Val d'Arno Part 11

230. The religion of any man is thus properly to be interpreted, as the feeling which binds him, irrationally, to the fulfilment of duties, or acceptance of beliefs, peculiar to a certain company of which he forms a member, as distinct from the rest of the world. 'Which binds him _irrationally_,' I say;--by a feeling, at all events, apart from reason, and often superior to it; such as that which brings back the bee to its hive, and the bird to her nest.

A man's religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built for him, and partly, by due reverence to former custom, he has built for himself; consisting of whatever imperfect knowledge may have been granted, up to that time, in the land of his birth, of the Divine character, presence, and dealings; modified by the circ.u.mstances of surrounding life.

It may be, that sudden accession of new knowledge may compel him to cast his former idols to the moles and to the bats. But it must be some very miraculous interposition indeed which can justify him in quitting the religion of his forefathers; and, a.s.suredly, it must be an unwise interposition which provokes him to insult it.

231. On the other hand, the value of religious ceremonial, and the virtue of religious truth, consist in the meek fulfilment of the one as the fond habit of a family; and the meek acceptance of the other, as the narrow knowledge of a child. And both are destroyed at once, and the ceremonial or doctrinal prejudice becomes only an occasion of sin, if they make us either wise in our own conceit, or violent in our methods of proselytism. Of those who will compa.s.s sea and land to make one proselyte, it is too generally true that they are themselves the children of h.e.l.l, and make their proselytes twofold more so.

232. And now I am able to state to you, in terms so accurately defined that you cannot misunderstand them, that we are about to study the results in Italy of the victory of an impious Christian over a pious Infidel, in a contest which, if indeed princ.i.p.alities of evil spirit are ever permitted to rule over the darkness of this world, was a.s.suredly by them wholly provoked, and by them finally decided. The war was not actually ended until the battle of Tagliacozzo, fought in August, 1268; but you need not recollect that irregular date, or remember it only as three years after the great battle of Welcome, Benevento; which was the decisive one. Recollect, therefore, securely:

1250. The First Trades Revolt in Florence.

1260. Battle of the Arbia.

1265. Battle of Welcome.

Then between the battle of Welcome and of Tagliacozzo, (which you might almost English in the real meaning of it as the battle of Hart's Death: 'cozzo' is a b.u.t.t or thrust with the horn, and you may well think of the young Conradin as a wild hart or stag of the hills)--between those two battles, in 1266, comes the second and central revolt of the trades in Florence, of which I have to speak in next lecture.

233. The two German princes who perished in these two battles--Manfred of Tarentum, and his nephew and ward Conradin--are the natural son, and the legitimate grandson of Frederick II.: they are also the last a.s.sertors of the infidel German power in south Italy against the Church; and in alliance with the Saracens; such alliance having been maintained faithfully ever since Frederick II.'s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and cornation as its king. Not only a great number of Manfred's forts were commanded by Saracen governors, but he had them also appointed over civil tribunals. My own impression is that he found the Saracens more just and trustworthy than the Christians; but it is proper to remember the allegations of the Church against the whole Suabian family; namely, that Manfred had smothered his father Frederick under cushions at Ferentino; and that, of Frederick's sons, Conrad had poisoned Henry, and Manfred had poisoned Conrad. You will, however, I believe, find the Prince Manfred one of the purest representatives of northern chivalry.

Against his nephew, educated in all knightly accomplishment by his mother, Elizabeth of Bavaria, nothing could be alleged by his enemies, even when resolved on his death, but the splendour of his spirit and the brightness of his youth.

