that apparition are somewhat less full than those of the one at Monte Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French Sanctuary, which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable fortress, is connected, right through, with humanity as the lonely shrine of the South has never been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel au PÉril de la Mer”—St. Michael of the Peril of the Sea—and bespeaks the invincible ally of the race that was once the ardent apostle of Christianity and its most valiant champion. It was to St. Aubert that the revelation came, when he was Bishop of Avranches, in the reign of Childebert III. The Archangel appeared to him in his sleep, says the Breviary, and bade him build a Church on the sentinel rock, round which already many pious hermits were gathered to serve God in solitude. Now St. Aubert was a man who reflected much before taking any new step, and he hesitated so long that the Archangel had to repeat his visit three times before he was obeyed—a great encouragement, this, to timid souls!—but then the Saint went to work valiantly enough. The rock was of a strange rounded shape, and he built on its summit a great round Church, as closely resembling the holy cave at Monte Gargano as possible. Then he sent to that place to fetch stones and relics from it, all of which he set with great honour in the newer sanctuary; and when all was done he established and endowed there a monastery of twelve “holy clerks for the perpetual service of the Blessed Archangel.” But Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wished still further to honour St. Michael, so he sent away the clerks and established the Benedictines in their place; and the fame of the Shrine and of the many miracles performed there drew a great concourse of pilgrims from all over the world, especially royal pilgrims, from England and Europe generally, so that when the order of the Knights of St. Michael was instituted, this was their Chapter House. By that time it was already one of the most ancient and one of the few “maiden” fortresses of the realm, and never, until the monarchy succumbed to the Revolution, did a single foe to France succeed in setting foot within its walls. For a thousand years, seven times a day, the praises of God had rang out from it over the sea; for a thousand years the standard of France floated stainless above its battlements. “Monsieur Saint-Michel, Archange, premier Chevalier, qui pour la querelle de Dieu victorieusement batailla contre le dragon” (it is thus that his titles are given in the Institutes of the Order founded in 1469) took care of his own—till France drove him away.
THE END
