Idling in Italy Part 7

-Lytton Strachey.

Samuel Butler's "Note-books" and "The Auth.o.r.ess of the Odyssey" added to the delights of the spring of 1915, which I spent in Sicily. The former, which is the quintessence of his wisdom and his impudence, gave revealing peeps into the mental and emotional make-up of the man who in "Erewhon" forecast the advent of the supremacy of machines and antic.i.p.ated Mrs. Eddy in considering disease a sin and a crime, and the latter gave a quickened interest to Trapani, Segesta, and many other places, some of which have since become shrines in my memory.

From these "Note-Books" and from "The Way with All Flesh," which gave a remarkable vista of his own unconscious mind as well as those of his ancestors, I made a vivid picture of the author. It has been blurred, and in some respects quite erased by the two ma.s.sive biographic volumes recently given to the world by Mr. Henry Festing Jones,[A] and which depicts him in all the nakedness of his virtues and his infirmities, revealing an unloving and unlovable character. Some day it will be explained to us why we cannot be left in possession of the cherished delusions that add to our happiness, increase our good-will toward our fellow men, and in no wise impair the reputations of those to whom they are directed.

One of the things that is most difficult to forgive a biographer is the wealth of sordid details they give us about our G.o.ds. Who can forgive Ranieri, for instance, for having told us with so much particularity that Leopardi hated to change his s.h.i.+rt or to take a bath, that he had a pa.s.sion for cheap sweets, that he insisted upon keeping the servants of the household where he was a guest up until midnight in order that he might have his princ.i.p.al meal, that he was morbidly susceptible to adulation? It does not advantage any one to know such things, even if they are true, and if it serves any laudable purpose I am not aware that it has been set forth.

Mr. Jones's biography is painfully candid and distressingly frank and confidential.

Samuel Butler's life was one of rebellion and resignation, of contention and strife, of unhappiness and unyieldingness, of disappointment and suspicion, of wrongheartedness and rightmindedness, of rude energy and crude revery. He had a vanity of his intellectual capacity that transcends all understanding and a pa.s.sion for what he called doing things thoroughly. He believed in the music of Handel, in the art of Giovanni Bellini, and his credo was the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, which apotheosizes charity and humility. Samuel Butler may have had charity and humility on his lips, but I fail to find from reading his biography that they ever got as far as his heart. He had an unhappy childhood, a perturbed adolescence, a lonely and isolated early manhood, an obsessed maturity, and an emotionally sterile old age. He hated his father, he pitied his mother, he barely tolerated his sisters, and he suspected the integrity and motives of his ill.u.s.trious contemporaries who, though polite to him, personally ignored him controversially. Indeed, part of the time he must have felt himself a modern, though tame Ishmael, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him.

Although he had a few forgiving, appreciative friends, a constant and ardent mistress, and a devoted servant who mothered and domineered him, engrossing interests and boundless energy, still he was chronically unhappy, the sweetness of his soul being embittered by contempt of his fellow men.

The offspring of a narrow-minded, obstinate, inflexible, selfish father and a gentle, reverential, yielding, and kindly mother, it was taken for granted that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman. He found when he began to take thought that he could not accept the Christian miracles or believe in a personal, anthropomorphic G.o.d. So he went to New Zealand and became a successful sheep-grazer, and within five years he had more than doubled the four thousand pounds which he had been able to screw from his father.

His life during these years is interesting in so much as it shows how a man of education and breeding lived in the bush while developing intellectually. The devil often tempted him there, but not always with success, though he became terribly fussed over the death and resurrection of Christ. He thought and wrote about it, but he was not successfully delivered from his dilemma until the idea of "Erewhon" took possession of him. This idea was that machines were about to supplant the human race and be developed into a higher kind of life. When the conception first seized him he wrote to Charles Darwin, whom he started by admiring and ended by despising, that he developed it "for mere fun and because it amused him and without a particle of serious meaning." He had Butler's "a.n.a.logy" in his head as the book at which it should be aimed, but when "Erewhon" appeared most readers thought he had "The Origin of Species" in mind.

