What was it?

I have forgotten!

So we discussed the world, while the music played under the starlit southern night.

It must have been midnight ere a final frenzied galop on the part of the indefatigable band announced the close of the entertainment. I walked a few paces beside the lame "proprietor" who, supported on the arms of his nephews, made his way to the spot where the cabs were waiting—his rheumatism, he explained, obliging him to drive. How he had enjoyed walking as a youth, and what pleasure it would now have given him to protract, during a promenade to my hotel, our delightful conversation! But infirmities teach us to curtail our pleasures, and many things that seem natural to man's bodily configuration are found to be unattainable. He seldom left his rooms; the stairs—the diabolical stairs! Would I at least accept his card and rest assured how gladly he would receive me and do all in his power to make my stay agreeable?

That card has gone the way of numberless others which the traveller in Southern Europe gathers about him. I have also forgotten the old man's name. But the palazzo in which he lived bore a certain historical title which happened to be very familiar to me. I remember wondering how it came to reach Messina.

In the olden days, of course, the days of splendour.

Will they ever return?

It struck me that the sufferings of the survivors would be alleviated if all the sheds in which they are living could be painted white or pearl-grey in order to protect them, as far as possible, from the burning rays of the sun. I mentioned the idea to an overseer.

"We are painting as fast as we can," he replied. "An expensive matter, however. The Villagio Elena alone has cost us, in this respect, twenty thousand francs—with the greatest economy."

This will give some notion of the scale on which things have to be done. The settlement in question contains some two hundred sheds—two hundred out of over ten thousand.

But I was alluding not to these groups of hygienic bungalows erected by public munificence and supplied with schools, laboratories, orphanages, hospitals, and all that can make life endurable, but to the others—those which the refugees built for themselves—ill-contrived hovels, patched together with ropes, potato-sacks, petroleum cans and miscellaneous odds and ends. A coat of whitewash, at least, inside and out. ... I was thinking, too, of those still stranger dwellings, the disused railway trucks which the government has placed at the disposal of homeless families. At many Stations along the line may be seen strings of these picturesque wigwams crowded with poor folk who have installed themselves within, apparently for ever. They are cultivating their favourite flowers and herbs in gaudy rows along the wooden platforms of the carriages; the little children, all dressed in black, play about in the shade underneath. The people will suffer in these narrow tenements under the fierce southern sun, after their cool courtyards and high-vaulted chambers! There will be diseases, too; typhoids from the disturbed drainage and insufficient water-supply; eye troubles, caused by the swarms of flies and tons of accumulated dust. The ruins are also overrun with hordes of mangy cats and dogs which ought to be exterminated without delay.

If, as seems likely, those rudely improvised sheds are to be inhabited indefinitely, we may look forward to an interesting phenomenon, a reversion to a corresponding type of man. The lack of the most ordinary appliances of civilization, such as linen, washing-basins and cooking utensils, will reduce them to the condition of savages who view these things with indifference or simple curiosity; they will forget that they ever had any use for them. And life in these huts where human beings are herded together after the manner of beasts—one might almost say fitted in, like the fragments of a mosaic pavement—cannot but be harmful to the development of growing children.

The Calabrians, I was told, distinguished themselves by unearthly ferocity; Reggio was given over to a legion of fiends that descended from the heights during the week of confusion. "They tore the rings and brooches off the dead," said a young officiai to me. "They strangled the wounded and dying, in order to despoil them more comfortably. Here, and at Messina, the mutilated corpses were past computation; but the Calabrians were the worst."

Vampires, offspring of Night and Chaos.

So Dolomieu, speaking of the depravation incroyable des moeurs which accompanied the earthquake of 1783, recounts the case of a householder of Polistena who was pinned down under some masonry, his legs emerging out of the ruins; his servant came and took the silver buckles off his shoes and then fled, without attempting to free him. We have seen something of this kind more recently at San Francisco.

"After despoiling the corpses, they ransacked the dwellings. Five thousand beds, sir, were carried up from Reggio into the mountains."

"Five thousand beds! Per Dio! It seems a considerable number."

A young fellow, one of the survivors, attached himself to me in the capacity of guide through the ruins of Reggio. He wore the characteristic earthquake look, a dazed and bewildered expression of countenance; he spoke in a singularly deliberate manner. Knowing the country, I was soon bending my steps in the direction of the cemetery, chiefly for the sake of the exquisite view from those windswept heights, and to breathe more freely after the dust and desolation of the lower parts. This burial-ground is in the same state as that of Messina, once the pride of its citizens; the insane frolic of nature has not respected the slumber of the dead or their commemorative shrines; it has made a mockery of the place, twisting the solemn monuments into repulsive and irreverential shapes.

But who can recount the freaks of stone and iron during those moments—the hair-breadth escapes? My companion's case was miraculous enough. Awakened from sleep with the first shock, he saw, by the dim light of the lamp which burns in all their bedrooms, the wall at his bedside weirdly gaping asunder. He darted to reach the opening, but it closed again and caught his arm in a stony grip. Hours seemed to pass—the pain was past enduring; then the kindly cleft yawned once more, allowing him to jump into the garden below. Simultaneously he heard a crash as the inner rooms of the house fell; then climbed aloft, and for four days wandered among the bleak, wet hills. Thousands were in the same plight.

I asked what he found to eat.

"Erba, Signore. We all did. You could not touch property; a single orange, and they would have killed you."

Grass!

He bore a name renowned in the past, but his home being turned into a dust-heap under which his money, papers and furniture, his two parents and brothers, are still lying, he now gains a livelihood by carrying vegetables and fruit from the harbour to the collection of sheds honoured by the name of market. Later in the day we happened to walk past the very mansion, which lies near the quay. "Here is my house and my family," he remarked, indicating, with a gesture of antique resignation, a pile of wreckage.

Hard by, among the ruins, there sat a young woman with dishevelled hair, singing rapturously. "Her husband was crushed to death," he said, "and it unhinged her wits. Strange, is it not, sir? They used to fight like fiends, and now—she sings to him night and day to come back."

Love—so the Greeks fabled—was the child of Chaos.

In this part of the town stands the civic museum, which all readers of Gissing's "Ionian Sea" will remember as the closing note of those harmonious pages. It is shattered, like everything else that he visited in Reggio; like the hotel where he lodged; like the cathedral whose proud superscription Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium impressed him so deeply; like that "singular bit of advanced civilization, which gave me an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who forecast the future—a public slaughter-house of tasteful architecture, set in a grove of lemon trees and palms, suggesting the dreamy ideal of some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism." We went the round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a rope by which the inmates may have tried to let themselves down.

A friend of mine, Baron C—— of Stilo, is a member of that same patriotic family, and gave me the following strange account. He was absent from Reggio at the time of the catastrophe, but three others of them were staying there. On the first shock they rushed together, panic-stricken, into one room; the floor gave way, and they suddenly found themselves sitting in their motor-car which happened to be placed exactly below them. They escaped with a few cuts and bruises.

An inscription on a neighbouring ruin runs to the effect that the mansion having been severely damaged in the earthquake of 1783, its owner had rebuilt it on lines calculated to defy future shattering! Whether he would rebuild it yet again?

Nevertheless, there seems to be some chance for the revival of Reggio; its prognosis is not utterly hopeless.

But Messina is in desperate case.

That haughty sea-front, with its long line of imposing edifices—imagine a painted theatre decoration of cardboard through which some sportive behemoth has been jumping with frantic glee; there you have it. And within, all is desolation; the wreckage reaches to the windows; you must clamber over it as best you can. What an all-absorbing post-tertiary deposit for future generations, for the crafty antiquarian who deciphers the history of mankind out of kitchen-middens and deformed heaps of forgotten trash! The whole social life of the citizens, their arts, domestic economy, and pastimes, lies embedded in that rubbish. "A musical race," he will conclude, observing the number of decayed pianofortes, guitars, and mandolines. The climate of Messina, he will further arene, must have been a wet one, inasmuch as there are umbrellas everywhere, standing upright among the debris, leaning all forlorn against the ruins, or peering dismally from under them. It rained much during those awful days, and umbrellas were at a premium. Yet fifty of them would not have purchased a loaf of bread.

