CHAPTER XXXV
THE CITY OF ST. FRANCIS
THE Italian hill-cities are such a strange novelty to the American of the Middle West—used only to the flat reaches of the prairie, and the city or town gathered primarily about the railway-station. One sees a whole series of them ranged along the eastern ridge of the Apennines as one travels northward from Rome. All the way up this valley I had been noting examples on either hand but when I got off the train at Assisi I saw what appeared to be a great fortress on a distant hill—the sheer walls of the church and monastery of St. Francis. It all came back to me, the fact that St. Francis had been born here of a well-to-do father, that he had led a gay life in his youth, had had his “vision”—his change of heart—which caused him to embrace poverty, the care of the poor and needy and to follow precisely that idealistic dictum which says: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,... but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,... for where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” I had found in one of the little books I had with me, “Umbrian Towns,” a copy of the prayer that he devised for his Order which reads:
Poverty was in the crib and like a faithful squire she kept herself armed in the great combat Thou didst wage for our redemption. During Thy passion she alone did not forsake Thee. Mary, Thy Mother, stopped at the foot of the cross, but poverty mounted it with Thee and clasped Thee in her embrace unto the end; and when Thou wast dying of thirst as a watchful spouse she prepared for Thee the gall. Thou didst expire in the ardor of her embraces, nor did she leave Thee when dead, O Lord Jesus, for she allowed not Thy body to rest elsewhere than in a borrowed grave. O poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the treasure of the highest poverty. Grant that the distinctive mark of our Order may be never to possess anything as its own under the sun for the glory of Thy name and to have no other patrimony than begging.
I wonder if there is any one who can read this without a thrill of response. This world sets such store by wealth and comfort. We all batten on luxury so far as our means will permit,—many of us wallow in it; and the thought of a man who could write such a prayer as that, and live it, made my hair tingle to the roots. I can understand Pope Innocent III’s saying that the rule offered by St. Francis and his disciples to ordinary mortals was too severe, but I can also conceive the poetic enthusiasm of a St. Francis. I found myself on the instant in the deepest accord with him, understanding how it was that he wanted his followers not to wear a habit, and to work in the fields as day-laborers, begging only when they could not earn their way. The fact that he and his disciples had lived in reed huts on the site of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the great church which stands in the valley near the station, far down from the town, and had practised the utmost austerity, came upon me as a bit of imaginative poetry of the highest sort. Before the rumbling bus arrived, which conveyed me and several others to the little hotel, I was thrilling with enthusiasm for this religious fact, and anything that concerned him interested me.
In some ways Assisi was a disappointment because I expected something more than bare picturesqueness; it is very old and I fancy, as modern Italy goes, very poor. The walls of the houses are for the most part built of dull gray stone. The streets climbed up hill and down dale, hard, winding, narrow, stony affairs, lined right to the roadway by these bare, inhospitable-looking houses. No yards, no gardens—at least none visible from the streets, but, between walls, and down street stairways, and between odd angles of buildings the loveliest vistas of the valley below, where were spread great orchards of olive trees, occasional small groups of houses, distant churches and the mountains on the other side of the valley. Quite suited to the self-abnegating spirit of St. Francis, I thought,—and I wondered if the town had changed greatly since his day—1182!
As I came up in the bus, looking after my very un-St. Francis-like luggage, and my precious fur overcoat, I encountered a pale, ascetic-looking French priest,—“L’Abbé Guillmant, Vicar General, Arras (Pas-de-Calais), France;” he wrote out his address for me,—who, looking at me over his French Baedeker every now and then, finally asked in his own tongue, “Do you Speak French?” I shook my head deprecatingly and smiled regretfully. “Italiano?” Again I had to shake my head. “C’est triste!” he said, and went on reading. He was clad in a black cassock that reached to his feet, the buttons ranging nicely down his chest, and carried only a small portmanteau and an umbrella. We reached the hotel and I found that he was stopping there. Once on the way up he waved his hand out of the window and said something. I think he was indicating that we could see Perugia further up the valley. In the dining-room where I found him after being assigned to my room he offered me his bill-of-fare and indicated that a certain Italian dish was the best.
