Chapter 14
And there is charm and joy to spare on lovely Capri. "Sea-mists are frequent in the early summer mornings, swathing the cliffs of Capri and brooding on the smooth water till the day wind rises," says John Addington Symonds. "Then they disappear like magic, rolling in smoke-wreaths from the surface of the sea, condensing into clouds and climbing the hills like Oceanides in quest of Prometheus, or taking their station on the watch towers of the world as in the chorus of the Nephelai. Such a morning may be chosen for the _giro_ of the island. The Blue Grotto loses nothing of its beauty, but rather gains by contrast, when passing from dense fog you find yourself transported to a world of wavering subaqueous sheen. It is only through the very topmost arch that a boat can glide into this cavern; the arch itself spreads downward through the water so that all the light is transmitted from beneath and colored by the sea. Outside the magic world of pantomime there is nothing to equal these effects of blue and silver.... Numberless are the caves at Capri. The so-called Green Grotto has the beauty of moss agate in its liquid floor; the Red Grotto shows a warmer chord of color; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone, tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones of blue or green from the still deeps beneath.... After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the loggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in front, beautiful by reason of the long fine line descending from Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level, and then gliding up to join the highlands of the north. Now sun and moon begin to mingle: waning and waxing splendors. The cliffs above our heads are still blushing like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, the touch of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and the horizon glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night that Ferdinand of Aragon fled from his capital before the French, with eyes turned ever to the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned from his galley's stern, that melancholy psalm, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain,' and seeing Naples dwindle to a white blot on the purple shore?"
The roses of Capri would form a chapter alone. What walks there are where the air is all fragrance of acacia and rose and orange blossoms! Cascades of roses in riotous luxuriance festoon the old gray stone walls; the pale pink of the early dawn or of a shell by the seashore, the amber of the Banskeia rose, the great golden masses of the Maréchal Niel, their faint yellow gleaming against the deep green leaves of myrtle and frond. The intense glowing scarlet of the gladiolus flames from rocks and roadside, and rosemary and the purple stars of hyacinths garland the ways, until one feels like journeying only in his singing robes. The deep, solemn green of stone pines forms canopies under the sapphire skies, and through their trunks one gazes on the sapphire sea. Is Capri the isle of Epipsychidion?
"Is there now any one that knows What a world of mystery lies deep down in the heart of a rose?"
One walks among these rose-lined lanes, hearing in the very air that exquisite lyric by Louise Chandler Moulton:--
"Roses that briefly live, Joy is your dower; Blest be the Fates that give One perfect hour. And, though too soon you die, In your dust glows Something the passer-by Knows was a Rose."
Monte Cassino is one of the most interesting inland points in Southern Italy,--the monastery lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea. Dante alludes to this in his Paradiso (XXII, XXXVII), and in the prose translation made by that eminent Dantean scholar, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, this assurance of Beatrice to Dante is thus rendered:--
"That mountain on whose slope Cassino is, was of old frequented on its summit by the deluded and ill-disposed people, and I am he who first carried up thither the name of Him who brought to earth the truth which so high exalts us; and such grace shone upon me that I drew away the surrounding villages from the impious worship which seduced the world. Those other fires were all contemplative men, kindled by that heat which brings to birth holy flowers and fruits. Here is Macarius, here is Romuald, here are my brothers, who within the cloisters fixed their feet, and held a steadfast heart. And I to him, 'The affection which thou displayest in speaking with me, and the good semblance which I see and note in all your ardors, have so expanded my confidence as the sun does the rose, when she becomes open so much as she has power to be. Therefore I pray thee, and do thou, father, assure me if I have power to receive so much grace, that I may see thee with uncovered shape.' Whereon he, 'Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where are fulfilled all others and my own. There perfect, mature, and whole is every desire; in that alone is every part there where it always was: for it is not in space, and hath not poles; and our stairway reaches up to it, wherefore thus from thy sight it conceals itself. Far up as there the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch its topmost part when it appeared to him so laden with Angels. But now no one lifts his feet from earth to ascend it; and my rule is remaining as waste of paper. The walls, which used to be an abbey, have become caves; and the cowls are sacks full of bad meal. But heavy usury is not gathered in so greatly against the pleasure of God, as that fruit which makes the heart of monks so foolish. For whatsoever the Church guards is all for the folk that ask it in God's name, not for one's kindred, or for another more vile. The flesh of mortals is so soft that a good beginning suffices not below from the springing of the oak to the forming of the acorn. Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayers and with fasting, and Francis in humility his convent; and if thou lookest at the source of each, and then lookest again whither it has run, thou wilt see dark made of the white. Truly, Jordan turned back, and the sea fleeing when God willed, were more marvellous to behold than succor here."