From this time one begins to see how extraordinarily laborious were all of Butler's writings. "Erewhon" was not published until eight years later, during which time he had written and rewritten, corrected and re-corrected, pruned, elaborated, and incorporated sentences from letters, records of experiences which he had while prospecting for and developing his sheeprun, and innumerable notes from a commonplace book which he early acquired the art of keeping. Ten years after its publication he wrote to an indiscriminating, ardent admirer: "I don't like 'Erewhon'; still it is good for me."

The next book he wrote, "The Fair Haven," he liked very much, but few others did. When he was a very young man he had written a pamphlet on the Resurrection. He was disappointed that it made little or no impression. Finally he decided it had been written too seriously. It then occurred to him to treat the subject as he had treated the a.n.a.logy of crime and disease in "Erewhon." The book purports to be written by the son of a clergyman, the ant.i.thesis of Butler's father, insane before the ma.n.u.script was completed, and of a mother, the replica of his own mother. A brother gives the book to the world, prefixing a memoir of the author modelled after Butler. The book fell flat. The few who resented it were the sensitive orthodox whose feelings were outraged. Butler could not understand why he was unable to induce people to reconsider the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

The second distinctive characteristic of Butler's make-up was his spirit of G.o.d-I-thank-thee-that-I-am-not-as-other-men.

When Butler left New Zealand he had eight thousand pounds, partly in his pocket and partly invested in the country that had been so bountiful to him; he decided to return to England and devote himself to painting, which he felt convinced was the field of activity in which he gave real promise. It was then from the exceeding high mountain that he saw Charles Payne Pauli, of Winchester, and Pembroke College, Oxford, who had gone out to the colony and found employment on a newspaper. One evening Pauli called upon Butler and stayed talking until midnight. "I suddenly became aware that I had become intimate with a personality quite different from that of any one whom I had ever known." Within a few months there was established a strange intimacy, "one of those one-sided friends.h.i.+ps when a diffident, poetical shy man becomes devoted to the confident, showy, real man as a dog to his master." He loaned Pauli one hundred pounds that he might return with him to England; he maintained him in London until Pauli was called to the bar; then he put him on an allowance which he continued for many years and which used up one-half of his savings and earnings.

When Pauli began to earn a comfortable income at the bar he treated Butler with scorn, though accepting money and food from him. When he died none of the nine thousand pounds which he had acc.u.mulated was left to Butler. Indeed, the latter did not know of his death until he saw a notice of it in the London Times. However, his love for Pauli, which surpa.s.sed understanding, surmounted all obstacles and he wrote a long, detailed account of the relation between himself and Pauli which, his biographer says, if ever printed in full, will be "very painful reading."

Some time before he broke with Pauli he started a friends.h.i.+p with another man which fortunately did not test his indulgence and his generosity to a similar extent, but it was no less remarkable. Indeed, it was more so, for Butler was now fifty-six, and he poured the depleted vessels of his affection upon Hans Rudolf Faesch in such a way as practically to submerge this young man. I doubt if there is anything in literature of men's friends.h.i.+ps which for intensity of pa.s.sion and affection surpa.s.ses the letters which Butler addressed to the young Swiss. The poem, "Out in the Night," addressed to Faesch on his departure for Singapore, is a genuine, impa.s.sioned expression of grief coming straight from the heart. And the letters to Faesch are truly remarkable doc.u.ments. In fact, the letter written to Hans Faesch after he had started for Singapore, when Butler was fifty-nine years old, might well have been written by Pericles to Aspasia or by a sentimental youth to his dulcina. "I should be ashamed of myself for having felt so keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you." And yet we speak of Anglo-Saxon frigidity and aloofness!