It was Goethe who, speaking of Pompeii, said that of the many catastrophes which have afflicted mankind few have given greater pleasure to posterity. The same will never be said of Messina, whose relics, for the most part, are squalid and mean. The German poet, by the way, visited this town shortly after the disaster of 1783, and describes its zackige Ruinenwueste—words whose very sound is suggestive of shatterings and dislocations. Nevertheless, the place revived again.

But what was 1783?

A mere rehearsal, an amateur performance.

Wandering about in this world of ghosts, I passed the old restaurant where the sword-fish had once tasted so good—an accumulation of stones and mortar—and reached the cathedral. It is laid low, all save the Gargantuan mosaic figures that stare down from behind the altar in futile benediction of Chaos; inane, terrific. This, then, is the house of that feudal lady of the fortiter in re, who sent an earthquake and called it love. Womanlike, she doted on gold and precious stones, and they recovered her fabulous hoard, together with a copy of a Latin letter she sent to the Christians of Messina by the hand of Saint Paul.

And not long afterwards—how came it to pass?—my steps were guided amid that wilderness towards a narrow street containing the ruins of a palazzo that bore, on a tablet over the ample doorway, an inscription which arrested my attention. It was an historical title familiar to me; and forthwith a train of memories, slumbering in the caverns of my mind, was ignited. Yes; there was no doubt about it: the old "proprietor" and his nephews, he of the municipal gardens. . . .

I wondered how they had met their fate, on the chill wintry morning. For assuredly, in that restricted space, not a soul can have escaped alive; the wreckage, hitherto undisturbed, still covered their remains.

And, remembering the old man and his humane converse that evening under the trees, the true meaning of the catastrophe began to disentangle itself from accidental and superficial aspects. For I confess that the massacre of a myriad Chinamen leaves me cool and self-possessed; between such creatures and ourselves there is hardly more than the frail bond of a common descent from the ape; they are altogether too remote for our narrow world-sympathies. I would as soon shed tears over the lost Pleiad. But these others are our spiritual cousins; we have deep roots in this warm soil of Italy, which brought forth a goodly tithe of what is best in our own lives, in our arts and aspirations.

And I thought of the two nephews, their decent limbs all distorted and mangled under a heap of foul rubbish, waiting for a brutal disinterment and a nameless grave. This is no legitimate death, this murderous violation of life. How inconceivably hateful is such a leave-taking, and all that follows after! To picture a fair young body, that divine instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, into some common festering pit of abominations. . . . The Northern type—a mighty bond, again; a tie of blood, this time, between our race and those rulers of the South, whose exploits in this land of orange and myrtle surpassed the dreamings of romance.

Strange to reflect that, without the ephemeral friendship of that evening, Messina of to-day might have represented to my mind a mere spectacle, the hecatomb of its inhabitants extorting little more than a conventional sigh. So it is. The human heart has been constructed on somewhat ungenerous lines. Moralists, if any still exist on earth, may generalize with eloquence from the masses, but our poets have long ago succumbed to the pathos of single happenings; the very angels of Heaven, they say, take more joy in one sinner that repenteth than in a hundred righteous, which, duly apprehended, is only an application of the same illiberal principle.

A rope of bed-sheets knotted together dangled from one of the upper windows, its end swaying in mid-air at the height of the second floor. Many of them do, at Messina: a desperate expedient of escape. Some pots of geranium and cactus, sadly flowering, adorned the other windows, whose glass panes were unbroken. But for the ominous sunlight pouring through them from within, the building looked fairly intact on this outer side. Its ponderous gateway, however, through which I had hoped to enter, was choked up by internal debris, and I was obliged to climb, with some little trouble, to the rear of the house.

If a titanic blade had sheared through the palazzo lengthwise, the thing could not have been done more neatly. The whole interior had gone down, save a portion of the rooms abutting on the street-front; these were literally cut in half, so as to display an ideal section of domestic architecture. The house with its inmates and all it contained was lying among the high-piled wreckage within, under my feet; masonry mostly—entire fragments of wall interspersed with crumbling mortar and convulsed iron girders that writhed over the surface or plunged sullenly into the depths; fetid rents and gullies in between, their flanks affording glimpses of broken vases, candelabras, hats, bottles, birdcages, writing-books, brass pipes, sofas, picture-frames, tablecloths, and all the paltry paraphernalia of everyday life. No attempt at stratification, horizontal, vertical, or inclined; it was as if the objects had been thrown up by some playful volcano and allowed to settle where they pleased. Two immense chiselled blocks of stone—one lying prone at the bottom of a miniature ravine, the other proudly erect, like a Druidical monument, in the upper regions—reminded me of the existence of a staircase, a diabolical staircase.

Looking upwards, I endeavoured to reconstruct the habits of the inmates, but found it impossible, the section that remained being too shallow. Sky-blue seems to have been their favourite colour. The kitchen was easily discernible, the hearth with its store of charcoal underneath, copper vessels hanging in a neat row overhead, and an open cupboard full of household goods; a neighbouring room (the communicating doors were all gone), with lace window-curtains, a table, lamp, and book, and a bedstead toppling over the abyss; another one, carpeted and hung with pictures and a large faded mirror, below which ran a row of shelves that groaned under a multitudinous collection of phials and bottles.

The old man's embrocations. . . .



XXX

THE SKIRTS OF MONTALTO

After such sights of suffering humanity—back to the fields and mountains! Aspromonte, the wild region behind Reggio, was famous, not long ago, for Garibaldi's battle. But the exploits of this warrior have lately been eclipsed by those of the brigand Musolino, who infested the country up to a few years ago, defying the soldiery and police of all Italy. He would still be safe and unharmed had he remained in these fastnesses. But he wandered away, wishful to leave Italy for good and all, and was captured far from his home by some policemen who were looking for another man, and who nearly fainted when he pronounced his name. After a sensational trial, they sentenced him to thirty odd years' imprisonment; he is now languishing in the fortress of Porto Longone on Elba. Whoever has looked into this Spanish citadel will not envy him. Of the lovely little bay, of the loadstone mountain, of the romantic pathway to the hermitage of Monserrato or the glittering beach at Rio—of all the charms of Porto Longone he knows nothing, despite a lengthy residence on the spot.

They say he has grown consumptive and witless during the long solitary confinement which preceded his present punishment—an eternal night in a narrow cell. No wonder. I have seen the condemned on their release from these boxes of masonry at the island of Santo Stefano: dazed shadows, tottering, with complexions the colour of parchment. These are the survivors. But no one asks after the many who die in these dungeons frenzied, or from battering their heads against the wall; no one knows their number save the doctor and the governor, whose lips are sealed. . . .

I decided upon a rear attack of Aspromonte. I would go by rail as far as Bagnara on the Tyrrhenian, the station beyond Scylla of old renown; and thence afoot via Sant' Eufemia [Footnote: Not to be confounded with the railway station on the gulf of that name, near Maida.] to Sinopoli, pushing on, if day permitted, as far as Delianuova, at the foot of the mountain. Early next morning I would climb the summit and descend to the shores of the Ionian, to Bova. It seemed a reasonable programme.

All this Tyrrhenian coast-line is badly shattered; far more so than the southern shore. But the scenery is finer. There is nothing on that side to compare with the views from Nicastro, or Monte-leone, or Sant' Elia near Palmi. It is also more smiling, more fertile, and far less malarious. Not that cultivation of the land implies absence of malaria—nothing is a commoner mistake! The Ionian shore is not malarious because it is desert—it is desert because malarious. The richest tracts in Greece are known to be very dangerous, and it is the same in Italy. Malaria and intensive agriculture go uncommonly well together. The miserable anopheles-mosquito loves the wells that are sunk for the watering of the immense orange and lemon plantations in the Reggio district; it displays a perverse predilection for the minute puddles left by the artificial irrigation of the fields that are covered with fruit and vegetables. This artificial watering, in fact, seems to be partly responsible for the spread of the disease. It is doubtful whether the custom goes back into remote antiquity, for the climate used to be moister and could dispense with these practices. Certain products, once grown in Calabria, no longer thrive there, on account of the increased dryness and lack of rainfall.

