“Mother age, for mine I knew not,
Help me as when life began.”
ROME in the Middle Ages―when the thought occurs, not to the professed historian and antiquarian, but to the general reader, a twofold idea floats before the mind. We think of the mighty dominant Church― that tremendous invisible power, ruling the souls and bodies of men with a rod of iron, sending heretics to the stake amidst the snows of Scotland, or missionaries to die on the burning sands of Africa―its hand everywhere, but its brain and heart, ever changing but ever the same, in that great city where the Cæsars ruled and the martyrs bled.
Or, we think of the Eternal City herself, now a widow and desolate, torn and devoured by her own children, her hoary ruins transformed into the dens of robber chieftains―the Frangipani in the Coliseum, the Savelli in the Theater of Marcellus, the Colonna in the Mausoleum of Augustus―lawlessness, misrule, and violence everywhere, “blood touching blood” ―the Rome for which Rienzi died in vain, because the nobles were too haughty, the plebeians too base, and all alike too selfish, to live as brethren and freemen.
It was to this Rome that Raymond Chalcondyles came in his frank, innocent, impressible boyhood. He brought letters of introduction to Cardinal Bessarion, his fellow countryman and fellow exile; and that eminent personage received him with kindness, and invited him to share the hospitality extended to several other young Greeks, who were aspiring under his patronage to the honors and emoluments of the Latin Church. Raymond, however, told the Cardinal at once, and with a candor somewhat unusual in the Greek of that day, that he had no thought of an ecclesiastical career.
“Most natural, my son,” replied the suave and courteous prelate, who was equally a man of the Church and a man of the world. “You are the solo representative of a noble line, and it must be your care to continue it worthily. Still, remain with me. Go for your Humanities to your admirable Professor Pomponius Laetus, and for your pleasures to your equals, the young nobles of the great families here; and when you are old enough, I will undertake that you shall not lack employment suited to your tastes and your capacity.”
Raymond acquiesced thankfully, and wrote rose-colored letters to his mother describing his present enjoyments and his future prospects.
Rome ecclesiastical influenced him but slightly, if at all. He enjoyed the pompous ceremonial and the exquisite music of the Church; but he was not in any sense devout, and the prejudices of his childhood still hung about him, though of course he conformed outwardly to the Latin ritual. But there was a terrible risk that Rome temporal―the Rome of his day and generation―would make him her own to his undoing. The dice box, the wine cup, the yet more insidious and intoxicating draft passion offers her votaries, were the deities worshipped by the young nobles with whom he associated. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the ayes, and the pride of life ruled unchecked in their bosoms. They were, physically, a splendid race. Noble and beautiful to look upon was the young Italian patrician of the period, with gold-embroidered mantle flowing over his costly inlaid armor, his high-mettled steed obedient to his lightest love-locks of ebony curling under his crested helmet, piercing coal-black eyes, and bronzed cheek glowing with health―often too with passion; for his beauty was the beauty of the leopard or the panther, lending a lurid, transitory charm to a nature fierce, false, sensual, pitiless. Such were too many of Raymond’s friends, and such― allowing for differences of race and temperament―might Raymond himself have become; but he was saved.
There was yet another Rome beside Rome ecclesiastical and Rome temporal. Another spirit dwelt in the Eternal City, haunting ruined temples, decaying arches, desecrated forums―a spirit strong with the strength of silence and of death, of love and reverence and memory, of all those unseen yet potent influences which mold the lives of men. It was the spirit of the past, the ghost of old dead Rome. In bygone days its shadowy hand had beckoned here and there some thoughtful student, who, raising dreamy eyes from his rare and precious parchment, obeyed and followed the mysterious summons—like Cola di Rienzi, through strife and bloodshed to his own ruin—or like Petrarch, through the gentler paths of classic song to the laurel wreath and the crowning on the Capitol. But now was come the hour when that spirit walked abroad through the length and breadth of the land; when that beckoning hand was seen, that spell of mysterious fascination felt, by all the eager, romantic, gifted youth of the day. It is almost always the young who adore the past; those for whom all the world is fresh and new invest the gray ruins of antiquity with the charro and the interest of the unknown.
Rome was then the headquarters of a band of enthusiastic scholars with whom her language, her history, and her antiquities were a passion, and who very literally “delighted in her stones.” To clothe her disembodied spirit once again with flesh, to bring back, in the fifteenth century, the days of Camillus and of Fabius, was the dream and the object of their lives. The Roman Academy, under illiberal or fanatical Popes a legal and theological seminary of the narrowest kind, had become in the days of Pius II a noteworthy assemblage of literary men, who studied on the spot the monuments of a mighty ancient civilization, and not only spoke and wrote the purest Latinity, but sometimes oven dressed and lived like old Romans.