This hotel to which we had come was a bare little affair. It was new enough—one of Cook’s offerings,—to which all the tourists traveling under the direction of that agency are sent. The walls were quite white and clean. The ceilings of the rooms were high, over high latticed windows and doors. My room, I found, gave upon a balcony which commanded the wonderful sweep of plain below.
The dining-room contained six or seven other travelers bound either southward towards Rome or northward towards Perugia and Florence. It was a rather hazy day, not cold and not warm, but cheerless. I can still hear the clink of the knives and forks as the few guests ate in silence or conversed in low tones. Travelers in this world seem almost innately fearsome of each other, particularly when they are few in number and meet in some such out-of-the-way place as this. My Catholic Abbé was longing to be sociable with me, I could feel it; but this lack of a common tongue prevented him, or seemed to. As I was leaving I asked the proprietor to say to him that I was sorry that I did not speak French, that if I did I would be glad to accompany him; and he immediately reported that the Abbé said, Would I not come along, anyhow? “He haav ask,” said the proprietor, a small, stout, dark man, “weel you not come halong hanyhow?”
“Certainly,” I replied. And so the Abbé Guillmant and I, apparently not understanding a word of each other’s language, started out sightseeing together—I had almost said arm-in-arm.
I soon learned that while my French priest did not speak English, he read it after a fashion, and if he took plenty of time he could form an occasional sentence. It took time, however. He began,—in no vivid or enthusiastic fashion, to be sure,—to indicate what the different things were as we went along.
Now the sights of Assisi are not many. If you are in a hurry and do not fall in love with the quaint and picturesque character of it and its wonderful views you can do them all in a day,—an afternoon if you skimp. There is the church of St. Francis with its associated monastery (what an anachronism a monastery seems in connection with St. Francis, who thought only of huts of branches, or holes in the rocks!) with its sepulcher of the saint in the lower church, and the frescoed scenes from St. Francis’s life by Giotto in the upper; the church of St. Clare (Santa Chiara) with its tomb and the body of that enthusiastic imitator of St. Francis; the Duomo, or cathedral, begun in 1134—a rather poor specimen of a cathedral after some others—and the church of St. Damiano, which was given—the chapel of it—to St. Francis by the Benedictine monks of Monte Subasio soon after he had begun his work of preaching the penitential life. There is also the hermitage of the Carceri, where, in small holes in the rocks the early Franciscans led a self-depriving life, and the new church raised on the site of the house belonging to Pietro Bernardone, the father of St. Francis, who was in the cloth business.
I cannot say that I followed with any too much enthusiasm the involved architectural, historical, artistic, and religious details of these churches and chapels. St. Francis, wonderful “jongleur of God” that he was, was not interested in churches and chapels so much as he was in the self-immolating life of Christ. He did not want his followers to have monasteries in the first place. “Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire.” I liked the church of St. Francis, however, for in spite of the fact that it is gray and bare as befits a Franciscan edifice, it is a double church—one below the other, and seemingly running at right angles; and they are both large Gothic churches, each complete with sacristy, choir nave, transepts and the like. The cloister is lovely, in the best Italian manner, and through the interstices of the walls wonderful views of the valley below may be secured. The lower church, gray and varied in its interior, is rich in frescoes by Cimabue and others dealing with the sacred vows of the Franciscans, the upper (the nave) decorated with frescoes by Giotto, illustrating the life of St. Francis. The latter interested me immensely because I knew by now that these were almost the beginning of Italian and Umbrian religious art and because Giotto, from the evidences his work affords, must have been such a naïve and pleasant old soul. I fairly laughed aloud as I stalked about this great nave of the upper church—the Abbé was still below—at some of the good old Italian’s attempts at characterization and composition. It is no easy thing, if you are the founder of a whole line of great artists, called upon to teach them something entirely new in the way of life-expression, to get all the wonderful things you see and feel into a certain picture or series of pictures, but Giotto tried it and he succeeded very well, too. The decorations are not great, but they are quaint and lovely, even if you have to admit at times that an apprentice of to-day could draw and compose better. He couldn’t “intend” better, however, nor convey more human tenderness and feeling in gay, light coloring,—and therein lies the whole secret!
