Personal Pleasures (8 page)

“If you find any pretty insects, keep them in a box,” Dr. Browne of Norwich wrote to his son in France. So also did we desire to do. But authority was against us; we were given to understand that in boxes our fireflies would pine, extinguish, and die. So we released the lucent sparks; they fled to join the host of dancing candles that bespangled the hills.

In the midsummer moonlight, with enormous golden stars empatining a violet sky, and these tiny bright ones skipping among black shadows about the lemon-sweet, frog-sung mountains, the world on St. John's Eve was incredible yet familiar, like worlds known in dreams.

But they never would let us stay out in it all night.

Christmas woke me early, in the small dark hours, as if someone had touched me on the shoulder and said, Wake up, wake up, it's Christmas. I woke up and it was dark, and would not be Christmas for hours. I crawled to the foot of the bed, to where it hung on the painted iron bedrail, the large woollen stocking that had yawned so emptily overnight, but now so stiffly, bulkily, swollenly bulged. It might not be opened until daylight, but I felt it outside, pinching and poking its various protuberances, from the square cornery one above the knee to the round one in the toe that might be an orange or a glass witchball. Shivers of ecstasy curdled my blood as I fingered and felt; my hair stared, my skin goosed, my pulses hammered in heart and head. It was Christmas Day. However often I whispered it, I could scarcely credit so strange, so preposterous, so heavenly a fact. Christmas Day had indeed arrived. But how could it really, actually, in point of fact, have come, and I in bed as usual, in the same red flannel pyjamas as on any other night? Yet Christmas Day must come; one had long expected it, and here it was. Perhaps it was a dream.

But of a sudden the still dark was shaken and shattered and a-clamour with bells. Not the gay sweet
chiming of an English church peal, but harsh, clanging, iron, tremendous, a very roar and tumult of noise. The great Roman brick tower of Sant Ambrogio in the large piazza outside the windows, the striped black and white tower of San Domenico in the small piazza up the street, the more distant, but patronal, Santa Caterina along the sea road beyond the town, the church of the Collegio up the hill path, the chapel of the convent school, all with one accord awoke to Christmas morning and clanged their summons to Mass. They were insistent, commanding, almost menacing. English bells, sweetly and uncertainly tumbling as they chime, seem to sing,
Come along to church, good people if you please, come along to church on Christmas Day
. These bells cry,
Venite, venite, il Signore v'aspetta, levatevi pronto, pronto, e fate il dovere
.

But to me they only shouted,
Christmas Day! Christmas Day!

Soon the piazza and streets were alive with hurrying feet, and with such resonant cries as Italians emit even between bed and Mass.

I crawled back under the bed-clothes and curled up to wait for Christmas Day. When it should be held to have fully arrived, we should all assemble on one bed and open the stockings. To me, lying in the clanging dark, forbidden to go and wake others before it was light, the propitious and blest day seemed half the night away. How foolishly the others slept, oblivious of the jubilant occasion!

Full little thought they than

That the mighty
Pan

Was kindly come to live with them below;

Perhaps their loves, or els their sheep
,

Was all that did their silly thoughts so busie keep
.

Whatever it was, and regardless of the bells, they slept like pigs in straw.

How dignified, how stately, how elegant, with ranks of tapers wavering gold against a dim background, while boys' voices lift the psalm
Audite hæc, omnes
high above the pealing organ to the high embowed roof, to linger and wander there among ten thousand cells. Through the windows richly dight, slant crimson, violet and deep blue rays of October evening sunshine; it touches the round heads and white surplices of little singing boys; it glints on the altar, dimming the tall, flickering flames, gleaming on the heads of thoughtful clergymen who listen to the quire's chant.
For he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth: neither shall his pomp follow him. For while he lived he counted himself an happy man: and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee. He shall follow the generation of his fathers: and shall never see light. Man being in honour hath no understanding: but is compared unto the beasts that perish. …

The soft and melancholy chant dies on a falling lilt. The clergy, quire and people sit down in deep oak seats, all but the lector, who rustles to the lectern,
adjusts his pince-nez, and says gently,
“Here begin-neth the first verse of the sixth chapter of the Book of Micah. Hear ye now what the Lord saith: Arise, contend thou before the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice. …”

The musical Eton-and-Cambridge monotone, just not parsonically pitched, strolls on, relating the Lord's controversy in the mountains with his people. I turn the pages of my Prayer Book, read the charming rubrics, read the Preface, of 1662, so gentlemanlike, so suavely urbane.
It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes. …

And then, Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished and some retained. …
And moreover, they be neither dark nor dumb ceremonies, but are so set forth, that every man may understand what they do mean, and to what use they do serve. … And in these our doings we condemn no other Nations, nor prescribe anything but to our own people only: For we think it convenient that every Country should use such Ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God's honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living. …

Meanwhile, the Eton-and-Cambridge voice is gently putting searching inquiries, becoming reluctantly menacing.
Are there yet
, it asks,
the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the
wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? … Therefore also will I make thee sick in smiting thee, in making thee desolate because of thy sins. Thou shalt eat, but not be satisfied. … Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil, and sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine. … That I should make thee a desolation, and the inhabitants thereof a hissing. …

It has grown too violent, this mountain controversy.
Here endeth the first Lesson
, and so to the Magnificat. One feels that it was time.

These violent Hebrews: they break in strangely, with hot Eastern declamation and gesture, into our tranquil Anglican service, our so ordered and so decent Common Prayer. A desolation and a hissing: those are not threats that our kindly clergy like to quote, even against those of their flock who have abominable scant measures and wicked balances. Milton railed against “the oppressions of a simonious, decimating clergy,” but, though they cannot help (since they must live) being decimating, they are no longer so simonious, and are a kindly race.