But there are some deadly regions, even along this Tyrrhenian shore. Such is the plain of Maida, for instance, where stood not long ago the forest of Sant' Eufemia, safe retreat of Parafante and other brigand heroes. The level lands of Rosarno and Gioia are equally ill-reputed. A French battalion stationed here in the summer of 1807 lost over sixty men in fourteen days, besides leaving two hundred invalids in the hospital at Monteleone. Gioia is so malarious that in summer every one of the inhabitants who can afford the price of a ticket goes by the evening train to Palmato sleep there. You will do well, by the way, to see something of the oil industry of Palmi, if time permits. In good years, 200,000 quintals of olive oil are manufactured in the regions of which it is the commercial centre. Not long ago, before modern methods of refining were introduced, most of this oil was exported to Russia, to be burned in holy lamps; nowadays it goes for the most part to Lucca, to be adulterated for foreign markets (the celebrated Lucca oil, which the simple Englishman regards as pure); only the finest quality is sent elsewhere, to Nice. From Gioia there runs a postal diligence once a day to Delianuova of which I might have availed myself, had I not preferred to traverse the country on foot.

The journey from Reggio to Bagnara on this fair summer morning, along the rippling Mediterranean, was short enough, but sufficiently long to let me overhear the following conversation:

A.—What a lovely sea! It is good, after all, to take three or four baths a year. What think you?

B.—I? No. For thirteen years I have taken no baths. But they are considered good for children.

The calamities that Bagnara has suffered in the past have been so numerous, so fierce and so varied that, properly speaking, the town has no right to exist any longer. It has enjoyed more than its full share of earthquakes, having been shaken to the ground over and over again. Sir William Hamilton reports that 3017 persons were killed in that of 1783. The horrors of war, too, have not spared it, and a certain modern exploit of the British arms here strikes me as so instructive that I would gladly extract it from Grant's "Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp," were it not too long to transcribe, and far too good to abbreviate.

A characteristic story, further, is told of the methods of General Manhes at Bagnara. It may well be an exaggeration when they say that the entire road from Reggio to Naples was lined with the heads of decapitated brigands; be that as it may, it stands to reason that Bagnara, as befits an important place, was to be provided with an -appropriate display of these trophies. The heads were exhibited in baskets, with strict injunctions to the authorities that they were not to be touched, seeing that they served not only for decorative but also moral purposes—as examples. Imagine, therefore, the General's feelings on being told that one of these heads had been stolen; stolen, probably, by some pious relative of the deceased rascal, who wished to give the relic a decent Christian burial.

"That's rather awkward," he said, quietly musing. "But of course the specimen must be replaced. Let me see. . . . Suppose we put the head of the mayor of Bagnara into the vacant basket? Shall we? Yes, we'll have the mayor. It will make him more careful in future." And within half an hour the basket was filled once more.

There was a little hitch in starting from Bagnara. From the windings of the carriage-road as portrayed by the map, I guessed that there must be a number of short cuts into the uplands at the back of the town, undiscoverable to myself, which would greatly shorten the journey. Besides, there was my small bag to be carried. A porter familiar with the tracks was plainly required, and soon enough I found a number of lusty youths leaning against a wall and doing nothing in particular. Yes, they would accompany me, they said, the whole lot of them, just for the fun of the thing.

"And my bag?" I asked.

"A bag to be carried? Then we must get a woman."

They unearthed a nondescript female who undertook to bear the burden as far as Sinopoli for a reasonable consideration. So far good. But as we proceeded, the boys began to drop off, till only a single one was left. And then the woman suddenly vanished down a side street, declaring that she must change her clothes. We waited for three-quarters of an hour, in the glaring dust of the turnpike; she never emerged again, and the remaining boy stoutly refused to handle her load.

"No," he declared. "She must carry the bag. And I will keep you company."

The precious morning hours were wearing away, and here we stood idly by the side of the road. It never struck me that the time might have been profitably employed in paying a flying visit to one of the most sacred objects in Calabria and possibly in the whole world, one which Signor N. Marcene describes as reposing at Bagnara in a rich reliquary—the authentic Hat of the Mother of God. A lady tourist would not have missed this chance of studying the fashions of those days. [Footnote: See next chapter.]

Finally, in desperation, I snatched up the wretched luggage and poured my griefs with unwonted eloquence into the ears of a man driving a bullock-cart down the road. So much was he moved, that he peremptorily ordered his son to conduct me then and there to Sinopoli, to carry the bag, and claim one franc by way of payment. The little man tumbled off the cart, rather reluctantly.

"Away with you!" cried the stern parent, and we began the long march, climbing uphill in the blazing sunshine; winding, later on, through shady chestnut woods and across broad tracts of cultivated land. It was plain that the task was beyond his powers, and when we had reached a spot where the strange-looking new village of Sant' Eufemia was visible—it is built entirely of wooden shelters; the stone town was greatly shaken in the late earthquake—he was obliged to halt, and thenceforward stumbled slowly into the place. There he deposited the bag on the ground, and faced me squarely.

"No more of this!" he said, concentrating every ounce of his virility into a look of uncompromising defiance.

"Then I shall not pay you a single farthing, my son. And, moreover, I will tell your father. You know what he commanded: to Sinopoli. This is only Sant' Eufemia. Unless——"

"You will tell my father? Unless——?"

"Unless you discover some one who will carry the bag not only to Sinopoli, but as far as Delianuova." I was not in the mood for repeating the experiences of the morning.

"It is difficult. But we will try."

He went in search, and returned anon with a slender lad of unusual comeliness—an earthquake orphan. "This big one," he explained, "walks wherever you please and carries whatever you give him. And you will pay him nothing at all, unless he deserves it. Such is the arrangement. Are you content?"

"You have acted like a man."

The earthquake survivor set off at a swinging pace, and we soon reached Sinopoli—new Sinopoli; the older settlement lies at a considerable distance. Midday was past, and the long main street of the town—a former fief of the terrible Ruffo family—stood deserted in the trembling heat. None the less there was sufficient liveliness within the houses; the whole place seemed in a state of jollification. It was Sunday, the orphan explained; the country was duller than usual, however, because of the high price of wine. There had been no murders to speak of—no, not for a long time past. But the vintage of this year, he added, promises well, and life will soon become normal again.

The mule track from here to Delianuova traverses some pretty scenery, both wild and pastoral. But the personal graces of my companion made me take small heed of the landscape. He was aglow with animal spirits, and his conversation naively brilliant and of uncommon import. Understanding at a glance that he belonged to a type which is rather rare in Calabria, that he was a classic (of a kind), I made every effort to be pleasant to him; and I must have succeeded, for he was soon relating anecdotes which would have been neither instructive, nor even intelligible, to the jeune fille; all this, with angelic serenity of conscience.

This radiantly-vicious child was the embodiment of the joy of life, the perfect immoralist. There was no cynicism in his nature, no cruelty, no obliquity, no remorse; nothing but sunshine with a few clouds sailing across the fathomless blue spaces—the sky of Hellas. Nihil humani alienum; and as I listened to those glad tales, I marvelled at the many-tinted experiences that could be crammed into seventeen short years; what a document the ad-verttures of such a frolicsome demon would be, what a feast for the initiated, could some one be induced to make them known! But such things are hopelessly out of the question. And that is why so many of our wise people go into their graves without ever learning what happens in this world.

Among minor matters, he mentioned that he had already been three times to prison for "certain little affairs of blood," while defending "certain friends." Was it not dull, I asked, in prison? "The time passes pleasantly anywhere," he answered, "when you are young. I always make friends, even in prison." I could well believe it. His affinities were with the blithe crew of the Liber Stratonis. He had a roving eye and the mouth of Antinous; and his morals were those of a condescending tiger-cub.

Arriving at Delianuova after sunset, he conceived the project of accompanying me next morning up Montalto. I hesitated. In the first place, I was going not only up that mountain, but to Bova on the distant Ionian littoral——

"For my part," he broke in, "ho pigliato confidenza. If you mistrust me, here! take my knife," an ugly blade, pointed, and two inches in excess of the police regulation length. This act of quasi-filial submission touched me; but it was not his knife I feared so much as that of "certain friends." Some little difference of opinion might arise, some question of money or other argument, and lo! the friends would be at hand (they always are), and one more stranger might disappear among the clefts and gullies of Montalto. Aspromonte, the roughest corner of Italy, is no place for misunderstandings; the knife decides promptly who is right or wrong, and only two weeks ago I was warned not to cross the district without a carbineer on either side of me.