Dante adds that the company "like a whirlwind gathered itself upward," and that "the sweet lady urged me behind them, with only a sign, up over that stairway; so did her virtue overcome my nature. But never here below, where one mounts and descends naturally, was there motion so rapid that it could be compared unto my wing."
The time was when Dante and Beatrice met, and he "was standing as one who within himself represses the point of his desire, and attempts not to ask, he so fears the too-much." And then he heard: "If thou couldst see, as I do, the charity which burns among us thy thoughts would be expressed. But that thou through waiting mayst not delay thy high end, I will make answer to thee, even to the thought concerning which thou art so regardful."
The vast monastery of Monte Cassino, lying on the crest of a hill nearly two thousand feet above the sea, has one of the most magnificent locations in all Italy. This monastery was founded (in 529 A.D.) by St. Benedict, on the site of an ancient temple to Apollo. Dante alludes to this also in the Paradiso (Canto XX, 11). As seen from below this monastery has the appearance of a vast castle, or fortress. Its location is one of the most magnificent in all Italy. The old entrance was a curious passage cut through solid rock and it is still used for princes and cardinals--no lesser dignitaries being allowed to pass through it--and within the past thirty years a new entrance has been constructed. In the passageway of the mediæval entrance St. Benedict is said to have had his cell, and of recent years the German Benedictines, believing they had located the original cell, had it located, restored, and decorated with Egyptian frescoes. Several of the courts of this convent are connected by beautiful arcades with lofty arches, and adorned with statues, among which are those of St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica. Still farther up the hill, upon the monastery, stands the church which is built on the site of the ancient one that was erected by St. Benedict himself--this present edifice dating back to 1637. Above the portals there is a long inscription in Latin relating the history of the monastery and the church. These portals are solid bronze, beautifully carved, with inlaid tablets of silver on which are inscribed a list of all the treasures of the abbey in the year 1006. The church is very rich in interior decoration of mosaics, rare marbles, and wonderful monumental memorials. Either side of the high altar are monuments to the Prince of Mignano (Guidone Fieramosca) and also to Piero de Medico. Both St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica, are entombed under the high altar, which is one of the most elaborately sculptured in all the churches of Italy.
Among the pictorial decorations of this church are a series of fresco paintings by Luca Giordano, painted in the seventeenth century, representing the miracles wrought by St. Benedict. In the refectory is the "Miracle of the Loaves," by Bassano; and in the chapel below are paintings by Mazzaroppi and Marco da Siena. Nothing can exceed the richness and beauty of the carvings of the choir stalls. These were executed in the seventeenth century by Coliccio.
The library of this monastery is renowned all over Europe--indeed, it is famous all over the world--for its preservation of ancient manuscripts done by the monks. These are carefully treasured in the archives. Among them is the record of a vision that came to the monk Alferic, in the twelfth century, on which it is believed that Dante founded his immortal "Divina Commedia;" there is also a fourteenth-century edition of Dante with margined notes; and the Commentary of Origen (on the Epistle to the Romans), dating back to the sixteenth century; there is the complete series of Papal bulls that were sent to the monastery of Monte Cassino from the eleventh century to the present time, many of them being richly illuminated and decorated with curiously elaborate seals. There is an autograph letter of the Sultan Mohammed II to Pope Nicholas IV, with the Pope's reply,--the theme of the correspondence being the Pope's threat of war. The imperial Mohammed seems to have been in terror of this, and in his epistle he expresses his willingness, and, indeed, his intention, to be converted as soon as he shall visit Rome! Apparently the Holy Father of that day laid little stress on the sincerity of this offer on the part of the Sultan. Here, too, is a wonderful correspondence between Don Erasmo Gattola, the historian of the abbey, and a great number of the celebrated men of his time; and there are hundreds of other letters, manuscripts, and documents relating to kings, nobles, emperors, and many of the nobility of the age.
In this monastery there is a most interesting collection of relics, in bronze, silver, gold, and _rosso antico_. The library proper contains some eleven thousand volumes, dating back to the very dawn of the discovery of the art of printing.
Mr. Longfellow, whose poet's pen has pictured so many of the Italian landscapes and ancient monuments, thus set Monte Cassino to music, picturing the entire landscape of the Terra di Lavoro region:--
"The Land of Labor and the Land of Rest, Where mediæval towns are white on all The hillsides, and where every mountain's crest Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall.
* * * * *
"There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town, Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light Still hovers o'er his birthplace like the crown Of splendor seen o'er cities in the night.
