Old Calabria Part 9

The flying monk resembles Saint Francis in more than one feature. He, too, removed his clothes and even his s.h.i.+rt, and exposed himself thus to a crucifix, exclaiming, "Here I am, Lord, deprived of everything." He followed his prototype, further, in that charming custom of introducing the animal world into his ordinary talk ("Brother Wolf, Sister Swallow,"

etc.). So Joseph used to speak of himself as _l'asinelio--_the little a.s.s; and a pathetic scene was witnessed on his death-bed when he was heard to mutter: "_L'asinelio_ begins to climb the mountain; _l'asinelio_ is half-way up; _l'asinelio_ has reached the summit; _l'asinelio_ can go no further, and is about to leave his skin behind."

It is to be noted, in this connection, that Saint Joseph of Coper-tino was born in a stable.

This looks like more than a mere coincidence. For the divine Saint Francis was likewise born in a stable.

But why should either of these holy men be born in stables?

A reasonable explanation lies at hand. A certain j.a.panese statesman is credited with that shrewd remark that the manifold excellencies and diversities of h.e.l.lenic art are due to the fact that the Greeks had no "old masters" to copy from--no "schools" which supplied their imagination with ready-made models that limit and smother individual initiative. And one marvels to think into what exotic beauties these southern saints would have blossomed, had they been at liberty, like those Greeks, freely to indulge their versatile genius--had they not been bound to the wheels of inexorable precedent. If the flying monk, for example, were an ordinary mortal, there was nothing to prevent him from being born in an omnibus or some other of the thousand odd places where ordinary mortals occasionally are born. But--no! As a Franciscan saint, he was obliged to conform to the school of Bethlehem and a.s.sisi.

He was obliged to select a stable. Such is the force of tradition. . . .

Joseph of Copertino lived during the time of the Spanish viceroys, and his fame spread not only over all Italy, but to France, Germany and Poland. Among his intimates and admirers were no fewer than eight cardinals, Prince Leopold of Tuscany, the Duke of Bouillon, Isabella of Austria, the Infanta Maria of Savoy and the Duke of Brunswick, who, during a visit to various courts of Europe in 1649, purposely went to a.s.sisi to see him, and was there converted from the Lutheran heresy by the spectacle of one of his flights. Prince Casimir, heir to the throne of Poland, was his particular friend, and kept up a correspondence with him after the death of his father and his own succession to the throne.

Towards the close of his life, the flying monk became so celebrated that his superiors were obliged to shut him up in the convent of Osimo, in close confinement, in order that his aerial voyages "should not be disturbed by the concourse of the vulgar." And here he expired, in his sixty-first year, on the 18th September, 1663. He had been suffering and infirm for some little time previous to that event, but managed to take a short flight on the very day preceding his demise.

Forthwith the evidences of his miraculous deeds were collected and submitted to the inspired examination of the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. Their conscientiousness in sifting and weighing the depositions is sufficiently attested by the fact that ninety years were allowed to elapse ere Joseph of Copertino was solemnly received into the number of the Blessed. This occurred in 1753; and though the date may have been accidentally chosen, some people will be inclined to detect the hand of Providence in the ordering of the event, as a challenge to Voltaire, who was just then disquieting Europe with certain doctrines of a pernicious nature.

XI

BY THE INLAND SEA

The railway line to Grottaglie skirts the sh.o.r.e of the inland sea for two or three miles, and then turns away. Old Taranto glimmers in lordly fas.h.i.+on across the tranquil waters; a sense of immemorial culture pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.

They led me, at Grottaglie, to the only convent of males now in use, San Francesco, recently acquired by the Jesuits. In the sacristy of its church, where I was told to wait, a slender young priest was praying rapturously before some image, and the clock that stood at hand recorded the flight of twenty minutes ere his devotions were ended. Then he arose slowly and turned upon me a pair of l.u.s.trous, dreamy eyes, as though awakened from another world.

This was quite a new convent, he explained; it could not possibly be the one I was seeking. But there was another one, almost a ruin, and now converted into a refuge for a flock of poor old women; he would gladly show me the way. Was I a "Germanese"? [Footnote: _Germanese_ or _Allemanno = a_ German. _Tedesco,_ hereabouts, signifies an Austrian--a detested nationality, even at this distance of time. I have wondered, since writing the above, whether this is really the place of which Rossi speaks. He calls it Grottole (the difference in spelling would be of little account), and says it lies not far distant from Copertino. But there may be a place of this name still nearer; it is a common appellation in these honeycombed limestone districts. This Grottaglie _is_ certainly the birth-place of another religious hero, the priest-brigand Ciro, who gave so much trouble to Sir R. Church.] No, I replied; I came from Scotland.

"A Calvinist," he remarked, without bitterness.

"A Presbyterian," I gently corrected.

"To be sure--a Presbyterian."

As we walked along the street under the glowing beams of midday I set forth the object of my visit. He had never heard of the flying monk--it was astonis.h.i.+ng, he said. He would look up the subject without delay.

The flying monk! That a Protestant should come all the way from "the other end of the world" to enquire about a local Catholic saint of whose existence he himself was unaware, seemed not so much to surprise as positively to alarm him.