234. Of the character of their enemy, Charles of Anjou, there will remain on your minds, after careful examination of his conduct, only the doubt whether I am justified in speaking of him as Christian against Infidel. But you will cease to doubt this when you have entirely entered into the conditions of this nascent Christianity of the thirteenth century. You will find that while men who desire to be virtuous receive it as the mother of virtues, men who desire to be criminal receive it as the forgiver of crimes; and that therefore, between Ghibelline or Infidel cruelty, and Guelph or Christian cruelty, there is always this difference,--that the Infidel cruelty is done in hot blood, and the Christian's in cold. I hope (in future lectures on the architecture of Pisa) to ill.u.s.trate to you the opposition between the Ghibelline Conti, counts, and the Guelphic Visconti, viscounts or "against counts," which issues, for one thing, in that, by all men blamed as too deliberate, death of the Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. The Count Ugolino was a traitor, who entirely deserved death; but another Count of Pisa, entirely faithful to the Ghibelline cause, was put to death by Charles of Anjou, not only in cold blood, but with resolute infliction of Ugolino's utmost grief;--not in the dungeon, but in the full light of day--his son being first put to death before his eyes. And among the pieces of heraldry most significant in the middle ages, the asp on the shield of the Guelphic viscounts is to be much remembered by you as a sign of this merciless cruelty of mistaken religion; mistaken, but not in the least hypocritical. It has perfect confidence in itself, and can answer with serenity for all its deeds. The serenity of heart never appears in the guilty Infidels; they die in despair or gloom, greatly satisfactory to adverse religious minds.

235. The French Pope, then, Urban of Troyes, had sent for Charles of Anjou; who would not have answered his call, even with all the strength of Anjou and Provence, had not Scylla of the Tyrrhene Sea been on his side. Pisa, with eighty galleys (the Sicilian fleet added to her own), watched and defended the coasts of Rome. An irresistible storm drove her fleet to shelter; and Charles, in a single ship, reached the mouth of the Tiber, and found lodgings at Rome in the convent of St. Paul. His wife meanwhile spent her dowry in increasing his land army, and led it across the Alps. How he had got his wife, and her dowry, we must hear in Villani's words, as nearly as I can give their force in English, only, instead of the English word pilgrim, I shall use the Italian 'romeo' for the sake both of all English Juliets, and that you may better understand the close of the sixth canto of the Paradise.

236. "Now the Count Raymond Berenger had for his inheritance all Provence on this side Rhone; and he was a wise and courteous signor, and of n.o.ble state, and virtuous; and in his time they did honourable things; and to his court came by custom all the gentlemen of Provence, and France, and Catalonia, for his courtesy and n.o.ble state; and there they made many cobbled verses, and Provencal songs of great sentences."

237. I must stop to tell you that 'cobbled' or 'coupled' verses mean rhymes, as opposed to the dull method of Latin verse; for we have now got an ear for jingle, and know that dove rhymes to love. Also, "songs of great sentences" mean didactic songs, containing much in little, (like the new didactic Christian painting,) of which an example (though of a later time) will give you a better idea than any description.

"Vraye foy de necessite, Non tant seulement d'equite, Nous fait de Dieu sept choses croire: C'est sa doulce nativite, Son baptesme d'humilite, Et sa mort, digne de memoire: Son descens en la chartre noire, Et sa resurrection, voire; S'ascencion d'auctorite, La venue judicatoire, Ou ly bons seront mis en gloire, Et ly mals en adversite."

238. "And while they were making these cobbled verses and harmonious creeds, there came a romeo to court, returning from the shrine of St.

James." I must stop again just to say that he ought to have been called a pellegrino, not a romeo, for the three kinds of wanderers are,--Palmer, one who goes to the Holy Land; Pilgrim, one who goes to Spain; and Romeo, one who goes to Rome. Probably this romeo had been to both. "He stopped at Count Raymond's court, and was so wise and worthy (valoroso), and so won the Count's grace, that he made him his master and guide in all things. Who also, maintaining himself in honest and religious customs of life, in a little time, by his industry and good sense, doubled the Count's revenues three times over, maintaining always a great and honoured court. Now the Count had four daughters, and no son; and by the sense and provision of the good romeo--(I can do no better than translate 'procaccio' provision, but it is only a makeshift for the word derived from procax, meaning the general talent of prudent impudence, in getting forward; 'forwardness,' has a good deal of the true sense, only diluted;)--well, by the sense and--progressive faculty, shall we say?--of the good pilgrim, he first married the eldest daughter, by means of money, to the good King Louis of France, saying to the Count, 'Let me alone,--Lascia-mi-fare--and never mind the expense, for if you marry the first one well, I'll marry you all the others cheaper, for her relationship."

