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Page 45
His splendid courage and the manliness of his character always commanded
admiration, and his hatred of injustice and wrong, cant and hypocrisy,
was in harmony with the nobility and passionate earnestness of his
nature. He was the friend of the workingman, the poor, and the
oppressed; and he exposed the abuses of jails and lunatic-asylums and
trades-unions, and much besides, in the interest of humanity and as a
disinterested philanthropist. He fought, too, the battles of his
fellow-authors on the copyright questions with the same tremendous
energy that he displayed in his struggles for practical reform in other
directions; and as a practical reformer through his novels he, like
Dickens, accomplished a great deal of good. When moved by strong
impulses in this direction, he seemed indeed to write with a quivering
pen, dipped not in ink, but in fire and gall and blood, and to imbue
what he wrote with his own vital force and magnetic spirit.
Measuring his literary stature at a glance, it must, however, be
admitted that, notwithstanding his high average of excellence, he was a
very uneven writer, and hence between his worst and his best work there
is a wide distance in point of merit. But the best of his writings as
well deserves immortality as anything ever penned in fiction. Although
inferior to them in some respects, he was superior in epigrammatic
descriptive power to the most famous of his English and French
contemporaries, and particularly in his descriptions of what he had
never seen or experienced, but only read about. Take, for instance, his
Australian scenes in "It is Never Too Late to Mend," where the effect of
the song of the English skylark in the gold-diggings is told with
touching brevity and pathos. Yet all his information concerning
Australia had been gained by reading newspaper correspondence and books
on that country. He made no secret of this, and said in substance, as
frankly as he spoke of his scrap-books, "I read these to save me from
the usual trick of describing a bit of England and calling it the
antipodes." He could infuse life into the dry figures of a blue-book;
but in the mere portraiture of ordinary conventional society manners,
free from the sway of strong passions and emotions, he did not greatly
excel writers of far inferior ability. He had the graphic simplicity and
realism of De Foe in describing places he had never seen; and as the
historian of a country or a period in which he felt interested he would
have been unusually brilliant, for he was an adept in picturesque
condensation, and knew how to improve upon his originals and use them
without copying a word. He was a master of vigorous English.
KINAHAN CORNWALLIS.
IN A SUPPRESSED TUSCAN MONASTERY.
We have left the golden hills and laughing valleys of Tuscany behind us
as we approach that desert part of it where the gray chalk cliffs
stretch out into the Maremma in long narrow tongues of rock, not far
from Siena. A frightful convulsion of nature in prehistoric times rent
the solid rock, seaming it with chasms so wide and deep that the region
is almost depopulated, not only because man can with difficulty find
room for the sole of his foot, but because the gases which lie over the
Maremma in vapors thick enough to destroy life in a single night rise up
to the top of these cliffs and reduce the dwellers there to fever-worn
shadows. Even the scattered olive-trees that have taken root in the thin
layer of soil are of the same hue, and the few clumps of cypresses add
to the pallor of the scene with their dark funereal shafts. The only bit
of color is where a cluster of low red-washed houses have found room for
their scanty foundations on a knot of rock where several chasms
converge. Where the sides of the chasms slope gently enough to admit of
being terraced, vineyards are planted, which yield famous wines, the red
Aleatico and the white Vino Santo, rivalling in quality the Monte
Pulciano, which grows only a short distance away. Farther down in the
depths thickets of scrub oak and wild vines form oases that are
invisible unless one is standing on the brink.
The epithet "God-forsaken," so often applied to regions like this,
would, however, be inappropriate here, for in God's name the locality is
famous. On a promontory whose sides fall down in sheer precipices all
about, except where a narrow neck of rock connects it with the net-work
of cliffs, is a vast monastery, the Mother Abbey of the Olivetani. In
1313 a noble of Siena, Bernardo Tolomei, in the midst of a life of
literary distinctions and pleasures, received, it is said, the grace of
God. He was struck blind, and in his prayers vowed if he recovered his
sight to embrace a life of penitence. It was the divine will that his
vows should be fulfilled, and his sight was immediately restored. Two
friends of the noblest Italian families, the Patrizzi and Piccolomini,
joined him in leaving the world to become hermits in the desert. The
chalky cliffs overhanging the Maremma on Bernardo's estates were
selected as a fitting retreat: here they dug grottoes in the sides of a
precipice and lived on roots and water. They were soon followed by so
many penitents as to form a community requiring a government, and, the
necessity of this being made plain to them through a vision, in which
Bernardo saw a silver ladder suspended between heaven and earth, on
which white-robed monks were ascending accompanied by angels, he was
urged to go to Avignon and obtain an audience of the Pope, who gave to
the community the rule of St. Benedict.
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