As to these services, which they long since so gracefully adapted, so fitly, beautifully, and ceremoniously translated and assembled, they are, as Sir John Suckling pointed out three centuries ago, fit for the attendance of even the fastidious Cato, who was disgusted by those of his own age and country. “Then,” complained the shocked Sir John, “the Ceremonies of
Liber Pater
and
Ceres
, how obscene! and those Days which were set apart for the Honour of the Gods, celebrated with such shews as
Cato
himself was ashamed to be present at. On the contrary, our Services are such, as not only
Cato
, but God himself may be there.”

Or so, at least, we hope. No doubt the Romans hoped too that Liber Pater and Ceres were present with them at worship, and that their lectisternia were enjoyed by the reclining and feasting deities. Be that as it may, and whatever the gods may think of it (and one must endeavour not to fall into arrogance in this matter of divine attendance at our worship), for my part I greatly admire and enjoy the Anglican order.

Though of course there is, from time to time, a sermon. … But it seems that this cannot, in any Church, be helped.

Is it because they happen to be the earliest in my memory, that the churches in a small Italian fishing-town still seem to me to be the very concentrated essence of what we mean when we say “church”? Or is it one's mediæval heritage, from the centuries that stretch back through time, through ages of mystery, of what our civilised Anglican Prayer Book calls dark and dumb ceremonies, of harsh chanting in dog-Latin, of swinging censers that smother the musty air and human odours with drifting clouds of aromatic sweetness?
From whatever cause, when I think “church,” I am back in a great, cool, dim, pillared interior, shut from a sunlit piazza by heavy leather door-curtains, clouded with drifts of that agreeable smoke which, while it ascends to heaven, fortunately perfumes all about it, and which we have always so rightly and wisely offered to our gods. Indeed, those churches which do not do so probably make a tactical error which no audible or visual beauty can redeem. Amid these fragrant clouds we advance, past the stoup of holy water which, thinks my mother, needs more frequent changing than it gets, past the notice on the wall which pleads, alas how vainly, “Per l'onore di Dio, e per l'igiene, si prega di non sputare,” into the dim interior, full of scraping wooden chairs, standing men, and old women kneeling as they mutter over their beads. One of these interrupts her orisons to put out a gnarled brown hand to my mother, murmuring mechanically
“Ave Maria, piena di grazia
, un soldino, signora, per l'amore di Dio.
Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell' ora della nostra morte”
. We kneel on chairs, our chins resting on their backs, and listen to that nasally monotonous chanting which seems to be the most widely and long approved tone in which to address one's God. Anyhow to me it seemed, and seems, to have a certain fitness and rightness which less primitive accents lack. It seems the voice of the whole world at worship; a black savage, an Australian aborigine, would surely feel at home with it, as with the fragrant smoking
spices and gums, and the gaudily clad wax or plaster figures who stand in niches round the church, some cruelly transfixed with swords or arrows, some enwreathed with paper flowers, but all with patient eyes upturned to heaven, and all with rows of candles guttering about them. A charming hagiary; I could not then, I cannot now, hear them scorned without resentment. Often one or another of them would be carried by a procession, on his or her festa, out of church and all round the town, and then they appeared to greater advantage than ever. Those adorable processions: I can scarcely admit to the status of a real religion a church which does not have them. A church, like a monarchy, must be potentially and occasionally processional, must show itself for worship and jubilee in the open, must at times be peregrinating and agoral, and wind, rich in pomps and gauds, through marketplace, street and town. Pomps and gauds, chanting and sweet smells, ceremonious adoration and mystery—if these be not the fit circumstance and habit of worship, the worshipping world has for many thousands of years erred.

At all events, when I say “church,” I am incense-shrouded, wax-saint-surrounded, kneeling on a high-backed chair on an uneven stone floor much
sputato
, among neighbours who tell their beads and have eaten garlic, and the primitive, eternal chanting drones on before a gaudy high altar, where peasant priests, richly vestured, genuflect, advance and retreat in stately measure. From the sun-baked piazza without come the
voices of men, who, in order not to waste their time, are waiting for the essential moment to enter, and meanwhile are lounging outside the drogheria, or hitting a ball through hoops. And, through and beyond this male clatter, there whispers, sighs and lisps the delicately turning edge of the summer sea, running lightly up the sand, drawing back, rustling like a cicada's wings.

But see, one of the priests is in the pulpit; he is preaching about
I'inferno
, its horrid and enduring torments. Well, that too is primitive; one hears in it the rolling thunders of the Christian Church down the ages, the awful fulminations, denunciations, miniations, of saints, popes, councils, prophets and poets, who have never scrupled or boggled at fiery damnation, or at the horrid picture of Satan and his tailed minions at work. Like pomp and ceremony, hell also has always been part of religion. Anglicans have forgotten it, have gently, rationally and fastidiously damped down and blurred over that fiery scarlet patch in the cosmography of religion, turning it into a vague cloud which they call the unsearchable and incalculable mercy of God. You will hear no hell-fire sermons from them; and when one of the creeds formulated by Councils in less delicate ages speaks with zest of without doubt perishing everlastingly, there is an Anglican agitation to have it omitted from services.

But there is no such squeamish humanitarian nonsense about Roman Catholics, and to this day you may hear from Irish and Latin pulpits the genuine old
world sizzling of frying souls, which gives such zest to being still above ground, such determination to make a good end.

The sermon is over; the preacher descends; for a moment one hears again that rustling, sighing whisper from the seashore, before the chant of Christian believers sings above it:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terræ visibilium omnium et invisibilium. …