239. "And so it fell out, sure enough; for incontinently the King of England (Henry III.) because he was the King of France's relation, took the next daughter, Eleanor, for very little money indeed; next, his natural brother, elect King of the Romans, took the third; and, the youngest still remaining unmarried,--says the good romeo, 'Now for this one, I will you to have a strong man for son-in-law, who shall be thy heir;'--and so he brought it to pa.s.s. For finding Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of the King Louis, he said to Raymond, "'Give her now to him, for his fate is to be the best man in the world,'--prophesying of him. And so it was done. And after all this it came to pa.s.s, by envy which ruins all good, that the barons of Provence became jealous of the good romeo, and accused him to the Count of having ill-guided his goods, and made Raymond demand account of them. Then the good romeo said, 'Count, I have served thee long, and have put thee from little state into mighty, and for this, by false counsel of thy people, thou art little grateful. I came into thy court a poor romeo; I have lived honestly on thy means; now, make to be given to me my little mule and my staff and my wallet, as I came, and I will make thee quit of all my service.' The Count would not he should go; but for nothing would he stay; and so he came, and so he departed, that no one ever knew whence he had come, nor whither he went. It was the thought of many that he was indeed a sacred spirit."

240. This pilgrim, you are to notice, is put by Dante in the orb of justice, as a just servant; the Emperor Justinian being the image of a just ruler. Justinian's law-making turned out well for England; but the good romeo's match-making ended ill for it; and for Borne, and Naples also. For Beatrice of Provence resolved to be a queen like her three sisters, and was the prompting spirit of Charles's expedition to Italy.

She was crowned with him, Queen of Apulia and Sicily, on the day of the Epiphany, 1265; she and her husband bringing gifts that day of magical power enough; and Charles, as soon as the feast of coronation was over, set out to give battle to Manfred and his Saracens. "And this Charles,"

says Villani, "was wise, and of sane counsel; and of prowess in arms, and fierce, and much feared and redoubted by all the kings in the world;--magnanimous and of high purposes; fearless in the carrying forth of every great enterprise; firm in every adversity; a verifier of his every word; speaking little,--doing much; and scarcely ever laughed, and then but a little; sincere, and without flaw, as a religious and catholic person; stern in justice, and fierce in look; tall and nervous in person, olive coloured, and with a large nose, and well he appeared a royal majesty more than other men. Much he watched, and little he slept; and used to say that so much time as one slept, one lost; generous to his men-at-arms, but covetous to acquire land, signory, and coin, come how it would, to furnish his enterprises and wars: in courtiers, servants of pleasure, or jocular persons, he delighted never."

241. To this newly crowned and resolute king, riding south from Rome, Manfred, from his vale of Nocera under Mount St. Augelo, sends to offer conditions of peace. Jehu the son of Nimshi is not swifter of answer to Ahaziah's messenger than the fiery Christian king, in his 'What hast thou to do with peace?' Charles answers the messengers with his own lips: "Tell the Sultan of Nocera, this day I will put him in h.e.l.l, or he shall put me in paradise."

242. Do not think it the speech of a hypocrite. Charles was as fully prepared for death that day as ever Scotch Covenanter fighting for his Holy League; and as sure that death would find him, if it found, only to glorify and bless. Balfour of Burley against Claverhouse is not more convinced in heart that he draws the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.

But all the knightly pride of Claverhouse himself is knit together, in Charles, with fearless faith, and religious wrath. "This Saracen sc.u.m, led by a b.a.s.t.a.r.d German,--traitor to his creed, usurper among his race,--dares it look me, a Christian knight, a prince of the house of France, in the eyes? Tell the Sultan of Nocera, to-day I put him in h.e.l.l, or he puts me in paradise."

They are not pa.s.sionate words neither; any more than hypocritical ones.

They are measured, resolute, and the fewest possible. He never wasted words, nor showed his mind, but when he meant it should be known.