There are some twenty-eight of these frescoes ranged along the lower walls on either side—St. Francis stepping on the cloak of the poor man who, recognizing him as a saint, spread it down before him; St. Francis giving his cloak to the poor nobleman; St. Francis seeing the vision of the palace which was to be reared for him and his followers; St. Francis in the car of fire; St. Francis driving the devils away from Arezzo; St. Francis before the Sultan; St. Francis preaching to the birds; and so on. It was very charming. I could not help thinking what a severe blow has been given to religious legend since those days however; nowadays, except in the minds of the ignorant, saints and devils and angels and stigmata and holy visions have all but disappeared. The grand phantasmagoria of religious notions as they relate to the life of Christ have all but vanished, for the time being anyhow, even in the brains of the masses, and we are having an invasion of rationalism or something approximating it, even at the bottom. The laissez-faire opportunism which has characterized the men at the top in all ages is seeping down to the bottom. Via the newspaper and the magazine, even in Italy—in Assisi—something of astronomy, botany, politics and mechanics, scientifically demonstrated, is creeping in. The inflow seems very meager as yet, a mere trickle, but it has begun. Even in Assisi I saw newspapers and a weekly in a local barber-shop. The natives—the aged ones—very thin, shabby and pale, run into the churches at all hours of the day to prostrate themselves before helpless saints; but nevertheless the newspapers are in the barber-shops. Old Cosimo Medici’s truism that governments are not managed by paternosters is slowly seeping down. We have scores of men in the world to-day as able as old Cosimo Medici and as ruthless. We will have hundreds and thousands after a while, only they will be much more circumspect in their ruthlessness and they will work hard for the State. Perhaps there won’t be so much useless praying before useless images when that time comes. The thought of divinity in the individual needs to be more fully developed.
While I was wandering thus and ruminating I was interested at the same time in the faithful enthusiasm my Abbé was manifesting in the details of the art of this great church. He followed me about for a time in my idle wanderings as I studied the architectural details of this one of the earliest of Gothic churches and then he went away by himself, returning every so often to find in my guide-book certain passages which he wanted me to read, pointing to certain frescoes and exclaiming, “Giotto!” “Cimabue!” “Andrea da Bologna!” Finally he said in plain English, but very slowly: “Did—you—ever—read—a—life—of St. Francis?”
I must confess that my knowledge of the intricacies of Italian art, aside from the lines of its general development, is slim. Alas, dabbling in Italian art, and in art in general, is like trifling with some soothing drug—the more you know the more you want to know.
We continued our way and finally we found a Franciscan monk who spoke both English and French—a peculiar-looking man, tall, and athletic, who appeared to be very widely experienced in the world, indeed. He explained more of the frescoes, the history of the church, the present state of the Franciscans here, and so on.
The other places Franciscan, as I have said, did not interest me so much, though I accompanied my friend, the Abbé, wherever he was impelled to go. He inquired about New York, looking up and waving his hand upward as indicating great height, great buildings, and I knew he was thinking of our skyscrapers. “American bar!” he said, twittering to himself like a bird, “American stim-eat [steam heat]; American ’otel.”
I had to smile.