Among other local curiosities, he pointed out the portal of the parish church, a fine but dilapidated piece of work, with a large rosette window overhead. The town, he told me, derives its name from certain large grottoes wherein the inhabitants used to take refuge during Saracen raids. This I already knew, from the pages of Swinburne and Sanchez; and in my turn was able to inform him that a certain Frenchman, Bertaux by name, had written about the Byzantine wall-paintings within these caves. Yes, those old Greeks! he said. And that accounted for the famous ceramics of the place, which preserved the h.e.l.lenic traditions in extraordinary purity. I did not inform him that Hector Preconi, who purposely visited Grottaglie to study these potteries, was considerably disappointed.

At the door of the decayed convent my guide left me, with sundry polite expressions of esteem. I entered a s.p.a.cious open courtyard; a well stood in the centre of a bare enclosure whereon, in olden days, the monks may have cultivated their fruit and vegetables; round this court there ran an arched pa.s.sage, its walls adorned with frescoes, now dim and faded, depicting sacred subjects. The monastery itself was a sombre maze of stairways and cells and corridors--all the free s.p.a.ces, including the very roof, enc.u.mbered with gleaming potteries of every shape and size, that are made somewhere near the premises.

I wandered about this sunless and cobwebby labyrinth, the old woman pensioners flitting round me like bats in the twilight. I peered into many dark closets; which of them was it--Joseph's famous blood-bespattered cell?

"He tormented his body so continuously and obstinately with pins, needles and blades of steel, and with such effusion of blood, that even now, after entire years, the walls of his cell and other places of retirement are discoloured and actually encrusted with blood." Which of them was it--the chamber that witnessed these atrocious macerations? It was all so gloomy and forlorn.

Then, pus.h.i.+ng aside a door in these tenebrous regions, I suddenly found myself bathed in dazzling light. A loggia opened here, with a view over stretches of gnarled olives, s.h.i.+ning all silvery under the immaculate sky of noonday and bounded by the sapphire belt of the Ionian. Suns.h.i.+ne and blue sea! Often must the monks have taken pleasure in this fair prospect; and the wiser among them, watching the labourers returning home at nightfall, the children at play, and all the happy life of a world so alien to their own, may well have heaved a sigh.

Meanwhile a crowd of citizens had a.s.sembled below, attracted by the unusual novelty of a stranger in their town. The simple creatures appeared to regard my investigations in the light of a good joke; they had heard of begging monks, and thieving monks, and monks of another variety whose peculiarities I dare not attempt to describe; but a flying monk--no, never!

"The Dark Ages," said one of them--the mayor, I dare say--with an air of grave authority. "Believe me, dear sir, the days of such fabulous monsters are over."

So they seem to be, for the present.

No picture or statue records the life of this flying wonder, this masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet--in this land of commemorative stones--has been erected to perpetuate the glory of his signal achievements; no street is called after him. It is as if he had never existed. On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway leading past his convent evokes the memory of a misty heathen poet, likewise native of these favoured regions, a man whose name Joseph of Copertino had a.s.suredly never heard--Ennius, of whom I can now recall nothing save that one unforgettable line which begins "O t.i.te tute Tati tibi----"; Ennius, who never so much as tried to fly, but contented himself with singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.

_Via Ennio. . . ._

It is the swing of the pendulum. The old pagan, at this moment, may be nearer to our ideals and aspirations than the flying monk who died only yesterday, so to speak.

But a few years hence--who can tell?

A characteristic episode. I had carefully timed myself to catch the returning train to Tarante. Great was my surprise when, half-way to the station, I perceived the train swiftly approaching. I raced it, and managed to jump into a carriage just as it drew out of the station. The guard straightway demanded my ticket and a fine for entering the train without one (return tickets, for weighty reasons of "internal administration," are not sold). I looked at my watch, which showed that we had left six minutes before the scheduled hour. He produced his; it coincided with my own. "No matter," he said. "I am not responsible for the eccentricities of the driver, who probably had some urgent private affairs to settle at Taranto. The fine must be paid." A fellow-pa.s.senger took a more charitable view of the case. He suggested that an inspector of the line had been travelling along with us, and that the driver, knowing this, was naturally ambitious to show how fast he could go.

A mile or so before reaching Tarante the railway crosses a stream that flows into the inland sea. One would be glad to believe those sages who hold it to be the far-famed Galaesus. It rises near at hand in a marsh, amid mighty tufts of reeds and odorous flowers, and the liquid bubbles up in pools of crystalline transparency--deep and perfidious cauldrons overhung by the trembling soil on which you stand. These fountains form a respectable stream some four hundred yards in length; another copious spring rises up in the sea near its mouth. But can this be the river whose virtues are extolled by: Virgil, Horace, Martial, Statius, Propertius, Strabo, Pliny, Varr and Coramella? What a constellation of names around these short-lived waters! Truly, _minuit praesentia famam,_ as Boccaccio says of the once-renowned Sebethus.