The presiding genius of this school was Pomponius Laetus, a spare, uncouth, hale man, wrapped in a genuine Roman toga, who every morning, before daylight, took his lanthorn in hand, armed his feet with Roman buskins, and trod the dark and miry paths that led from his modest dwelling on the Esquiline to the lecture hall on the Quirinal. There Raymond Chalcondyles and many another studious youth hung upon his lips, while with antique eloquence he praised those former days of the Eternal City, which indeed were better than these.
Raymond had at first been attracted to the Roman Academy and the teaching of Pomponius Laetus by the praises of a friend in Venice, who had formerly been his pupil; but he afterward yielded to the fascination for its own sake, and, Greek though he was, became for the time as heartily absorbed in the Latin classics as if he had been born on the banks of the Tiber. Yet the spirit of the present world might eventually have proved too strong for the genius of the past, and pleasure have won him from his books, had it not been for an incident that occurred when he had resided for about two years in the household of Cardinal Bessarion.
One day, on coming home from the lecture hall, he met a Greek student, one of the cardinal’s protégés, who accosted him in some excitement. “Count Raymond, your servant has been stabbed. I know he is a schismatic; but had we not better send for a confessor?”
“Send for a physician” cried Raymond, who was deeply attached to the faithful retainer of his house. “Where is he?”
Gregorio guided him to the hall where Manuel lay on a settle, the blood flowing freely from his wound. Raymond knelt beside him, staunched the blood with linen torn from his own dress, and lavished every tender care upon him, until the arrival of the Cardinal’s household physician.
It fortunately proved on examination that the wound was not very serious; and Manuel was soon able to give his young master an account of the transaction. He had been suffering from rheumatism, and one of the Cardinal’s pages good-naturedly recommended a visit to the miraculous Bambino of Ara Cœli, who, he said, had cured him of a broken arm with marvelous celerity. Manuel, very imprudently, called the Bambino “an idol,” and denied its wonder-working power. The angry Roman replied that the leavened wafer of the Greeks was corrupt, and only fit to be cast to the dogs; to which Manuel retorted that no respectable dog would touch the accursed azyme of the Latins. The controversy had thus clearly reached the point where a stout hand might come to the aid of an angry tongue. The page was the first to strike, Manuel repaid the bloom with interest, then the Italian’s stiletto flashed out, and the quarrel ended in a crime.
Raymond hotly espoused the cause of his servant, and sought the Cardinal, intent on procuring the condign punishment, or at least the dismissal, of the offending page. The Cardinal, bland, cool, and courteous as ever, requested an account of the transaction, which Raymond had the rather uncommon honesty to give quite fairly, only softening the expressions used by Manuel about the host, a reticence that proved of no avail.
“No doubt, my son,” said the prelate, himself a proselyte from the Greek Church, “the unhappy man used language yet more opprobrious in speaking of our holy mysteries, though very properly and out of becoming reverence you hesitate to repeat his words.”
He then gave Raymond clearly to understand that such a scandal could not be suffered in the household of a Prince of the Church, and that, in fact, the question was not the dismissal of the page, but the instant dismissal of Manuel.
Raymond tried to remonstrate; but the Cardinal did not seem to understand the possibility of anyone resisting his will for a moment. “Here, my child,” he said, “take this purse of scudi, provide for the fellow handsomely, and trouble thy head no more about him. Be ready to come with me tomorrow to the Blessing of the Banners―nay, no more words now, I am busy. Goodnight, mio caro.” And before he knew what he was doing Raymond found himself standing in the anteroom amidst a crowd of smirking pages, who guessed his business and rejoiced in his evident discomfiture and the triumph of their brother in office. Pride came to his rescue, enabling him to cover his momentary embarrassment. The purse was still in his hand; he had been obliged to take it from the Cardinal, or it would have fallen on the ground. “My friends,” he said―there was a slight flush on his cheek, but he spoke in a tone of careless, good-natured superiority― “I am about to leave, for the present, the palace of his Eminence. You have all of you performed little services for me during my stay here; I therefore beg of you to divide among you a trifling largesse.” And, flinging the purse on the table, he left the room.