243. The messenger returned, thus answered; and the French king rode on with his host. Manfred met him in the plain of Grandella, before Benevento. I have translated the name of the fortress 'Welcome.' It was altered, as you may remember, from Maleventum, for better omen; perhaps, originally, only [Greek: *maloeis*]--a rock full of wild goats?--a.s.sociating it thus with the meaning of Tagliacozzo.

244. Charles divided his army into four companies. The captain of his own was our English Guy de Montfort, on whom rested the power and the fate of his grandfather, the pursuer of the Waldensian shepherds among the rocks of the wild goats. The last, and it is said the goodliest, troop was of the exiled Guelphs of Florence, under Guido Guerra, whose name you already know. "These," said Manfred, as he watched them ride into their ranks, "cannot lose to-day." He meant that if he himself was the victor, he would restore these exiles to their city. The event of the battle was decided by the treachery of the Count of Caserta, Manfred's brother-in-law. At the end of the day only a few knights remained with him, whom he led in the last charge. As he helmed himself, the crest fell from his helmet. "Hoc est signum Dei," he said,--so accepting what he saw to be the purpose of the Ruler of all things; not claiming G.o.d as his friend. not asking anything of Him, as if His purpose could be changed; not fearing Him as an enemy; but accepting simply His sign that the appointed day of death was come. He rode into the battle armed like a nameless soldier, and lay unknown among the dead.

245. And in him died all southern Italy. Never, after that day's treachery, did her n.o.bles rise, or her people prosper.

Of the finding of the body of Manfred, and its casting forth, accursed, you may read, if you will, the story in Dante. I trace for you to-day rapidly only the acts of Charles after this victory, and its consummation, three years later, by the defeat of Conradin.

The town of Benevento had offered no resistance to Charles, but he gave it up to pillage, and ma.s.sacred its inhabitants. The slaughter, indiscriminate, continued for eight days; the women and children were slain with the men, being of Saracen blood. Manfred's wife, Sybil of Epirus, his children, and all his barons, died, or were put to death, in the prisons of Provence. With the young Conrad, all the faithful Ghibel-line knights of Pisa were put to death. The son of Frederick of Antioch, who drove the Guelphs from Florence, had his eyes torn out, and was hanged, he being the last child of the house of Suabia. Twenty-four of the barons of Calabria were executed at Gallipoli, and at Home. Charles cut off the feet of those who had fought for Conrad; then--fearful lest they should be pitied--shut them into a house of wood, and burned them. His lieutenant in Sicily, William of the Standard, besieged the town of Augusta, which defended itself with some fort.i.tude, but was betrayed, and all its inhabitants, (who must have been more than three thousand, for there were a thousand able to bear arms,) ma.s.sacred in cold blood; the last of them searched for in their hiding-places, when the streets were empty, dragged to the sea-sh.o.r.e, then beheaded, and their bodies thrown into the sea. Throughout Calabria the Christian judges of Charles thus forgave his enemies. And the Mohammedan power and heresy ended in Italy, and she became secure in her Catholic creed.

246. Not altogether secure under French dominion. After fourteen years of misery, Sicily sang her angry vespers, and a Calabrian admiral burnt the fleet of Charles before his eyes, where Scylla rules her barking Salamis. But the French king died in prayerful peace, receiving the sacrament with these words of perfectly honest faith, as he reviewed his past life: "Lord G.o.d, as I truly believe that you are my Saviour, so I pray you to have mercy on my soul; and as I truly made the conquest of Sicily more to serve the Holy Church than for my own covetousness, so I pray you to pardon my sins."

247. You are to note the two clauses of this prayer. He prays absolute mercy, on account of his faith in Christ; but remission of purgatory, in proportion to the quant.i.ty of good work he has done, or meant to do, as against evil. You are so much wiser in these days, you think, not believing in purgatory; and so much more benevolent,--not ma.s.sacring women and children. But we must not be too proud of not believing in purgatory, unless we are quite sure of our real desire to be purified: and as to our not ma.s.sacring children, it is true that an English gentleman will not now himself willingly put a knife into the throat either of a child or a lamb; but he will kill any quant.i.ty of children by disease in order to increase his rents, as unconcernedly as he will eat any quant.i.ty of mutton. And as to absolute ma.s.sacre, I do not suppose a child feels so much pain in being killed as a full-grown man, and its life is of less value to it. No pain either of body or thought through which you could put an infant, would be comparable to that of a good son, or a faithful lover, dying slowly of a painful wound at a distance from a family dependent upon him, or a mistress devoted to him.