Butler would seem never to have been in love in the ordinary usual way. We are justified in concluding that he had only a tenderness for "Madame," who "during the twenty years of intimacy with Butler had no rivals." Certainly he never was in love with Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage, an extraordinary woman whose mentality is reflected in all of Butler's books. From 1871, when he was writing "Erewhon," until her death, in 1885, Butler submitted to Miss Savage everything he wrote, and remodelled in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. Not only did he submit the drafts of his books to her, but the suggestions of many of them originated with her. If ever the soul and spirit of one person operated through another, the soul and spirit of this brilliant woman operated through the apparent mental elaborations of Samuel Butler. She understood him as no one else understood him; she loved him as no other woman loved him. Her devotion to him, her appreciation of his talent, her unrequited love, her unfailing humor and mirth, her incomparable courage when confronted with serious disease and with death, and her apparent willingness that her talent should s.h.i.+ne through him is one of the most extraordinary things in literature. I am at a loss to understand why neither his biographers nor the critics of Butler's writings have given the subject adequate consideration.

Some years ago a youthful Austrian psychopath, Weininger, wrote a book, "Geschlecht und Charakter," which had great popularity. It was widely read in the original and in translations. Amongst other things that he discussed was the s.e.x endowment of man. The hundred per cent male is very uncommon, and he is rarely encountered amongst creative artists. The feminine percentage in them is considerable, often more than fifty per cent. Samuel Butler had many feminine traits. He was vain, gossipy, vindictive, swayed by his emotions, and he allowed himself to be wooed by a woman. He took from Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage without giving a quid pro quo or even acknowledgment. He did not have the courage to say to her in the flesh what he said of her in the grave. He sold to the public as of his own manufacture the warp and woof of her intellectual weavings. Her letters, which form such a large part of the first volume of these memoirs and which Butler wrote to her father "the like of which I have never elsewhere seen," testify the public debt to her contracted in the name of Samuel Butler.

The wit, humor, irony, and sarcasm of these letters all combine to reveal a remarkable soul and rare personality. For twenty years she was a true, steadfast, resourceful, sympathetic helpmate to Samuel Butler. He accepted her amatory homage and her literary co-operation, and she might legitimately have inferred from his letters that she was somatically as well as spiritually sympathetic. Many women have convinced themselves that their pa.s.sion was reciprocated by men who gave less tangible evidence of it than Samuel Butler gave Miss Savage. That she loved him there can be no doubt, but her unaesthetic appearance appalled him, her halting stride annoyed him, and her loving attentions bored him. Some years after her death he composed two sonnets to her memory, the first exquisitely vulgar, the second painfully pathetic.

"She was too kind, wooed too persistently, Wrote moving letters to me day by day; The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I, The more she gave, the less could I repay, Therefore I grieve not that I was not loved But that, being loved, I could not love again.

I liked; but like and love are far removed; Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.

For she was plain and lame and fat and short, Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell That, though I loved her in a certain sort, Yet did I love too wisely but not well.

Ah! had she been more beauteous or less kind She might have found me of another mind.

"And now, though twenty years are come and gone, That little lame lady's face is with me still; Never a day but what, on every one, She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.

She said she wished I knew not wrong from right; It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite, Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.

'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true, A man will yield for pity if he can, But if the flesh rebels what can he do?

I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long The wrong I did in that I did no wrong."

Her memory deserves a better fate than interment in Mr. Jones's huge mausoleum.

The third of Samuel Butler's distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics was that he was incapable of falling in love with any one but himself.

He labored prodigiously to become a painter, and during his life he succeeded in having five pictures hung in the Royal Academy exposition. However, he never got out of Cla.s.s C as a painter, and when he was forty-one he forsook the brush for the pen. Meanwhile he had (according to his father) killed his mother by the publication of "Erewhon," launched "The Fair Haven," got thoroughly enmeshed in the teachings of Darwin and the contentions of Mivart, Lamarck, and others, plunged into h.e.l.lenic literature to give it specificity of origin and display, and was otherwise very busy pus.h.i.+ng over statues of heroes which he mistook for tin soldiers. Early in life he began keeping notes. His principle was that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. When he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. He was his own Boswell with all of that immortal's colloquiality and ingenuousness. He did not hesitate to make frank comments on the people he met, and photographic descriptions of such individuals, of his family and friends, and their letters went to make up the novel (if novel a narrative of fact can be called) through which he was made known to the general public, and by which he will probably be longest remembered, namely, "The Way of All Flesh." It was begun when he was thirty-one and finished fifteen years later. Because it is autobiographical, and biographical of his family and friends, he found the necessity of frequently rewriting it, as time, event, and G.o.d changed them.