"Doubled the splendor is, that in its streets The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played, And dreamed perhaps the dreams that he repeats In ponderous folios for scholastics made.
"And there, uplifted, like a passing cloud That pauses on a mountain summit high, Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud And venerable walls against the sky.
"Well I remember how on foot I climbed The stony pathway leading to its gate; Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed, Below, the darkening town grew desolate.
* * * * *
"The silence of the place was like a sleep, So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread Was a reverberation from the deep Recesses of the ages that are dead.
"For, more than thirteen centuries ago, Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome, A youth disgusted with its vice and woe, Sought in these mountain solitudes a home.
"He founded here his Convent and his Rule Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer; The pen became a clarion, and his school Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.
* * * * *
"From the high window, I beheld the scene On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,-- The mountains and the valley in the sheen Of the bright sun,--and stood as one amazed.
* * * * *
"The conflict of the Present and the Past, The ideal and the actual in our life, As on a field of battle held me fast, Where this world and the next world were at strife."
The monastery of Monte Cassino entertains, as its guests, for dinner or for a night, all gentlemen who visit it; but there is an alms box on the ancient gate into which the guest is supposed to place whatever contribution he pleases for the poor of the place. The Italian government, in 1866, declared this monastery to be a "Monumento Nazionale," and it is now a famous ecclesiastical school with some two hundred students and a resplendent faculty of fifty learned monks under the direction of the Abbot. Some of the most celebrated prelates in Europe have been educated at Monte Cassino.
Quite near Monte Cassino, as Longfellow depicts in his lines, is Monte Aquino, a picturesque hillside where the "Doctor Angelicus," Thomas Aquinas, was born (in 1224), the son of Count Landulf, in the Castel Roccasecca. He was educated in the monastery, and one finds himself recalling here these lines of Thomas William Parsons, entitled "Turning from Darwin to Thomas Aquinas:"--
"Unless in thought with thee I often live, Angelic doctor! life seems poor to me. What are these bounties, if they only be Such boon as farmers to their servants give? That I am fed, and that mine oxen thrive, That my lambs fatten, that mine hours are free-- These ask my nightly thanks on bended knee; And I do thank Him who hath blest my hive, And made content my herd, my flock, my bee. But, Father! nobler things I ask from Thee. Fishes have sunshine, worms have everything! Are we but apes? Oh! give me, God, to know I am death's master; not a scaffolding, But a true temple where Christ's word could grow."
It was at Aquinum, too, at the foot of Monte Aquino, Juvenal was born. Near the peaks of Monte Cassino and Monte Aquino is that of Monte Cairo, five thousand five hundred feet high, from whose summit one of the finest views of all southern Europe is attained. The Gulf of Gaeta, the valley of San Germano, the wild and romantic mountain region of the Abruzzi and a view, too, of the blue sea are in the panorama, bathed in the opalescent, gleaming lights that often invest the Italian landscape with jewelled splendor.
"I ask myself, Is this a dream? Will it all vanish into air? Is there a land of such supreme And perfect beauty, anywhere?"
It might have been in this pictured dream-region that Hercules came to rest.
"When Heracles, the twelve great labors done, To Calpe came, and there his journey stayed, He raised two pillars toward the evening sun, And carved them by a goddess' subtle aid. Upon their shafts were sacred legends traced, And round the twain a serpent cincture placed: 'T was at this bound the primal world stood still, And of Atlantis dreamed, with baffled will."
But still in unmeasured space, still beyond and afar and unattained, still lost in the unpenetrated realms of the poet's fancy,--
"Atlantis lies beyond the pillars yet!"
_"Here Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles."_
* * * * *
_High o'er the sea-surge and the sands, Like a great galleon wrecked and cast Ashore by storms, thy Castle stands A mouldering landmark of the Past._
_Upon its terrace-walk, I see A phantom gliding to and fro; It is Colonna,--it is she Who lived and loved so long ago._
LONGFELLOW.
_We are the only two that, face to face, Do know each other, as God doth know us both. --O fearless friendship, that held nothing back! O absolute trust, that yielded every key, And flung each curtain up, and drew me on To enter the white temple of thy soul, So vast, so cold, so waste!--and give thee sense Of living warmth, of throbbing tenderness, Of soft dependencies! O faith that made Thee free to seek the spot where my dead hopes Have sepulture, and read above the crypt Deep graven, the tearful legend of my life! There, gloomed with the memorials of my past, Thou once for all didst learn what man accepts Lothly--(how should he else?)--that never woman, Fashioned a woman,--heart, brain, body, soul,-- Ever twice loved._
"_Vittoria Colonna to Michael Angelo._"
MARGARET J. PRESTON.