Often have I visited this site and tried to reconstruct its vanished glories. My enthusiasm even led me, some years ago, to the town hall, in order to ascertain its true official name, and here they informed me that "it is vulgarly called Citrezze; but the correct version is 'Le Giadrezze,' which, as you are aware, sir, signifies _pleasantness"_ This functionary was evidently ignorant of the fact that so long ago as 1771 the learned commentator (Carducci) of the "Delizie Tarentine"

already sneered at this popular etymology; adding, what is of greater interest, that "in the time of our fathers" this region was covered with woods and rich in game. In the days of Keppel Craven, the vale was "scantily cultivated with cotton." Looking at it from above, it certainly resembles an old river-bed of about five hundred yards in breadth, and I hold it possible that the deforestation of the higher lands may have suffocated the original sources with soil carried down from thence, and forced them to seek a lower level, thus shortening the stream and reducing its volume of water.

But who shall decide? If we follow Polybius, another brook at the further end of the inland sea has more valid claims to the t.i.tle of Galaesus. Virgil called it "black Galaesus "--a curious epithet, still applied to water in Italy as well as in Greece (Mavromati, etc.). "For me," says Gissing, "the Galaesus is the stream I found and tracked, whose waters I heard mingle with the little sea." There is something to be said for such an att.i.tude, on the part of a dilettante traveller, towards these desperate antiquarian controversies.

It is an agreeable promenade from the Giadrezze rivulet to Taranto along the sh.o.r.e of this inland sea. Its clay banks are full of sh.e.l.ls and potteries of every age, and the shallow waters planted with stakes indicating the places where myriads of oysters and mussels are bred--indeed, if you look at a map you will observe that the whole of this lagoon, as though to shadow forth its signification, is split up into two basins like an opened oyster.

Here and there along this beach are fishermen's huts constructed of tree-stems which are smothered under mult.i.tudinous ropes of gra.s.s, ropes of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly fresh, others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay. There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted sh.o.r.e; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew the ground; a few stakes emerge, hard by, out of the placid and oozy waters.

In such a cabin, methinks, dwelt those two old fishermen of Theocritus--here they lived and slumbered side by side on a couch of sea moss, among the rude implements of their craft.

The habits of these fisherfolk are antique, because the incidents of their calling have remained unchanged. Some people have detected traces of "Greek" in the looks and language of these of Tarante. I can detect nothing of the kind.

And the same with the rest of the population. h.e.l.lenic traits have disappeared from Tarante, as well they may have done, when one remembers its history. It was completely latinized under Augustus, and though Byzantines came hither under Nicephorus Phocas--Benjamin of Tudela says the inhabitants are "Greeks"--they have long ago become merged into the Italian element. Only the barbers seem to have preserved something of the old traditions: grandiloquent and terrible talkers, like the cooks in Athenasus.

I witnessed an Aristophanic scene in one of their shops lately, when a simple-minded stranger, a north Italian--some a.r.s.enal official--brought a little boy to have his hair cut "not too short" and, on returning from a brief visit to the tobacconist next door, found it cropped much closer than he liked.

"But, d.a.m.n it," he said (or words to that effect), "I told you not to cut the hair too short."

The barber, immaculate and imperturbable, gave a preliminary bow. He was collecting his thoughts, and his breath.

"I say, I told you not to cut it too short. It looks horrible----"

"Horrible? That, sir--pardon my frankness!--is a matter of opinion. I fully admit that you desired the child's hair to be cut not too short.

Those, in fact, were your very words. Notwithstanding, I venture to think you will come round to my point of view, on due reflection, like most of my esteemed customers. In the first place, there is the ethnological aspect of the question. You are doubtless sufficiently versed in history to know that under the late regime it was considered improper, if not criminal, to wear a moustache. Well, nowadays we think differently. Which proves that fas.h.i.+ons change; yes, they change, sir; and the wise man bends to them--up to a certain point, of course; up to a certain reasonable point----" "But, d.a.m.n it----"

"And in favour of my contention that hair should be worn short nowadays, I need only cite the case of His Majesty the King, whose august head, we all know, is clipped like that of a racehorse. Horrible (as you call it) or not, the system has momentarily the approval of royalty, and that alone should suffice for all loyal subjects to deem it not unworthy of imitation. Next, there are what one might describe as hygienic and climatic considerations. Summer is approaching, sir, and apart from certain unpleasant risks which I need not specify, you will surely agree with me that the solst.i.tial heat is a needlessly severe trial for a boy with long hair. My own children are all cropped close, and I have reason to think they are grateful for it. Why not yours? Boys may differ in strength or complexion, in moral character and mental attainments, but they are remarkably unanimous as to what const.i.tutes personal comfort.

And it is obviously the duty of parents to consult the personal comfort of their offspring--within certain reasonable limits, of course----"

"But----"

"Lastly, we come to the much-debated point: I mean the aesthetic side of the matter. No doubt, to judge by some old pictures such as those of the renowned Mantegna, there must have been a time when men thought long hair in children rather beautiful than otherwise. And I am not so rigorous as to deny a certain charm to these portraits--a charm which is largely due I fancy, to the becoming costumes of the period. At the same time----"