This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of that book. It had an artificial popularity-Mr. G. Bernard Shaw being the artificer. There was one thing about it concerning which every one agreed: to pillory your parents in public is the equivalent of beating them up in private.

The fourth of Samuel Butler's characteristics was insensitiveness to what is generally called refinement or finer feeling. Though an artist he had little aesthetic awareness. If he knew the canons of good taste he did not subscribe to them. What he called his little jokes, which Mr. Jones relates with great gustfulness, is the ample proof of this accusation. "What is more subversive of a sultan's dignity than pinching his leg? Pinching his sultana's leg." "We shall not get infanticide, permission of suicide, cheap and easy divorce, and other social arrangements till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid." Cheap and vulgar prost.i.tution of intellectual possession a gentleman would call it.

Mr. Jones and Alfred, clerk, valet, and general attendant, "a live young thing about the place, and a cheerful addition to 15 Clifford's Inn," became very intimate with Butler. Mr. Jones had been a barrister, but had abandoned the law and was under a modest retainer of two hundred a year from Butler to give him Boswellian service. They found Butler companionable, and there are such indications as letters from casual acquaintances, particularly in Italy, to show that he was agreeable and sympathetic to some persons.

Aside from these there is very little in these two ma.s.sive volumes to testify to the kindness, gentleness, simpleness, and humility of Samuel Butler. Apparently he disliked every one with whom he had to do or with whom he came in contact, save Mr. Pauli, Mr. Faesch, Lord Beaconsfield, and Richard Garnett. Still he was pleased with Mr. Garnett's discomfiture on hearing his lecture on "The Humor of Homer." Searching Mr. Jones's plethoric volumes carefully, it is difficult to find kind or appreciative words for contemporary or forebear.

"How many years was it before I learned to dislike Thackeray or Tennyson as much as I do now?" "Middlemarch is a long-winded piece of studied brag." "What a wretch Carlyle must be to run Goethe as he has done!" "We talked about Charlotte Bronte; Butler did not like her." "I do not like Mr. W. J. Stillman at all." "I do not remember that Edwin Lear told us anything particularly amusing." "All I remember about John Morley is that I disliked and distrusted him." "I dislike Rossetti's face and his manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends." "No, I do not like Lamb; you see Canon Anger writes about him, and Canon Anger goes to tea with my sisters." "Blake was no good because he learned Italian at over sixty in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying." "I said I was glad Stanley was dead." "I never read a line of Marcus Aurelius that left me wiser than I was before." Speaking of Maeterlinck, who was then coming to his estate, "Now a true genius cannot so soon be recognized. If a man of thirty-five can get such admiration he is probably a very good man, but he is not one of those who will redeem Israel." Though Butler was fascinated by G. Bellini, he surely had heard of Raphael.

Darwin, Wallace, Ray Lankester, most of the scientists of his time who did not fully agree with him; novelists, philosophers, artists, poets-all excited his disapproval. When he was fifty-three he made a note to remind himself to call Tennyson the Darwin of poetry and Darwin the Tennyson of science. Thus would he empty the vials of his wrath and contempt.

He acided his system, as the Italians say, with hatred and envy of his fellow man who had achieved fame or who was upon the road to it. It is difficult to rid one's mind of the thought that the motive that prompted him to literary work was that he might show how contemptibly inadequate the masters were or had been, all of them save Handel and G. Bellini.