His pride was sufficiently “philosophic and Roman” to be highly applauded by “the Master,” as all the students called Pomponius Laetus, with whom moreover he was a special favorite. When, after telling his story, he intimated that he must now go and seek for lodgings, Messer Pomponio laid a rough but kind hand upon his shoulder, and said, in choicest Latin, “Let that be, my son; the little house on the Esquiline hath room for thee and me. It is true that olives and lentils, and perhaps a couple of eggs, with fresh water from the fountain, will be a poor exchange for the ortolans and beccaficos and choice red wine of his Eminence’s table, but at least they will be seasoned with liberty and with peace.”
Raymond at this period thought Pomponius Laetus the greatest man in the whole world, an opinion shared by many of his fellow-pupils, whose envy he provoked by gratefully accepting the master’s hospitality. Manuel also became an inmate of the house on the Esquiline, and, when recovered from his wound, worked diligently under the master himself in; the celebrated garden on the Quirinal, where he cultivated with his own hand precisely the same fruits and vegetables as did the ancient Romans, pleasing himself with the thought that he was following the example of Cincinnatus and Camillus―where too he often received his pupils and conversed with them under the shade of olives and evergreen oaks.
Raymond was now obliged, whatever his tastes might be, to embrace a life of severe simplicity and self-denial. Pomponius was determined to make this, his favorite pupil, a model of the genuine old Roman virtues, dignity, moderation, self-control. It was hard to expect the happy, free hearted Greek boy to become a Stoic at seventeen; and as time passed on Raymond might have rebelled, had not exceptional circumstances reconciled him to his life of self-restraint. Already he had caught the true scholarly enthusiasm, and, under the fostering influence of Pomponius, it deepened day by day. That great master lived for his pupils, and wished to live in them for posterity, “like Socrates and Christ,” as he himself said profanely―a profanity very characteristic of his spirit and that of his school. They were the works into which he poured his ardent soul; for them, not for himself, he was ambitious. Like the poet’s perfect king, it might have been said of him―
“No keener hunter after glory lives,
He loves it in his knights more than himself,
They prove to him his work.”
Under such auspices Raymond burned the midnight oil of the student, finding, for the present, joy and inspiration enough in “all the golden deeds of men,” in the rich heritage of memory which the two noble languages, the Greek of his fathers and the cherished Latin of his admired instructor, opened out before him.
He, too, would be a “Humanist” and a great scholar; he would write commentaries and poems, edit classics, discover lost MSS., decide knotty points of antiquarian lore; he would become a power in the courts of princes, like Poggio Bracciolini and others of his type. Perhaps he would serve the learned and liberal Pope, whom he greatly admired for many reasons, but chiefly for his zeal in the cause of Christendom against the Turks.
Thus glided by very rapidly the tranquil days of a studious youth. Raymond was likely to be the better, the braver, and the manlier all his life for the keen, cold, bracing air he breathed, and learned to love, during the momentous period in which character is formed and fixed. His manners. like those of his master and host, were severely simple, almost ascetic. Not that, in this particular, he was at all a type of the scholars of his age. No feature in the story of the Italian Renaissance is so sad as the divorce, only too general, between morality and learning. Rare indeed is it to find a great scholar who, like Vittorino de la Feltre, wore
“The white flower of a blameless life,
Amidst a thousand peering little nesses.”
When the literati of the fifteenth century quarreled―and they quarreled continually, and fought out their quarrels with weapons of all sorts; with epigrams, lampoons, epistles, and pamphlets, with fists, cudgels, and the daggers of hired bravos—wonderful and, terrible were the stories they told of each other’s doings and misdoings. With a large deduction for unscrupulous lying―in itself such a dark blot upon character―enough remains to show very clearly why that fair morning of intellectual promise never ripened into the full sunshine of glorious day.
Amongst so many gifted spirits, rich in noble capabilities, who were slaking their eager thirst at the unsealed fountains of ancient lore, we look in vain for one soul athirst for God, oven for the living God. And “the people that forget God,” however learned, intellectual, and refined, have usually contrived in all ages to end where He says they shall, and to make a hell for themselves with their own passions.
The Platonic mystic school; of which Pico della Mirandola is the type, stands exempt, at least partially, from this condemnation. Of him, and of those like him, we speak not here; they were but a small minority, and could not leaven the masa. The thought and culture of the day, especially south of the Alps, was essentially Pagan. Thus Raymond Chalcondyles, under the very shadow of the Vatican, and a favorite with the Pope and with half the College of Cardinals, whose fashion it was to patronize rising young scholars, grew up a frank Pagan, with as little real belief in the God who made him as in the “Jove” and “Bacchus” whose names were continually on his lips. That he did not also, like the majority of his associates, groom up an opera profligate he had to thank God ―that God whom he had forgotten so utterly.