The Unfortunate Priest

“Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight—Death the Skeleton,
And Time the Shadow.”—WORDSWORTH.

“If God were half so cruel as His priests,
It would go hard, I ween, with all of us.”

I have elsewhere remarked that there is—chiefly about the Duomo—a group of small streets bearing the dismal names of Death, Hell, Purgatory, Limbo, Crucifixion, Our Lady of Coughing (_delle Tosse_), The (last) Rest of Old Age, Gallows Lane (_Via della Forca_), The Tombs, The Way of the Discontented, {201} Dire Need, Small Rags, Fag-End or Stump, Bad Payers, and finally, the Via dello Scheletro, or Skeleton Street. To which there belongs, as is appropriate, a melancholy legend.

LA VIA DELLO SCHELETRO.

“There once dwelt in what is now called the Street of the Skeleton a priest attached to the Cathedral, who was in every respect all that a good man of his calling and a true Christian should be, as he was pious, kind-hearted, and charitable, passing his life in seeking out the poor and teaching their children, often bringing cases of need and suffering to the knowledge of wealthier friends—which thing, were it more frequently done by all, would do more to put an end to poverty than anything else.

“‘But he who is in everything most human
May highest rise and yet the lowest fall;
And when a brave kind heart meets with _the_ woman,
Our greatest duties seem extremely small,
And those which were the first became the least:
Even so it happened to this gentle priest.

“‘In the old dwelling where he had his home,
Which otherwise had been most drear and dull
At morn or eve did oft before him come
A girl as sweet as she was beautiful;
Full soon they learned that both in head and heart
Each was to each the very counterpart.

“‘There is in every soul of finer grain
A soul which is in self a soul apart,
Which to itself doth oft deep hid remain,
But leaps to life when Love awakes the heart.
Then as a vapour rises with the sun,
And blends with it, two souls pass into one.

“‘And so it came that he would sometimes kiss
Her lovely face, nor seemed it much to prove
That they in anything had done amiss.
Until, one night, there came the kiss of Love, {202}
Disguised in friendly seeming like the rest—
Alas! he drove an arrow to her breast.

“‘Then came the glow of passion—new to both—
The honeymoon of utter recklessness,
When the most righteous casts away his oath,
And all is lost in sweet forgetfulness,
And life is steeped in joy, without, within,
And rapture seems the sweeter for the sin.

“‘Then came in its due course the sad awaking
To life and its grim claims, and all around
They found, in cold grim truth, without mistaking,
These claims for them did terribly abound;
And the poor priest was brought into despair
To find at every turn a foe was there.

“‘To know our love is pure though passionate,
And have it judged as if both foul and base,
Doth seem to us the bitterness of fate;
Yet in the world it is the usual case.
By it all priests are judged—yea, every one—
Never as Jesus would Himself have done.

“‘Because the noblest love with passion rings,
Therefore men cry ’tis _all_ mere sexual sense,
As if the rose and the dirt from which it springs
Were one because of the same elements:
Therefore ’tis true that, of all sins accurst,
Is Gossip, for it always tells the worst.

“‘So Gossip did its worst for these poor souls.
The bishop made the priest appear before him,
And, as a power who destiny controls,
Informed him clearly he had hell before him,
And if he would preserve the priestly stole, {203a}
Must leave his woman—or else lose his soul!

“‘Now had this man had money, or if he,
Like many of his calling, had been bold
With worldly air, then all this misery
Might have been ’scaped as one escapes the cold
By putting on a sheepskin, warm and fine;
But then hypocrisy was not his line.

“‘His love was now a mother, and the truth
Woke in him such a deep and earnest love,
That he would not have left her though in sooth
He had been summoned by the Power above;
And so the interdict was soon applied,
But on that day both child and mother died.

“‘She, poor weak thing, could not endure the strain,
So flickered out, and all within a day;
And then the priest, without apparent pain,
Began mysteriously to waste away,
And, shadow-like and silent as a mouse,
Men saw him steal into, or from, the house.

“‘And thinner still and paler yet he grew,
With every day some life from him seemed gone,
And all aghast, though living, men still knew
He had become a literal skeleton;
And so he died—in some world less severe
Than this to join the one he held so dear. {203b}

“‘Yet no one knew when ’twas he passed away
Out of that shadowy form and ’scaped life’s power,
For still ’twas seen beneath the moon’s pale ray,
Or gliding through the court at twilight hour.
But there it still is seen—and so it came
The Via del Scheletro got its name.’”

There is not a word of all this which is “Protestant invention,” for though I have poetised or written up a very rude text, the narrative is strictly as I received it. There is one point in it worth noticing, that it is a matter of very general conviction in Italy that in such matters of Church discipline as are involved in this story, it is the small flies who are caught in the web, while the great ones burst buzzing through it without harm, or that the weak and poor (who are very often those with the best hearts and principles) are most cruelly punished, where a bold, sensual, vulgar _frate_ makes light of and easily escapes all accusations.

There is something sadly and strangely affecting in the conception of a simply good and loving nature borne down by the crush of the world and misapplied morality—or clerical celibacy—into total wretchedness—a diamond dissolved to air. One in reading this seems to hear the sad words of one who thought his own name was written in water:

“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling
Alone. I chant alone the holy mass,
While little signs of life are round me kneeling,
And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
And thou art distant in Humanity!”