Samuel Butler took himself with great solemnity. He believed what he wanted to believe and he believed he knew about many things far better than experts and empiricists. When they did not agree with him he took great umbrage and wrote disagreeable letters to them or made disparaging references to them in his notes. "He never could form an opinion on a subject until he had established his volatile thoughts and caged them in a note. This enabled him to make up his mind." Thus he made up his mind, aided by Miss Savage, that "The Odyssey" was written by a female, or, to use his felicitous expression, "any woman save Mrs. Barrett Browning."

Samuel Butler's most deforming characteristic was lack of reverence. He was endowed with an orderly mind. It was his pa.s.sion and pastime to train and develop it. He never let anything stand in the way of accomplis.h.i.+ng that purpose. His greatest literary gift was his capacity for presenting evidence. His chief weakness was his incapacity to gather evidence. He a.s.sumed certain things and then proceeded to prove to the reader that they were facts. This is a procedure that has never had favor in the courts or in the laboratories. Neither has it been accepted as a legitimate procedure in what might be called constructive literature, critical or creative. The only place where it has ever been received with favor is the pulpit, and Samuel Butler was the true son of the cloth which he did so much to deride and from which he believed he had divested himself.

We should never have known what a pathetic figure he was if Mr. Jones had not seen fit in his affection and his obsession to reveal him to us. We can forgive Mr. Jones for this, however, because of his belief that Samuel Butler is immortal. Would that we could also forgive him for publis.h.i.+ng a portrait of Mr. Butler standing before the hearth in the sitting-room of his home-in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves! We could not have been more shocked had we found that he wore garters around his arms to regulate the length of his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. England indeed is changed. This life of Butler gives the lie to Britishers' reputation for stolidity and formality.

CHAPTER X SAINTS AND SINNERS

Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom. Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here. "What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a new adaptation of living to dying-a new Death?" is the way one of them expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading. The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists.

Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall, particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The philosopher accepts it as a part of G.o.d's programme: some he allows to succ.u.mb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all mankind, the greatest safety.

We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres, concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so const.i.tuted that he must display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days of the war?

The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful-that is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp. But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of a.s.sisi, to which the professing or professional Christian conforms even approximately; and because his fellow man, prost.i.tuting it in some similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him, he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as infidel and unbeliever.

I have no intention of prophesying whether the church will weather the storm in which it is now floundering or not. I think very likely it will. One reason for so thinking is that it has weathered all previous storms; one of them five hundred years ago was of severity that will never be forgotten. Since then education and enlightenment have lifted man from the supine obedience and resignation of the domestic animal, and he has demanded, and in a measure obtained, his worldly rights. This encourages me to believe that he may soon demand his spiritual rights: liberation from the tyranny imposed upon his mind by the Junkers of the church, freedom to look upon G.o.d as the fountainhead of wisdom, mercy, and love who mediates succor to the poor, the mourning, and the meek more willingly than to the rich, the joyous, and the arrogant; liberty to live according to the mandates of Christ and to die in confidence that his pledges will be redeemed. Another reason is that man must have a religion. Individual man can live without it, but collective man cannot, and there is not the slightest sign of the second coming of Christ. Religion was never so openly repudiated as during the Great War, and it never wielded as little influence on the determinations of man's conduct as it does to-day. Those who convince themselves otherwise make themselves immune to the teachings of experience.