Side by side we proceeded through the church of St. Clare, the Duomo, the new church raised on the site of the house that belonged to Pietro Bernardone, the father of the saint; and finally to the Church of San Damiano, where after St. Francis had seen the vision of the new life, he went to pray. After it was given him by the Benedictines he set about the work of repairing it and when once it was in charge of the poor Clares, after resigning the command of his order, he returned thither to rest and compose the “Canticle of the Law.” I never knew until I came to Assisi what a business this thing of religion is in Italy—how valuable the shrines and churches of an earlier day are to its communities. Thousands of travelers must pass this way each year. They support the only good hotels. Travelers from all nations come, English, French, German, American, Russian, and Japanese. The attendants at the shrines reap a small livelihood from the tips of visitors and they are always there, lively and almost obstreperous in their attentions. The oldest and most faded of all the guides and attendants throng about the churches and shrines of Assisi, so old and faded that they seemed almost epics of poverty. My good priest was for praying before every shrine. He would get down on his knees and cross himself, praying four or five minutes while I stood irreligiously in the background, looking at him and wondering how long he would be. He prayed before the tomb of St. Francis in the Franciscan church; before the body of St. Clare (clothed in a black habit and shown behind a glass case), in the church of St. Clare; before the altar in the chapel of Saint Damiano, where St. Francis had first prayed; and so on. Finally when we were all through, and it was getting late evening, he wanted to go down into the valley, near the railroad station, to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the cell in which St. Francis died, is located. He thought I might want to leave him now, but I refused. We started out, inquiring our way of the monks at Saint Damiano and found that we had to go back through the town. One of the monks, a fat, bare-footed man, signaled me to put on my hat, which I was carrying because I wanted to enjoy the freshness of the evening wind. It had cleared off now, the sun had come out and we were enjoying one of those lovely Italian spring evenings which bring a sense of childhood to the heart. The good monk thought I was holding my hat out of reverence to his calling. I put it on.
We went back through the town and then I realized how lovely the life of a small Italian town is, in spring. Assisi has about five thousand population. It was cool and pleasant. Many doorways were now open, showing evening fires within the shadows of the rooms. Some children were in the roadways. Carts and wains were already clattering up from the fields below and church-bells—the sweetest echoes from churches here and there in the valley and from those here in Assisi—exchanged melodies. We walked fast because it was late and when we reached the station it was already dusk. The moon had risen, however, and lighted up this great edifice, standing among a ruck of tiny homes. A number of Italian men and women were grouped around a pump outside—those same dark, ear-ringed Italians with whom we are now so familiar in America. The church was locked, but my Abbé went about to the cloister gate which stood at one side of the main entrance, and rang a bell. A brown-cowled monk appeared and they exchanged a few words. Finally with many smiles we were admitted into a moonlit garden, where cypress trees and box and ilex showed their lovely forms, and through a long court that had an odor of malt, as if beer were brewed here, and so finally by a circuitous route into the main body of the church and the chapel containing the cell of St. Francis. It was so dark by now that only the heaviest objects appeared distinctly, the moonlight falling faintly through several of the windows. The voices of the monks sounded strange and sonorous, even though they talked in low tones. We walked about looking at the great altars, the windows, and the high, flat ceiling. We went into the chapel, lined on either side by wooden benches, occupied by kneeling monks, and lighted by one low, swinging lamp which hung before the cell in which St. Francis died. There was much whispering of prayers here and the good Abbé was on his knees in a moment praying solemnly.
St. Francis certainly never contemplated that his beggarly cell would ever be surrounded by the rich marbles and bronze work against which his life was a protest. He never imagined, I am sure, that in spite of his prayer for poverty, his Order would become rich and influential and that this, the site of his abstinence, would be occupied by one of the most ornate churches in Italy. It is curious how barnacle-wise the spirit of materiality invariably encrusts the ideal! Christ died on the cross for the privilege of worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” after he had preached the sermon on the mount,—and then you have the gold-incrusted, power-seeking, wealth-loving Papacy, with women and villas and wars of aggrandizement and bastardy among the principal concomitants. And following Francis, imitating the self-immolation of the Nazarene, you have another great Order whose churches and convents in Italy are among the richest and most beautiful. And everywhere you find that lust for riches and show and gormandizing and a love of seeming what they are not, so that they may satisfy a faint scratching of the spirit which is so thickly coated over that it is almost extinguished.
Or it may be that the ideal is always such an excellent device wherewith to trap the unwary and the unsophisticated. “Feed them with a fine-seeming and then put a tax on their humble credulity” seems to be the logic of materialism in regard to the mass. Anything to obtain power and authority! Anything to rule! And so you have an Alexander VI, Vicar of Christ, poisoning cardinals and seizing on estates that did not belong to him: leading a life of almost insane luxury; and a Medicean pope interested in worldly fine art and the development of a pagan ideal.