But the victories of Charles, and the ma.s.sacres, taken in sum, would not give a muster-roll of more than twenty thousand dead; men, women, and children counted all together. On the plains of France, since I first began to speak to you on the subject of the arts of peace, at least five hundred thousand men, in the prime of life, have been ma.s.sacred by the folly of one Christian emperor, the insolence of another, and the mingling of mean rapacity with meaner vanity, which Christian nations now call 'patriotism.'

248. But that the Crusaders, (whether led by St. Louis or by his brother,) who habitually lived by robbery, and might be swiftly enraged to murder, were still too savage to conceive the spirit or the character of this Christ whose cross they wear, I have again and again alleged to you; not, I imagine, without question from many who have been accustomed to look to these earlier ages as authoritative in doctrine, if not in example. We alike err in supposing them more spiritual or more dark, than our own. They had not yet attained to the knowledge which we have despised, nor dispersed from their faith the shadows with which we have again overclouded ours.

Their pa.s.sions, tumultuous and merciless as the Tyrrhene Sea, raged indeed with the danger, but also with the uses, of naturally appointed storm; while ours, pacific in corruption, languish in vague maremma of misguided pools; and are pestilential most surely as they retire.

LECTURE X.

FLEUR DE LYS.

249. Through all the tempestuous winter which during the period of history we have been reviewing, weakened, in their war with the opposed rocks of religious or knightly pride, the waves of the Tuscan Sea, there has been slow increase of the Favonian power which is to bring fruitfulness to the rock, peace to the wave. The new element which is introduced in the thirteenth century, and perfects for a little time the work of Christianity, at least in some few chosen souls, is the law of Order and Charity, of intellectual and moral virtue, which it now became the function of every great artist to teach, and of every true citizen to maintain.

250. I have placed on your table one of the earliest existing engravings by a Florentine hand, representing the conception which the national mind formed of this spirit of order and tranquillity, "Cosmico," or the Equity of Kosmos, not by senseless attraction, but by spiritual thought and law. He stands pointing with his left hand to the earth, set only with tufts of gra.s.s; in his right hand he holds the ordered system of the universe--heaven and earth in one orb;--the heaven made cosmic by the courses of its stars; the earth cosmic by

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IX.--THE CHARGE TO ADAM. MODERN ITALIAN. ]

the seats of authority and fellowship,--castles on the hills and cities in the plain.

251. The tufts of gra.s.s under the feet of this figure will appear to you, at first, grotesquely formal. But they are only the simplest expression, in such herbage, of the subjection of all vegetative force to this law of order, equity, or symmetry, which, made by the Greek the princ.i.p.al method of his current vegetative sculpture, subdues it, in the hand of Cora or Triptolemus, into the merely triple sceptre, or animates it, in Florence, to the likeness of the Fleur-de-lys.

252. I have already stated to you that if any definite flower is meant by these triple groups of leaves, which take their authoritatively typical form in the crowns of the Cretan and Laciuian Hera, it is not the violet, but the purple iris; or sometimes, as in Pindar's description of the birth of Ismus, the yellow water-flag, which you know so well in spring, by the banks of your Oxford streams. [1] But, in general, it means simply the springing of beautiful and orderly vegetation in fields upon which the dew falls pure. It is the expression, therefore, of peace on the redeemed and cultivated earth, and of the pleasure of heaven in the uncareful happiness of men clothed without labour, and fed without fear.

[Footnote 1: In the catalogues of the collection of drawings in this room, and in my "Queen of the Air" you will find all that I would ask you to notice about the various names and kinds of the flower, and their symbolic use.--Note only, with respect to our present purpose, that while the true white lily is placed in the hands of the Angel of the Annunciation even by Florentine artists, in their general design, the fleur-de-lys is given to him by Giovaiini Pisano on the facade of Orvieto; and that the flower in the crown-circlets of European kings answers, as I stated to you in my lecture on the Corona, to the Narcissus fillet of early Greece; the crown of abundance and rejoicing.]