But to have clothed my thoughts in words during his gracious mood would have been supremely unethical. I contented myself with the trite but pregnant remark that things sometimes looked different in the morning, which provoked a pagan fit of laughter; farewelled him "with the Madonna!" and watched as he withdrew under the trees, lithe and buoyant, like a flame that is swallowed up in the night.

Only then did the real business begin. I should be sorry to say into how many houses and wine-shops the obliging owner of the local inn conducted me, in search of a guide. We traversed all the lanes of this straggling and fairly prosperous place, and even those of its suburb Paracorio, evidently of Byzantine origin; the answer was everywhere the same: To Montalto, yes; to Bova, no! Night drew on apace and, as a last resource, he led the way to the dwelling of a gentleman of the old school—a retired brigand, to wit, who, as I afterwards learned, had some ten or twelve homicides to his account. Delianuova, and indeed the whole of Aspromonte, has a bad reputation for crime.

It was our last remaining chance.

We found the patriarch sitting in a simple but tidy chamber, smoking his pipe and playing with a baby; his daughter-in-law rose as we entered, and discreetly moved into an adjoining room. The cheery cut-throat put the baby down to crawl on the floor, and his eyes sparkled when he heard of Bova.

"Ah, one speaks of Bova!" he said. "A fine walk over the mountain!" He much regretted that he was too old for the trip, but so-and-so, he thought, might know something of the country. It pained him, too, that he could not offer me a glass of wine. There was none in the house. In his day, he added, it was not thought right to drink in the modern fashion; this wine-bibbing was responsible for considerable mischief; it troubled the brain, driving men to do things they afterwards repented. He drank only milk, having become accustomed to it during a long life among the hills. Milk cools the blood, he said, and steadies the hand, and keeps a man's judgment undisturbed.

The person he had named was found after some further search. He was a bronzed, clean-shaven type of about fifty, who began by refusing his services point-blank, but soon relented, on hearing the ex-brigand's recommendation of his qualities.



XXXI

SOUTHERN SAINTLINESS

Southern saints, like their worshippers, put on new faces and vestments in the course of ages. Old ones die away; new ones take their place. Several hundred of the older class of saint have clean faded from the popular memory, and are now so forgotten that the wisest priest can tell you nothing about them save, perhaps, that "he's in the church"—meaning, that some fragment of his holy anatomy survives as a relic amid a collection of similar antiques. But you can find their histories in early literature, and their names linger on old maps where they are given to promontories and other natural features which are gradually being re-christened.

Such saints were chiefly non-Italian: Byzantines or Africans who, by miraculous intervention, protected the village or district of which they were patrons from the manifold scourges of medi-aevalism; they took the place of the classic tutelar deities. They were men; they could fight; and in those troublous times that is exactly what saints were made for.

With the softening of manners a new element appears. Male saints lost their chief raison d'etre, and these virile creatures were superseded by pacific women. So, to give only one instance, Saint Rosalia in Palermo displaced the former protector Saint Mark. Her sacred bones were miraculously discovered in a cave; and have since been identified as those of a goat. But it was not till the twelfth century that the cult of female saints began to assume imposing dimensions.

Of the Madonna no mention occurs in the songs of Bishop Paulinus (fourth century); no monument exists in the Neapolitan catacombs. Thereafter her cult begins to dominate.

She supplied the natives with what orthodox Christianity did not give them, but what they had possessed from early times—a female element in religion. Those Greek settlers had their nymphs, their Venus, and so forth; the Mother of God absorbed and continued their functions. There is indeed only one of these female pagan divinities whose role she has not endeavoured to usurp—Athene. Herein she reflects the minds of her creators, the priests and common people, whose ideal woman contents herself with the duties of motherhood. I doubt whether an Athene-Madonna, an intellectual goddess, could ever have been evolved; their attitude towards gods in general is too childlike and positive.

South Italians, famous for abstractions in philosophy, cannot endure them in religion. Unlike ourselves, they do not desire to learn anything from their deities or to argue about them. They only wish to love and be loved in return, reserving to themselves the right to punish them, when they deserve it. Countless cases are on record where (pictures or statues of) Madonnas and saints have been thrown into a ditch for not doing what they were told, or for not keeping their share of a bargain. During the Vesuvius eruption of 1906 a good number were subjected to this "punishment," because they neglected to protect their worshippers from the calamity according to contract (so many candles and festivals = so much protection).

For the same reason the adult Jesus—the teacher, the God—is practically unknown. He is too remote from themselves and the ordinary activities of their daily lives; he is not married, like his mother; he has no trade, like his father (Mark calls him a carpenter); moreover, the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount are so repugnant to the South Italian as to be almost incomprehensible. In effigy, this period of Christ's life is portrayed most frequently in the primitive monuments of the catacombs, erected when tradition was purer.

Three tangibly-human aspects of Christ's life figure here: the bambino-cult, which not only appeals to the people's love of babyhood but also carries on the old traditions of the Lar Familiaris and of Horus; next, the youthful Jesus, beloved of local female mystics; and lastly the Crucified—that grim and gloomy image of suffering which was imported, or at least furiously fostered, by the Spaniards.

The engulfing of the saints by the Mother of God is due also to political reasons. The Vatican, once centralized in its policy, began to be disquieted by the persistent survival of Byzantinism (Greek cults and language lingered up to the twelfth century); with the Tacitean odium fratrum she exercised more severity towards the sister-faith than towards actual paganism. [Footnote: Greek and Egyptian anchorites were established in south Italy by the fourth century. But paganism was still flourishing, locally, in the sixth. There is some evidence that Christians used to take part in pagan festivals.]

The Madonna was a fit instrument for sweeping away the particularist tendencies of the past; she attacked relic-worship and other outworn superstitions; like a benignant whirlwind she careered over the land, and these now enigmatical shapes and customs fell faster than leaves of Vallombrosa. No sanctuary or cave so remote that she did not endeavour to expel its male saint—its old presiding genius, whether Byzantine or Roman. But saints have tough lives, and do not yield without a struggle; they fought for their time-honoured privileges like the "daemons" they were, and sometimes came off victorious. Those sanctuaries that proved too strong to be taken by storm were sapped by an artful and determined siege. The combat goes on to this day. This is what is happening to the thrice-deposed and still triumphant Saint Januarius, who is hard pressed by sheer force of numbers. Like those phagocytes which congregate from all sides to assail some weakened cell in the body physical, even so Madonna-cults—in frenzied competition with each other—cluster thickest round some imperilled venerable of ancient lineage, bent on his destruction. The Madonna dell' Arco, del Soccorso, and at least fifty others (not forgetting the newly-invented Madonna di Pompei)—they have all established themselves in the particular domain of St. Januarius; they are all undermining his reputation, and claiming to possess his special gifts. [Footnote: He is known to have quelled an outbreak of Vesuvius in the fifth century, though his earliest church, I believe, only dates from the ninth. His blood, famous for liquefaction, is not mentioned till 1337.]

Early monastic movements of the Roman Church also played their part in obliterating old religious landmarks. Settling down in some remote place with the Madonna as their leader or as their "second Mother," these companies of holy men soon acquired such temporal and spiritual influence as enabled them successfully to oppose their divinity to the local saint, whose once bright glories began to pale before her effulgence. Their labours in favour of the Mother of God were part of that work of consolidating Papal power which was afterwards carried on by the Jesuits.

Perhaps what chiefly accounts for the spread of Madonna-worship is the human craving for novelty. You can invent most easily where no fixed legends are established. Now the saints have fixed legendary attributes and histories, and as culture advances it becomes increasingly difficult to manufacture new saints with fresh and original characters and yet passable pedigrees (the experiment is tried, now and again); while the old saints have been exploited and are now inefficient—worn out, like old toys. Madonna, on the other hand, can subdivide with the ease of an amoeba, and yet never lose her identity or credibility; moreover, thanks to her divine character, anything can be accredited to her—anything good, however wonderful; lastly, the traditions concerning her are so conveniently vague that they actually foster the mythopoetic faculty. Hence her success. Again: the man-saints were separatists; they fought for their own towns against African intruders, and in those frequent and bloody inter-communal battles which are a feature of Italian medievalism. Nowadays it is hardly proper that neighbouring townsmen, aided and abetted by their respective saints, should sally forth to cut each others' throats. The Madonna, as cosmopolitan Nike, is a fitter patroness for settled society.