IV
A PAGE DE CONTI FROM ISCHIA
"Unto my buried lord I give myself."
* * * * *
Michael Angelo! A man that all men honor, and the model That all should follow; one who works and prays, For work is prayer, and consecrates his life To the sublime ideal of his art Till art and life are one.
LONGFELLOW, from "_Michael Angelo; A Fragment_."
In that poetic sail along the Italian coast between Naples and Genoa the voyager feels that it is
"On no earthly sea with transient roar"
that his bark is floating; that
"Unto no earthly airs he trims his sail,"
as he flits along this coast when violet waves dash against a brilliant background of sky. Ischia reveals herself through the blue, transparent air, gleaming with opalescent lights, quivering, fading and flaming again as the afterglow in the east rivals in its coloring the sunset splendors of the west. Is there in the air a faint, lingering echo of the _chant d'amour_ of sirens on the rocky shores? Is Parthenope still to be descried? Gazing upon Ischia there is a rush of romantic impressions as if one were transported into ideal regions of song, before this impression begins to resolve itself into definite remembrance of fact and incident. Surely some exquisite associations in the past had enchanted this island in memory and invested it with the magic light that never was on sea or land. Traditions of beauty; of the lives of scholar and savant and princes of the church; of a court of nobility enriched and adorned by prelate and by poet; traditions, too, of a woman's consecration to an immortal love and the solace of grief by poetic genius and exalted friendships,--all these seem to cling about Ischia in a vague, atmospheric way till memory, still groping backward in the twilight of the richly historic past, suddenly crystallized into recognition that it was Ischia which was the home of Vittoria Colonna, the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance. Lines, long since read, arose like an incantation; and like bars of music, each note of which vibrated in the air, came this fragment of one of her songs:--
"If in these rude and artless songs of mine I never take the file in hand, nor try With curious care and nice, fastidious eye To deck and polish each uncultured line, 'T is that it makes small merit of my name To merit praise....
* * * * *
But it must be that heaven's own gracious gift Which, with its breath, divine, inspires my soul, Strikes forth these sparks unbidden by my will."
Vittoria Colonna was called the most beautiful and gifted woman of her time in all Italy. Her life of nearly sixty years (1490-1547) lay entirely in that period when the apathy of ten centuries was broken, when the darkness fled before the dawning of a glorious day. New methods of thought, revised taste in poetry, new discoveries of science, a nobler progress in criticism, great discoveries, and a lofty and unprecedented freedom of conviction marked the century between 1450 and 1550, stamping it as the marvellous time which we know as the Renaissance, "that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound æsthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type."
It was peculiarly fitting that Italy should take the initiative in inaugurating this _vita nuova_. Italy had a language and literature and art. Dante had delivered his solemn message and Petrarca his impassioned song. Boccaccio had taught the gospel of gladness. Who shall analyze the secret springs of their inspiration and reveal to what degree Ovid and Horace and Virgil influenced the later literature? A new solar system was established by Copernicus. America was discovered. Science entered on her definite and ceaseless progress, and religion and art became significant forces in human life. Printing had been invented and the compass discovered.
Into this time of new forces, when everything was throbbing and pulsating with life, was Vittoria Colonna born into social prestige and splendor. Her father, Fabrizio Colonna, and her mother, Agnesina di Montefeltro, a daughter of the Duke of Urbino, were then domiciled in the castle of Marino, on the Lago d'Albano, a magnificent palace some twelve miles from Rome, in which the Duke d'Amalfi (the father of Fabrizio Colonna) lived, and which is still standing, filled with memorials and relics of historic interest. Urbino, the seat of the Montefeltro, is renowned as having been the birthplace of Raphael, who
"Only drank the precious wine of youth,"
but who
"... lives immortal in the hearts of men, ... and the world is fairer That he lived in it."
The Colonna date back to the eleventh century, and they gave many princes and cardinals to the country. At the close of the thirteenth century they were arrayed against Boniface VIII, the Pope, who accused them of crime, while they disputed the validity of his election to the holy office. In retaliation, the Pope excommunicated the entire family, anathematized them as heretics and declared their estates forfeited to the church. The Colonna, far from being intimidated, commanded three hundred armed horsemen, attacked the papal palace, which they plundered, and made him a prisoner,--an incident referred to by Dante in the "Inferno." The Colonna and the Orsini were also at warfare, and when a member of the former family was elevated to the papacy under the name of Martin V, they despoiled property of the Orsini.