Russell Kirk reminds us that men are put into this world to do battle, “to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward the triumph of Love.” Kirk loved F. Marion Crawford’s stories because he recognized another great Romantic born out of his time.
Saracinesca, by F. Marion Crawford (372 pages, Cluny Media)
Almost forgotten today, in the early twentieth century the Romantic novelist Francis Marion Crawford outsold his friend Henry James. Undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame in the 1920s devoured his novels, ranking them alongside the works of two other Catholic converts, John Henry Newman and Robert Hugh Benson. Russell Kirk was his Romantic disciple and he endorsed Crawford’s novels as “handsome approaches which we traverse by owl-light” in a “fresh search for the wondrous.”
His bestseller Saracinesca is both art and artifact, holding in its pages the last echoes of the era when “Viva Garibaldi!” and “Viva Pio Nono!” rang out in rivalry on the streets of Rome. He wrote in Saracinesca with the authority of an eyewitness that
often in the afternoon there was heard the tramp of horse as a detachment of the noble guards trotted down the Corso on their great chargers, escorting the holy Father himself, while all who met him dropped upon one knee and uncovered their heads to receive the benediction of the mild-eyed old man with the beautiful features, the head of Church and State. Many a time, too, Pius IX would descend from his coach and walk upon the Pincio, all clothed in white, stopping sometimes to talk with those who accompanied him, or to lay his gentle hand on the fair curls of some little English child that paused from its play in awe and admiration as the Pope went by. For he loved children well, and most of all, children with golden hair—angels, not Angles, as Gregory said.
Born in Italy to American parents in 1854, Crawford was raised in Rome’s Villa Negroni on the Esquiline Hill. The Crawfords’ landlord was Prince Massimo, a member of the black nobility—those princely Roman families who remained loyal to the Pope. “People crossed the Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic cable was not laid; German unity had not been invented; Pius IX reigned in the Pontifical States; Louis Napoleon was the idol of the French; President Lincoln had not been murdered,” Crawford asks, “is anything needed to widen the gulf which separates those times from these?” Romantic relations between men and women were hemmed in by the social construction of formal courtship and the practical construction of Roman couture. To sin against chastity is practical only in thought not in deed “when a woman of most moderate dimensions occupied three or four square yards of space upon a ballroom floor.”
Saracinesca is the first novel in his Roman tetralogy followed by Sant’ Ilario, Don Orsino, and Corleone. Today in Rome, a saracinesca is the slatted metal blind pulled down with much rust and squeaking by shopkeepers in Trastevere before a long lunch. In Crawford’s time, a saracinesca was a grand portcullis, a latticed metal grille, lowered over the opening of a gate. For readers, Francis Marion Crawford raises the portcullis and opens the gate for our entry into the palazzos of Roman society where a double line of torch bearers greets us and “in the reception rooms there was much light and warmth; there were bright fires and softly shaded lamps; velvet-footed servants stealing softly among the guests, with immense burdens of tea and cake; men of more or less celebrity chatting about politics in corners; women of more or less beauty gossiping over their tea, or flirting, or wishing they had somebody to flirt with; people of many nations and ideas, with a goodly leaven of Romans.”
Behind the saracinescas of Roman palazzos, we meet Crawford’s principal characters:
Giovanni Saracinesca is the only son and heir to the millennia-old Saracinesca titles and estates. “His mother had been a Spaniard, and something of the melancholy of her country had entered into his soul, giving depth and durability to the hot Italian character he inherited from his father.” Naturally, he is the most eligible bachelor in Rome and in no hurry to make a choice from among the rich, fashionable, beautiful women introduced to him.
His father, Prince Saracinesca, belongs to “the old, patriarchal class, the still flourishing remnant of the last generation, who prided themselves upon good management, good morals, and ascetic living; the class of people in whose marriage contracts it was stipulated that the wife was to have meat twice a day, excepting on fast days, a drive—the trottata, as it used to be called—daily, and two new gowns every year.” The prince spends a large annual income without ostentation. He prefers manly activity on his country estates to gossip in Rome. His son’s disinterest in marriage exasperates him: “Would you have Saracinesca sold, to be distributed piecemeal among a herd of dogs of starving relations you never heard of, merely because you are such a vagabond, such a Bohemian, such a breakneck, crazy good-for-nothing, that you will not take the trouble to accept one of all the women who rush into your arms?”
Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., declares that all desire is prophecy. Giovanni desires the one woman in Rome who cannot and will not rush into his arms. Corona d’Astrardente is the most beautiful woman in Rome. “It would be impossible to imagine greater simplicity than Corona showed in her dress, but it would be hard to conceive of any woman who possessed by virtue of severe beauty a more indubitable right to dispense with ornament.” Again, Crawford writes from experience. His teenage sweetheart was Lily Conrad, an American expat universally acknowledged as the fairest young beauty in Rome. One smitten son of a princely family, depressed by his failure to woo her, shot himself before her portrait in a gallery on the Corso.