253. In the pa.s.sage, so often read by us, which announces the advent of Christianity as the dawn of peace on earth, we habitually neglect great part of the promise, owing to the false translation of the second clause of the sentence. I cannot understand how it should be still needful to point out to you here in Oxford that neither the Greek words [Greek: *"en anthriopois evdokia,"*] nor those of the vulgate, "in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis," in the slightest degree justify our English words, "goodwill to men."

Of G.o.d's goodwill to men, and to all creatures, for ever, there needed no proclamation by angels. But that men should be able to please _Him_,--that their wills should be made holy, and they should not only possess peace in themselves, but be able to give joy to their G.o.d, in the sense in which He afterwards is pleased with His own baptized Son;--this was a new thing for Angels to declare, and for shepherds to believe.

254. And the error was made yet more fatal by its repet.i.tion in a pa.s.sage of parallel importance,--the thanksgiving, namely, offered by Christ, that His Father, while He had hidden what it was best to know, not from the wise and prudent, but from some among the wise and prudent, and had revealed it unto babes; not 'for so it seemed good' in His sight, but 'that there might be well pleasing in His sight,'--namely, that the wise and simple might equally live in the necessary knowledge, and enjoyed presence, of G.o.d. And if, having accurately read these vital pa.s.sages, you then as carefully consider the tenour of the two songs of human joy in the birth of Christ, the Magnificat, and the Nunc dimittis, you will find the theme of both to be, not the newness of blessing, but the equity which disappoints the cruelty and humbles the strength of men; which scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts; which fills the hungry with good things; and is not only the glory of Israel, but the light of the Gentiles.

255. As I have been writing these paragraphs, I have been checking myself almost at every word,--wondering, Will they be restless on their seats at this, and thinking all the while that they did not come here to be lectured on Divinity? You may have been a little impatient,--how could it well be otherwise? Had I been explaining points of anatomy, and showing you how you bent your necks and straightened your legs, you would have thought me quite in my proper function; because then, when you went with a party of connoisseurs through the Vatican, you could point out to them the insertion of the clavicle in the Apollo Belvidere; and in the Sistine Chapel the perfectly accurate delineation of the tibia in the legs of Christ. Doubtless; but you know I am lecturing at present on the goffi, and not on Michael Angelo; and the goffi are very careless about clavicles and shin-bones; so that if, after being lectured on anatomy, you went into the Campo Santo of Pisa, you would simply find nothing to look at, except three tolerably well-drawn skeletons. But if after being lectured on theology, you go into the Campo Santo of Pisa, you will find not a little to look at, and to remember.

256. For a single instance, you know Michael Angelo is admitted to have been so far indebted to these goffi as to borrow from the one to whose study of mortality I have just referred, Orcagna, the gesture of his Christ in the Judgment, He borrowed, however, accurately speaking, the position only, not the gesture; nor the meaning of it. [1] You all remember the action of Michael Angelo's Christ,--the right hand raised as if in violence of reprobation; and the left closed across His breast, as refusing all mercy. The action is one which appeals to persons of very ordinary sensations, and is very naturally adopted by the Renaissance painter, both for its popular effect, and its capabilities for the exhibition of his surgical science. But the old painter-theologian, though indeed he showed the right hand of Christ lifted, and the left hand laid across His breast, had another meaning in the actions. The fingers of the left hand are folded, in both the figures; but in Michael Angelo's as if putting aside an appeal; in Orcagna's, the fingers are bent to draw back the drapery from the right side. The right hand is raised by Michael Angelo as in anger; by Orcagna, only to show the wounded palm. And as, to the believing disciples, He showed them His hands and His side, so that they were glad,--so, to the unbelievers, at their judgment, He shows the wounds in hand and side. They shall look on Him whom they pierced.

[Footnote: I found all this in M. Didron's Iconographie, above quoted; I had never noticed the difference between the two figures myself.]