She also found a ready welcome in consequence of the pastoral institutions of the country in which the mother plays such a conspicuous role. So deeply are they ingrained here that if the Mother of God had not existed, the group would have been deemed incomplete; a family without a mother is to them like a tree without roots—a thing which cannot be. This accounts for the fact that their Trinity is not ours; it consists of the Mother, the Father (Saint Joseph), and the Child—with Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an important personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all things and the Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible and non-human.

But She never became a true cosmopolitan Nike, save in literature. The decentralizing spirit of South Italy was too strong for her. She had to conform to the old custom of geographical specialization. In all save in name she doffed her essential character of Mother of God, and became a local demi-god; an accessible wonder-worker attached to some particular district. An inhabitant of village A would stand a poor chance of his prayers being heard by the Madonna of village B; if you have a headache, it is no use applying to the Madonna of the Hens, who deals with diseases of women; you will find yourself in a pretty fix if you expect financial assistance from the Madonna of village C: she is a weather-specialist. In short, these hundreds of Madonnas have taken up the qualities of the saints they supplanted.

They can often outdo them; and this is yet another reason for their success. It is a well-ascertained fact, for example, that many holy men have been nourished by the Milk of the Mother of God, "not," as a Catholic writer says, "in a mystic or spiritual sense, but with their actual lips"; Saint Bernard "among a hundred, a thousand, others." Nor is this all, for in the year 1690, a painted image of the Madonna, not far from the city of Carinola, was observed to "diffuse abundant milk" for the edification of a great concourse of spectators—a miracle which was recognized as such by the bishop of that diocese, Monsignor Paolo Ayrola, who wrote a report on the subject. Some more of this authentic milk is kept in a bottle in the convent of Mater Domini on Vesuvius, and the chronicle of that establishment, printed in 1834, says:

"Since Mary is the Mother and Co-redeemer of the Church, may she not have left some drops of her precious milk as a gift to this Church, even as we still possess some of the blood of Christ? In various churches there exists some of this milk, by means of which many graces and benefits are obtained. We find such relics, for example, in the church of Saint Luigi in Naples, namely, two bottles full of the milk of the Blessed Virgin; and this milk becomes fluid on feast-days of the Madonna, as everybody can see. Also in this convent of Mater Domini the milk sometimes liquefies." During eruptions of Vesuvius this bottle is carried abroad in procession, and always dispels the danger. Saint Januarius must indeed look to his laurels! Meanwhile it is interesting to observe that the Mother of God has condescended to employ the method of holy relics which she once combated so strenuously, her milk competing with the blood of Saint John, the fat of Saint Laurence, and those other physiological curios which are still preserved for the edification of believers.

All of which would pass if a subtle poison had not been creeping in to taint religious institutions. Taken by themselves, these infantile observances do not necessarily harm family life, the support of the state; for a man can believe a considerable deal of nonsense, and yet go about his daily work in a natural and cheerful manner. But when the body is despised and tormented the mind loses its equilibrium, and when that happens nonsense may assume a sinister shape. We have seen it in England, where, during the ascetic movement of Puritanism, more witches were burnt than in the whole period before and after.

The virus of asceticism entered South Italy from three principal sources. From early ages the country had stood in commercial relations with the valley of the Nile; and even as its black magic is largely tinged with Egyptian practices, so its magic of the white kind—its saintly legends—bear the impress of the self-macerations and perverted life-theories of those desert-lunatics who called themselves Christians. [Footnote: These ascetics were here before Christianity (see Philo Judaeus); in fact, there is not a single element in the new faith which had not been independently developed by the pagans, many of whom, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, were ripe for the most abject self-abasement.] But this Orientalism fell at first upon unfruitful soil; the Vatican was yet wavering, and Hellenic notions of conduct still survived. It received a further rebuff at the hands of men like Benedict, who set up sounder ideals of holiness, introducing a gleam of sanity even in that insanest of institutions—the herding together of idle men to the glory of God.

But things became more centralized as the Papacy gainedground. The strong Christian, the independent ruler or warrior or builder saint, was tolerated only if he conformed to its precepts; and the inauspicious rise of subservient ascetic orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans, who quickly invaded the fair regions of the south, gave an evil tone to their Christianity.

There has always been a contrary tendency at work: the Ionic spirit, heritage of the past. Monkish ideals of chastity and poverty have never appealed to the hearts of people, priests or prelates of the south; they will endure much fondness in their religion, but not those phenomena of cruelty and pruriency which are inseparably connected with asceticism; their notions have ever been akin to those of the sage Xenocrates, who held that "happiness consists not only in the possession of human virtues, but in the accomplishment of natural acts." Among the latter they include the acquisition of wealth and the satisfaction of carnal needs. At this time, too, the old Hellenic curiosity was not wholly dimmed; they took an intelligent interest in imported creeds like that of Luther, which, if not convincing, at least satisfied their desire for novelty. Theirs was exactly the attitude of the Athenians towards Paul's "New God"; and Protestantism might have spread far in the south, had it not been ferociously repressed.

But after the brilliant humanistic period of the Aragons there followed the third and fiercest reaction—that of the Spanish viceroys, whose misrule struck at every one of the roots of national prosperity. It is that "seicentismo" which a modern writer (A. Niceforo, "L'Italia barbara," 1898) has recognized as the blight, the evil genius, of south Italy. The Ionic spirit did not help the people much at this time. The greatest of these viceroys, Don Pietro di Toledo, hanged 18,000 of them in eight years, and then confessed, with a sigh, that "he did not know what more he could do." What more could he do? As a pious Spaniard he was incapable of understanding that quarterings and breakings on the rack were of less avail than the education of the populace in certain secular notions of good conduct—notions which it was the business of his Church not to teach. Reading through the legislation of the viceregal period, one is astonished to find how little was done for the common people, who lived like the veriest beasts of earth.

Their civil rulers—scholars and gentlemen, most of them—really believed that the example of half a million illiterate and vicious monks was all the education they needed. And yet one notes with surprise that the Government was perpetually at loggerheads with the ecclesiastical authorities. True; but it is wonderful with what intuitive alacrity they joined forces when it was a question of repelling their common antagonist, enlightenment.

From this rank soil there sprang up an exotic efflorescence of holiness. If south Italy swarmed with sinners, as the experiences of Don Pietro seemed to show, it also swarmed with saints. And hardly one of them escaped the influence of the period, the love of futile ornamentation. Their piety is overloaded with embellishing touches and needless excrescences of virtue. It was the baroque period of saintliness, as of architecture.

I have already given some account of one of them, the Flying Monk (Chapter X), and have perused the biographies of at least fifty others. One cannot help observing a great uniformity in their lives—a kind of family resemblance. This parallelism is due to the simple reason that there is only one right for a thousand wrongs. One may well look in vain, here, for those many-tinted perversions and aberrations which disfigure the histories of average mankind. These saints are all alike—monotonously alike, if one cares to say so—in their chastity and other official virtues. But a little acquaintance with the subject will soon show you that, so far as the range of their particular Christianity allowed of it, there is a praiseworthy and even astonishing diversity among them. Nearly all of them could fly, more or less; nearly all of them could cure diseases and cause the clouds to rain; nearly all of them were illiterate; and every one of them died in the odour of sanctity—with roseate complexion, sweetly smelling corpse, and flexible limbs. Yet each one has his particular gifts, his strong point. Joseph of Copertino specialized in flying; others were conspicuous for their heroism in sitting in hot baths, devouring ordure, tormenting themselves with pins, and so forth.

Here, for instance, is a good representative biography—the Life of Saint Giangiuseppe della Croce (born 1654), reprinted for the occasion of his solemn sanctification. [Footnote: "Vita di S. Giangiuseppe della Croce . . . Scritta dal P. Fr. Diodato dell' Assunta per la Beatificazione ed ora ristampata dal postulatore della causa P. Fr. Giuseppe Rostoll in occasione della solenne Santificazione." Roma, 1839.]