The paucity of men who have the capacity for constructive statesmans.h.i.+p is pitiable, but how trifling is such a capacity compared with that required to formulate the tenets of a livable new religion! The practices of the church to-day are not those of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was steeped in every conceivable kind of depravity, licentiousness, simony, wealth, power, arrogance, avarice, and flattery; when it betrayed its mission to protect the weak; when it fornicated with the princes of the world; when it crucified Jesus in the name of egoism. But in what way has it espoused the sacred cause of the lowly, the best-beloved of Him who died that eternal happiness might be vouchsafed us? If Christ's vicar could remain silent without being called to account as was the case a few years ago when we were offering our fathers on the sacrificial altar for the liberation from slavery of G.o.d's ebony image, it is not likely that he will be called on to explain a similar silence during the Great War. I do not profess to say, not even to know, the att.i.tude of the hierarchy which governed the Roman Catholic church toward the war. If it was Germanophile or Austrophile, it was more wicked than the harlot of Babylon. I should say the same had it been Anglophile or Francophile. The man who can believe that the temporal head of the church is the infallible spiritual guide of her adherents cannot believe that it should take sides against any of her own people. "The house divided against itself must fall." What I should like from the church is a definition of her att.i.tude toward war. She teaches her children what their conduct should be about indulging their genesic extent, about the property and person of their fellow men, about intemperance of language and of appet.i.te. Why not about war? What troubles me with the church is not so much the determination to keep her children in ignorance, nor that she has her back to the door which opens upon a vista of the world's progress and advance, hoping that she may keep it closed in the face of the divine forces of evolutionary progress which are seeking to push it open. That might be tolerated, but not her arrogation of self-sufficiency, her a.s.sumption of self-satisfaction, her boasted immutability, her sanctimonious semblance of resignation, her mumblings of archaic sayings in a language that neither its votaries nor one-half its priests understand, her profession to protect the weak and aid the poor while at the same time she bends the knee to the rich and traffics with emperors.

Though I lived nearly two years in the city where the church's mediaeval gorgeousness is more striking than in any other city of the world, and where its chief stronghold is, it was rarely that its practices or its preachings disturbed my spiritual equanimity, my belief in G.o.d, or my fathomless faith. Nearly every day my duties took me through the Piazza of St. Peter and along the Vatican Gardens, and my thought was more often of his mediaeval predecessors than of the voluntary "prisoner" who, while occupying the sumptuous palace, eats out his heart because he is not allowed to be a temporal sovereign-in other words, to be the ant.i.thesis of Him whose vicar he claims to be.

One morning, after I read the communiques and had that glow of satisfaction in the accomplishments of my fellow men, that feeling of pride which every ally had during the last weeks of the war, I turned the paper and saw the arresting headline, "Translation of the Bones of St. Petronius," and I read:

"This morning at eight o'clock the Holy Father, accompanied by the pontifical court, repaired to the Sistine Chapel, where were gathered the residents of Bologna who had come to Rome for the occasion. The pope, clad in sacred vestments, celebrated the ma.s.s and gave communion to those present. After the ma.s.s Cardinal Gusmimi, Archbishop of Bologna, gave a brief discourse, while the pope sat on the throne. The pope then responded, recalling the religious glory of Bologna and the life of the sainted Bishop Petronius. He then covered himself with other sacred vestments appropriate for the occasion and a.s.sisted the archbishop of Bologna in taking from the provisory urn the bones of that saintly man who had yielded this life for a place in the heavenly hierarchy many years ago, and placed them in the urn offered by the Bolognese; having done this, he placed the urn on the altar. The ceremony lasted upward of two hours."

In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate, what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better account of their stewards.h.i.+p to their Master were they to devote their time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon-a trainload of men who had been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians?

I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized. When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in a dying state. As a rule, they had been en route for a week, and, though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little evidence of their efforts was to be seen.

Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal secretions that give elasticity to the skin, l.u.s.tre to the hair, sparkle to the eye, and appearance of health to the tout ensemble. She but heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato," "Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, far la sua fotografia." The ways of the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence, voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were, shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator.

They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile, but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope, who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over the portal, "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate." It is some such procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his pa.s.sage through the infernal regions. "Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonche di posa, ma di minor pena." Not only did their faces reveal absolute despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth shoes with wooden soles, gave the finis.h.i.+ng touch to what seemed to be animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked in putrid oil. After those who were able to get on their feet had pa.s.sed out came those who were practically in the throes of death, and those whose minds had been dethroned by suffering and privation. One was able to keep the sob in his throat until they appeared, and then the effort to suppress it was impotent. Indeed,

They had a rendezvous with death When Spring brings back blue days and fair, and they are reconciled that he shall take their hands and lead them into his dark land, as Alan Seeger said in those precious lines which will ornament his memory for many a day.