Fresh from convent school, Corona married the wealthy Duca d’Astradente to save her father from financial disgrace. A decaying dandy several decades her senior, he has “a goodly share of original sin, to which he added others of his own originating but having an equal claim to originality.” He loves his young wife but “there was something sad in the thought of a man like him finding the only real passion of his life when worn out with age and dissipation.” Her virtue lifts him out of a life of vice. “I could have been different, Corona, if I had had you for my wife for thirty years, instead of five.” She lives a lonely life of quiet piety and sacrifice despite her wealth, beauty, and position.
The antagonist of the story is Ugo del Ferice. A man of common birth, he flatters his noble schoolmates while making himself useful to the point where “it might be said that he was never missed, because he was always present.” A political chameleon, he is unprincipled and ambitious. “Del Ferice represented the scum which remained after the revolution of 1848 had subsided,” Crawford writes in a brief interjection of his political beliefs. “He was one of those men who were used and despised by their betters.”
Anastase Gouache is a talented young painter “already half famous with that young celebrity which young men easily mistake for fame itself.” He is hard at work on his craft but not yet certain of his true vocation. Crawford had an artist’s eye for soldiers and their uniforms. As a youth he loved comparing the French dragoons and hussars, separating officers from infantry, and looking out for the Papal Zouaves, “whose grey Turco uniforms with bright red facings, red sashes, and short yellow gaiters, gave colour to any crowd.” Into young Gouache he breathes the same romantic awe. Aquinas explains that art is the “right reason of things to be made”; whereas prudence is the “right reason of things to be done.” Gouache’s move from art to action supplies one of the great surprises of the novel.
As a young man, Crawford learned to duel at a German university and his action scenes are enlivened with the details and enthusiasm of an expert, competitive athlete. With an eye towards another volume in the tetralogy, Crawford introduces the unforgettable Count Spicca, the best duellist in Italy. Melancholic and cadaverous, he “looked like the shadow of death.” Like a sniper squinting down his scope, he observes every scene through his monocle. “Spicca is a living memento mori; he occasionally reminds men of death by killing them.”
In the edges of the story moves the shade of the “red pope” Cardinal Antonelli, Secretary of State for Pius IX. One of the last cardinals created without priestly orders, his rise to power and endurance in his office provoked many jealous enemies to spread ridiculous rumors. They accused him of every sin and vice: an insatiable appetite for the sensual company of women, limitless greed unsatisfied by taking bribes and embezzling state funds, intentional violent cruelty towards children, a cultivation of occult powers that mesmerized the pontiff and other ridiculous slanders that formed the black legend around this supposed Richelieu or Machiavelli of the Papal States. He was once attacked by a mad hatter with a pitchfork on a quiet staircase in the Vatican. Antonelli requested leniency for his would-be assassin. Pius refused and ordered his execution by decapitation on the Piazza Della Bocca Verita. Antonelli received the blame and rumors of his bloodthirsty vindictiveness spread across Rome.
Crawford the Romantic took up the lost cause of Antonelli’s reputation. “Few men in the midst of the world have stood so wholly alone as Cardinal Antonelli.” As the European powers from without and republicans and revolutionaries from within threatened the temporal power of the pope in the Papal States, Antonelli was Pius IX’s trusted advisor and chief diplomat. He had perfect manners, lived simply in the Vatican, worked tirelessly, humbly declined to defend his reputation, and was devoted to his family. William Seward, his contemporary as the United States Secretary of State, acknowledged his great diplomatic abilities and admired his “consummate skill and the inflexible firmness” with which he led an administration facing “insurmountable difficulties.”
Crawford’s Antonelli faces the threats to Rome and the papacy with resolve. “The condition of our lives is battle, and battle against terrible odds,” he counsels Giovanni. “Neither you nor I should be content to waste our strength in fighting shadows, in waging war on petty troubles of our own raising, knowing all the while that the powers of evil are marshaled in a deadly array against the powers of good. Sed non praevalebunt!”
Russell Kirk reminds us that men are put into this world to do battle, “to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward the triumph of Love.” Kirk loved Crawford’s stories because he recognized another great Romantic born out of his time. A Romantic conservative, Kirk spent his career defending the belief that the object of life is Love. Kirk’s contemporary, the fantasy novelist H. Warner Munn, also a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, found in Crawford’s novels a remnant of the old medieval “courtoisie”—that Romantic chivalry that is another way of doing battle. “Man would still like to fight dragons for his fair ladye; to engage in lost causes; to enshrine in his heart a precious image.” Crawford’s Romantic novels show us the rightly ordered relations of men and women enlivened by magnanimous love.
Corona knows that it is unworthy of her as a woman even to pause in doing right. She resolves to trample wrong and run to do what is right. Giovanni resists temptation and battles his manly desire “for he loved her truly—and above all, he would do nothing to compromise the unsullied reputation she enjoyed.” Corona warns Giovanni that the only path to victory is in the sure knowledge that “the sin you see is real, but it is yet not very near you since you so abhor it”; and if he will be a man worthy of her, “you will you pray that you may hate it, it will go further from you till you may hope not even to understand how it could once have been so near.”
How near Giovanni and Corona come to their destruction is the great Romantic drama of Saracinesca. It is the dramatic struggle of all of our lives, not only against flesh and blood “but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
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The featured image is “View of Rome from Tivoli” (1872) by George Inness, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.