He resembled other saints in many points. He never allowed the "vermin which generated in his bed" to be disturbed; he wore the same clothes for sixty-four years on end; with women his behaviour was that of an "animated statue," and during his long life he never looked any one in the face (even his brother-monks were known to him only by their voices); he could raise the dead, relieve a duchess of a devil in the shape of a black dog, change chestnuts into apricots, and bad wine into good; his flesh was encrusted with sores, the result of his fierce scarifications; he was always half starved, and when delicate viands were brought to him, he used to say to his body: "Have you seen them? Have you smelt them? Then let that suffice for you."

He, too, could fly a little. So once, when he was nowhere to be found, the monks of the convent at last discovered him in the church, "raised so high above the ground that his head touched the ceiling." This is not a bad performance for a mere lad, as he then was. And how useful this gift became in old age was seen when, being almost incapable of moving his legs, and with body half paralysed, he was nevertheless enabled to accompany a procession for the length of two miles on foot, walking, to the stupefaction of thousands of spectators, at about a cubit's height above the street, on air; after the fashion of those Hindu gods whose feet—so the pagans fable—are too pure to touch mortal earth.

His love of poverty, moreover, was so intense that even after his death a picture of him, which his relatives had tried to attach to the wall in loving remembrance, repeatedly fell down again, although nailed very securely; nor did it remain fixed until they realized that its costly gilt frame was objectionable to the saint in heaven, and accordingly removed it. No wonder the infant Jesus was pleased to descend from the breast of Mary and take rest for several hours in the arms of Saint Giangiuseppe, who, on being disturbed by some priestly visitor, exclaimed, "O how I have enjoyed holding the Holy Babe in my arms!" This is an old and favourite motif; it occurs, for example, in the Fioretti of Saint Francis; there are precedents, in fact, for all these divine favours.

But his distinguishing feature, his "dominating gift," was that of prophecy, especially in foretelling the deaths of children, "which he almost always accompanied with jocular words (scherzi) on his lips." He would enter a house and genially remark: "O, what an odour of Paradise "; sooner or later one or more of the children of the family would perish. To a boy of twelve he said, "Be good, Natale, for the angels are coming to take you." These playful words seem to have weighed considerably on the boy's mind and, sure enough, after a few years he died. But even more charming—piu grazioso, the biographer calls it—was the incident when he once asked a father whether he would give his son to Saint Pasquale. The fond parent agreed, thinking that the words referred to the boy's future career in the Church. But the saint meant something quite different—he meant a career in heaven! And in less than a month the child died. To a little girl who was crying in the street he said: "I don't want to hear you any more. Go and sing in Paradise." And meeting her a short time after, he said, "What, are you still here?" In a few days she was dead.

The biography gives many instances of this pretty gift which would hardly have contributed to the saint's popularity in England or any other country save this, where—although the surviving youngsters are described as "struck with terror at the mere name of the Servant of God"—the parents were naturally glad to have one or two angels in the family, to act as avvocati (pleaders) for those that remained on earth.

And the mention of the legal profession brings me to one really instructive miracle. It is usually to be observed, after a saint has been canonized, that heaven, by some further sign or signs, signifies approval of this solemn act of the Vicar of God; indeed, to judge by these biographies, such a course is not only customary but, to use a worldly expression, de rigueur. And so it happened after the decree relative to Saint Giangiuseppe had been pronounced in the Vatican basilica by His Holiness Pius VI, in the presence of the assembled cardinals. Innumerable celestial portents (their enumeration fills eleven pages of the "Life") confirmed and ratified the great event, and among them this: the notary, who had drawn up both the ordinary and the apostolic processi, was cured of a grievous apoplexy, survived for four years, and finally died on the very anniversary of the death of the saint. Involuntarily one contrasts this heavenly largesse with the sordid guineas which would have contented an English lawyer. . . .

Or glance into the biography of the Venerable Sister Orsola Benincasa. She, too, could fly a little and raise men from the dead. She cured diseases, foretold her own death and that of others, lived for a month on the sole nourishment of a consecrated wafer; she could speak Latin and Polish, although she had been taught nothing at all; wrought miracles after death, and possessed to a heroic degree the virtues of patience, humility, temperance, justice, etc. etc. So inflamed was she with divine love, that almost every day thick steam issued out of her mouth, which was observed to be destructive to articles of clothing; her heated body, when ice was applied, used to hiss like a red-hot iron under similar conditions.

As a child, she already cried for other people's sins; she was always hunting for her own and would gladly, at the end of her long and blameless career, have exchanged her sins for those of the youthful Duchess of Aquaro. An interesting phenomenon, by the way, the theory of sinfulness which crops up at this particular period of history. For our conception of sin is alien to the Latin mind. There is no "sin" in Italy (and this is not the least of her many attractions); it is an article manufactured exclusively for export. [Footnote: "Vita della Venerabile Serva di Dio Suor Orsola Benincasa, Scritta da un cherico regolare," Rome, 1796. There are, of course, much earlier biographies of all these saints; concerning Sister Orsola we possess, for instance, the remarkable pamphlet by Cesare d'Eboli ("Caesaris Aevoli Neapolitan! Apologia pro Ursula Neapolitana quas ad urbem accessit MDLXXXIII," Venice, 1589), which achieves the distinction of never mentioning Orsola by name: she is only once referred to as "mulier de qua agitur." But I prefer to quote from the more recent ones because they are authoritative, in so far as they have been written on the basis of miracles attested by eye-witnesses and accepted as veracious by the Vatican tribunal. Sister Orsola, though born in 154.7, was only declared Venerable by Pontifical decree of 1793. Biographies prior to that date are therefore ex-parte statements and might conceivably contain errors of fact. This is out of the question here, as is clearly shown by the author on p. 178.]

Orsola's speciality, however, were those frequent trance-like conditions by reason of which, during her lifetime, she was created "Protectress of the City of Naples." I cannot tell whether she was the first woman-saint to obtain this honour. Certainly the "Seven Holy Protectors" concerning whom Paolo Regio writes were all musty old males. . . .

And here is quite another biography, that of Alfonso di Liguori (born 1696), the founder of the Redemptorist order and a canonized saint. He, too, could fly a little and raise the dead to life; he suffered devil-temptations, caused the clouds to rain, calmed an eruption of Vesuvius, multiplied food, and so forth. Such was his bashfulness, that even as an aged bishop he refused to be unrobed by his attendants; such his instinct for moral cleanliness that once, when a messenger had alighted at his convent accompanied by a soldier, he instantly detected, under the military disguise, the lineaments of a young woman-friend. Despite these divine gifts, he always needed a confessor. An enormous batch of miracles accompanied his sanctification.

But he only employed these divine graces by the way; he was by profession not a taumaturgo, but a clerical instructor, organizer, and writer. The Vatican has conferred on him the rare title of "Doctor Ecclesia," which he shares with Saint Augustine and some others.

The biography from which I have drawn these details was printed in Rome in 1839. It is valuable because it is modern and so far authentic; and for two other reasons. In the first place, curiously enough, it barely mentions the saint's life-work—his writings. Secondly, it is a good example of what I call the pious palimpsest. It is over-scored with contradictory matter. The author, for example, while accidentally informing us that Alfonso kept a carriage, imputes to him a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments, in order (I presume) to make his character conform to the grosser ideals of the mendicant friars. I do not believe in these traits—in his hatred of soap and clean apparel. From his works I deduce a different original. He was refined and urbane; of a casuistical and prying disposition; like many sensitive men, unduly preoccupied with the sexual life of youth; like a true feudal aristocrat, ever ready to apply force where verbal admonition proved unavailing. . . .

In wonder-working capacities these saints were all put in the shade by the Calabrian Francesco di Paola, who raised fifteen persons from the dead in his boyhood. He used to perform a hundred miracles a day, and "it was a miracle, when a day passed without a miracle." The index alone of any one of his numerous biographies is enough to make one's head swim.

The vast majority of saints of this period do not belong to that third sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the constructive and purposeful third sex. They are wholly sexless, unsocial and futile beings, the negation of every masculine or feminine virtue. Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously introspective. Those honourable saintly combats of the past with external enemies and plagues and stormy seasons were transplanted from without into the microcosm within, taking the shape of hallucinations and demon-temptations. They were no longer actors, but sufferers; automata, who attained a degree of inanity which would have made their old Byzantine prototypes burst with envy.

Yet they vary in their gifts; each one, as I have said, has his or her strong point. Why? The reason of this diversity lies in the furious competition between the various monastic orders of the time—in those unedifying squabbles which led to never-ending litigation and complaints to head-quarters in Rome. Every one of these saints, from the first dawning of his divine talents, was surrounded by an atmosphere of jealous hatred on the part of his co-religionists. If one order came out with a flying wonder, another, in frantic emulation, would introduce some new speciality to eclipse his fame—something in the fasting line, it may be; or a female mystic whose palpitating letters to Jesus Christ would melt all readers to pity. The Franciscans, for instance, dissected the body of a certain holy Margaret and discovered in her heart the symbols of the Trinity and of the Passion. This bold and original idea would have gained them much credit, but for the rival Dominicans, who promptly discovered, and dissected, another saintly Margaret, whose heart contained three stones on which were engraven portraits of the Virgin Mary. [Footnote: These and other details will be found in the four volumes "Das Heidentum in der romischen Kirche" (Gotha, 1889-91), by Theodor Trede, a late Protestant parson in Naples, strongly tinged with anti-Catholicism, but whose facts may be relied upon. Indeed, he gives chapter and verse for them.] So they ceaselessly unearthed fresh saints with a view to disparaging each other—all of them waiting for a favourable moment when the Vatican could be successfully approached to consider their particular claims. For it stands to reason that a Carmelite Pope would prefer a Carmelite saint to one of the Jesuits, and so forth.

And over all throned the Inquisition in Rome, alert, ever-suspicious; testing the "irregularities" of the various orders and harassing their respective saints with Olympic impartiality.

I know that mystics such as Orsola Benincasa are supposed to have another side to their character, an eminently practical side. It is perfectly true—and we need not go out of England to learn it—that piety is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly affairs. But the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of nine-tenths of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor and not of the saint. Trainers of performing animals are aware how these differ in plasticity of disposition and amenability to discipline; the spiritual adviser, who knows his business, must be quick to detect these various qualities in the minds of his penitents and to utilize them to the best advantage. It is inconceivable, for instance, that the convent-foundress Orsola was other than a neuropathic nonentity—a blind instrument in the hands of what we should call her backers, chiefest of whom (in Naples) were two Spanish priests, Borii and Navarro, whose local efforts were supported, at head-quarters, by the saintly Filippo Neri and the learned Cardinal Baronius.

This is noticeable. The earlier of these godly biographies are written in Latin, and these are more restrained in their language; they were composed, one imagines, for the priests and educated classes who could dispense to a certain degree with prodigies. But the later ones, from the viceregal period onwards, are in the vernacular and display a marked deterioration; one must suppose that they were printed for such of the common people as could still read (up to a few years ago, sixty-five per cent of the populace were analphabetic). They are pervaded by the characteristic of all contemporary literature and art: that deliberate intention to astound which originated with the poet Marino, who declared such to have been his object and ideal. The miracles certainly do astound; they are as strepitosi (clamour-arousing) as the writers claim them to be; how they ever came to occur must be left to the consciences of those who swore on oath to the truth of them.

During this period the Mother of God as a local saint increased in popularity. There was a ceaseless flow of monographs dealing with particular Madonnas, as well as a small library on what the Germans would doubtless call the "Madonna as a Whole." Here is Serafino Montorio's "Zodiaco di Maria," printed in 1715 on the lines of that monster of a book by Gumppenberg. It treats of over two hundred subspecies of Madonna worshipped in different parts of south Italy which is divided, for these celestial purposes, into twelve regions, according to the signs of the Zodiac. The book is dedicated by the author to his "Sovereign Lady the Gran Madre di Dio" and might, in truth, have been written to the glory of that protean old Magna Mater by one of Juvenal's "tonsured herd" possessed of much industry but little discrimination. [Footnote: The Mater Dei was officially installed in the place of Magna Mater at the Synod of Ephesus in 431.] Such as it is, it reflects the crude mental status of the Dominican order to which the author belonged. I warmly recommend this book to all Englishmen desirous of understanding the south. It is pure, undiluted paganism—paganism of a bad school; one would think it marked the lowest possible ebb of Christian spirituality. But this is by no means the case, as I shall presently show.

How different, from such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the "Glories of Mary," by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints and pictures. The bearded men-saints were extinct; in the place of them this mawkish, sub-sexual love for the Virgin developed a corresponding type of adorer—clean-shaven, emasculate youths, posing in ecstatic attitudes with a nauseous feminine smirk. Rather an unpleasant sort of saint.

The unwholesome chastity-ideal, without which no holy man of the period was "complete," naturally left its mark upon literature, notably on that of certain Spanish theologians. But good specimens of what I mean may also be found in the Theologia Moralis of Liguori; the kind of stuff, that is, which would be classed as "curious" in catalogues and kept in a locked cupboard by the most broad-minded paterfamilias. Reading these elucubrations of Alfonso's, one feels that the saint has pondered long and lovingly upon themes like an et quando peccata sint oscula or de tactu et adspectu corporis; he writes with all the authority of an expert whose richly-varied experiences in the confessional have been amplified and irradiated by divine inspiration. I hesitate what to call this literature, seeing that it was obviously written to the glory of God and His Virgin Mother. The congregation of the Index, which was severe in the matter of indecent publications and prohibited Boccaccio's Decameron on these grounds, hailed with approval the appearance of such treatises composed, as they were, for the guidance of young priests.

Cruelty (in the shape of the Inquisition) and lasciviousness (as exemplified by such pious filth)—these are the prime fruits of that cult of asceticism which for centuries the Government strove to impose upon south Italy. If the people were saved, it was due to that substratum of sanity, of Greek sophrosyne, which resisted the one and derided the other. Whoever has saturated himself with the records will marvel not so much that the inhabitants preserved some shreds of common sense and decent feeling, as that they survived at all—he will marvel that the once fair kingdom was not converted into a wilderness, saintly but uninhabited, like Spain itself.

For the movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate, but—as often happens when the quantity is excessive—the quality declined. This lazzaroni-period was the debacle of holiness. So true it is that our gods reflect the hearts that make them.

The Venerable Fra Egidio, a native of Taranto, is a good example of contemporary godliness. My biography of him was printed in Naples in 1876, [Footnote: "Vita del Venerabile servo di Dio Fra Egidio da S. Giuseppe laico professo alcantarino," Napoli, 1876.] and contains a dedicatory epistle addressed to the Blessed Virgin by her "servant, subject, and most loving son Rosario Frungillo"—a canon of the church and the author of the book.

This "taumaturgo" could perform all the ordinary feats; I will not linger over them. What has made him popular to this day are those wonders which appealed to the taste of the poorer people, such as, for example, that miracle of the eels. A fisherman had brought fourteen hundredweight of these for sale in the market. Judge of his disappointment when he discovered that they had all died during the journey (southerners will not pay for dead eels). Fortunately, he saw the saint arriving in a little boat, who informed him that the eels were "not dead, but only asleep," and who woke them up again by means of a relic of Saint Pasquale which he always carried about with him, after a quarter of an hour's devout praying, during which the perspiration oozed from his forehead. The eels, says the writer, had been dead and slimy, but now turned their bellies downwards once more and twisted about in their usual spirals; there began a general weeping among the onlookers, and the fame of the miracle immediately spread abroad. He could do the same with lobsters, cows, and human beings.

Thus a cow belonging to Fra Egidio's monastery was once stolen by an impious butcher, and cut up into the usual joints with a view to a clandestine sale of the meat. The saint discovered the beast's remains, ordered that they should be laid together on the floor in the shape of a living cow, with the entrails, head and so forth in their natural positions; then, having made the sign of the cross with his cord upon the slaughtered beast, and rousing up all his faith, he said: "In the name of God and of Saint Pasquale, arise, Catherine!" (Catherine was the cow's name.) "At these words the animal lowed, shook itself, and stood up on its feet alive, whole and strong, even as it had been before it was killed."

In the case of one of the dead men whom he brought to life, the undertakers were already about their sad task; but Fra Egidio, viewing the corpse, remarked in his usual manner that the man was "not dead, but only asleep," and after a few saintly manipulations, roused him from his slumber. The most portentous of his wonders, however, are those which he wrought after his own death by means of his relics and otherwise; they have been sworn to by many persons. Nor did his hand lose its old cunning, in these posthumous manifestations, with the finny tribe. A certain woman, Maria Scuotto, was enabled to resuscitate a number of dead eels by means of an image of the deceased saint which she cast among them.

Every one of the statements in this biography is drawn from the processi to which I will presently refer; there were 202 witnesses who deposed "under the rigour and sanctity of oath" to the truth of these miracles; and among those who were personally convinced of the Venerable's rare gifts was the Royal Family of Naples, the archbishop of that town, as well as innumerable dukes and princes. An embittered rationalist would note that the reading of Voltaire, at this period, was punished with three years' galley-slavery and that several thousand citizens were hanged for expressing liberal opinions; he will suggest that belief in the supernatural, rejected by the thinking classes, finds an abiding shelter among royalty and the proletariat.

It occurs to me, a propos of Fra Egidio, to make the obvious statement that an account of an occurrence is not necessarily true, because it happened long ago. Credibility does not improve, like violins and port wine, with lapse of years. This being the case, it will not be considered objectionable to say that there are certain deeds attributed to holy men of olden days which, to speak frankly, are open to doubt; or at least not susceptible of proof. Who were these men, if they ever existed? and who vouches for their prodigies? This makes me think that Pope Gelasius showed no small penetration in excluding, as early as the fifth century, some few acta sanctorum from the use of the churches; another step in the same direction was taken in the twelfth century when the power of canonizing saints, which had hitherto been claimed by all bishops, became vested in the Pope alone; and yet another, when Urban VIII forbade the nomination of local patron saints by popular vote. Pious legends are supposed to have their uses as an educative agency. So be it. But such relations of imperfectly ascertained and therefore questionable wonders suffer from one grave drawback: they tend to shake our faith in the evidence of well-authenticated ones. Thus Saint Patrick is also reported to have raised a cow from the dead—five cows, to be quite accurate; but who will come forward and vouch for the fact? No one. That is because Saint Patrick belongs to the legendary stage; he died, it is presumed, about 490.

Here, with Saint Egidio, we are on other ground; on the ground of bald actuality. He expired in 1812, and the contemporaries who have attested his miraculous deeds are not misty phantoms of the Thebais; they were creatures of flesh and blood, human, historical personages, who were dressed and nourished and educated after the fashion of our own grandfathers. Yet it was meet and proper that the documentary evidence as to his divine graces should be conscientiously examined. And only in 1888 was the crowning work accomplished. In that year His Holiness Leo XIII and the Sacred Congregation of Cardinals solemnly approved the evidence and inscribed the name of Egidio in the book of the Blessed.

To touch upon a few minor matters—I observe that Fra Egidio, like the Flying Monk, was "illiterate," and similarly preserved up to a decrepit age "the odorous lily of purity, which made him appear in words and deeds as a most innocent child." He was accustomed to worship before a favourite picture of the Mother of God which he kept adorned with candles; and whenever the supply of these ran out, he was wont to address Her with infantile simplicity of heart and in the local dialect: "Now there's no wax for You; so think about it Yourself; if not, You'll have to go without." The playful-saintly note. . . .

But there is this difference between him and earlier saints that whereas they, all too often, suffered in solitude, misunderstood and rejected of men, he enjoyed the highest popularity during his whole long life. Wherever he went, his footsteps were pursued by crowds of admirers, eager to touch his wonder-working body or to cut off shreds of his clothing as amulets; hardly a day passed that he did not return home with garments so lacerated that only half of them was left; every evening they had to be patched up anew, although they were purposely stitched full of wires and small chains of iron as a protection. The same passionate sympathy continued after death, for while his body was lying in state a certain Luigi Ascione, a surgeon, pushed through the crowd and endeavoured to cut off one of his toe-nails with the flesh attached to it; he admitted being driven to this act of pious depredation by the pleading request of the Spanish Ambassador and a Neapolitan princess, who held Fra Egidio in great veneration.

This is not an isolated instance. Southerners love their saints, and do not content themselves with chill verbal expressions of esteem. So the biographer of Saint Giangiuseppe records that "one of the deceased saint's toes was bitten off with most regret-able devotion by the teeth of a man in the crowd, who wished to preserve it as a relic. And the blood from the wound flowed so copiously and so freely that many pieces of cloth were saturated with it; nor did it cease to flow till the precious corpse was interred." It is hard to picture such proofs of fervid popularity falling to the lot of English deans and bishops.

He was modern, too, in this sense, that he did not torment himself with penitences (decay of Spanish austerity); on the contrary, he even kept chocolate, honey and suchlike delicacies in his cell. In short, he was an up-to-date saint, who despised mediaeval practices and lived in a manner befitting the age which gave him birth. In this respect he resembles our English men of holiness, who exercise a laudable self-denial in resisting the seductions of the ascetic life.

Meanwhile, the cult of the Mother of God continued to wax in favour, and those who are interested in its development should read the really remarkable book by Antonio Cuomo, "Saggio apologetico della belezza celeste e divina di Maria S.S. Madre di Dio" (Castellamare, 1863). It is a diatribe against modernism by a champion of lost causes, an exacerbated lover of the "Singular Virgin and fecund Mother of the Verb." His argument, as I understand it, is the consensus gentium theory applied to the Virgin Mary. In defence of this thesis, the book has been made to bristle with quotations; they stand out like quills upon the porcupine, ready to impale the adventurous sceptic. Pliny and Virgil and the Druids and Balaam's Ass are invoked as foretelling Her birth; the Old Testament—that venerable sufferer, as Huxley called it—is twisted into dire convulsions for the same purpose; much evidence is also drawn from Hebrew observances and from the Church Fathers. But the New Testamentary record is seldom invoked; the Saviour, on the rare occasions when He is mentioned, being dismissed as "G. C." The volume ends with a pyrotechnical display of invective against non-Catholic heretics; a medley of threats and abuse worthy of those breezy days of Erasmus, when theologians really said what they thought of each other. The frank polytheism of Montorio is more to my taste. This outpouring of papistical rhetoric gives me unwarrantable sensations—it makes me feel positively Protestant.

Another sign of increasing popularity is that the sacred bacchanals connected with the "crowning" of various Madonnas were twice as numerous, in Naples, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century. Why an image of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly symbol, as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to those who fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of southern religion. Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either puerile or adult; the Englishman remains everlastingly adolescent. . . .

Now of course it is open to any one to say that the pious records from which I have quoted are a desolation of the spirit; that they possess all the improbability of the "Arabian Nights," and none of their charm; that all the distempered dreamings to which our poor humanity is subject have given themselves a rendezvous in their pages. I am not for disputing the point, and I can understand how one man may be saddened by their perusal, while another extracts therefrom some gleams of mirth. For my part, I merely verify this fact: the native has been fed with this stuff for centuries, and if we desire to enter into his feelings, we must feed ourselves likewise—up to a point. The past is the key to the present. That is why I have dwelt at such length on the subject—in the hope of clearing up the enigma in the national character: the unpassable gulf, I mean, between the believing and the unbelieving sections of the community.

An Anglo-Saxon arriving at Bagnara and witnessing a procession in honour of that Sacred Hat of the Mother of God which has led me into this disquisition, would be shocked at the degree of bigotry implied. "The Hat of the Virgin Mary," he would say—"what next?" Then, accosting some ordinary citizen not in the procession—any butcher or baker—he would receive a shock of another kind; he would be appalled at the man's language of contemptuous derision towards everything which he, the Anglo-Saxon, holds sacred in biblical tradition. There is no attempt, here, at "reconciliation." The classes calling themselves enlightened are making a clean sweep of the old gods in a fashion that bewilders us who have accustomed ourselves to see a providential design in everything that exists (possibly because our acquaintance with a providentially- designed Holy Office is limited to an obsolete statute, the genial de haeretico comburendo). The others, the fetishists, have remained on the spiritual level of their own saints. And there we stand today. That section so numerous in England, the pseudo-pagans, crypto-Christians, or whatever obscurantists like Messrs. A. J. Balfour and Mallock like to call themselves (the men who, with disastrous effects, transport into realms of pure intelligence the spirit of compromise which should be restricted to practical concerns)—that section has no representatives hereabouts.