MONTE CASSINO
By L. G. WICKHAM LEGG
THE great convent of Monte Cassino, swept by the surge of war, will soon cease, if it has not already ceased, to exist. The fact irresistibly recalls a night and a day spent under its hospitable roof more than forty years ago. Reverence for the past made it impossible not to feel a certain thrill when approaching the resting- place of Sc. Benedict, the founder of the great order of Black Monks, and of his sister, St. Scholastica ; nor indeed must it be forgotten that when asked to sign a petition to avert the threatened dissolution of the monastery, Dean Stanley, though of another communion, said he would sign it "with both hands."
Forty years ago Cassino was the one stopping-place of the expresses between Rome and Naples, so, though not a place fre- quented by the ordinary tourist, it was easy of access, and, as our arrival was expected, a carriage was ready to meet us at the bottom of the long climb from the station to the monastery, over 1,5oo feet above. It was a slow business, for motor-cars were then as infre- quent a sight in Italy as they were here, even though the first motor I ever saw was threading the traffic in the streets of Milan four years before such a vehicle was allowed in Britain. But our driver was talkative, and whiled away the time, not failing to point out to us, when it came into sight, the peak of Vesuvius, not yet truncated by the eruption of 1906. It was past sunset when we arrived and received a warm-hearted welcome from the monks and the courteous .greetings of the kindly German-American abbot, whose !lame, if I remember aright, was Klug. Supper and con- versation occupied the early part of the evening, but we were very ready to go to our rooms in the forestieria along the hotel-like corridors of the monastery. The accommodation, as was fitting in such a place, was not luxurious, for the linen was rough and the floors bare, but it was scrupulously clean, and though the h.td, was hard, it was none the worse for that to weary limbs.
At four in the morning a bell rang in the corridor ; my companion, as a liturgical expert, was glad to rise in pitch darkness in order to hear a monastic mattins, but I waited for the first glimmer of dawn, and then went to the window to see what I could of the landscape. The reward was immensely rich. Imagine the view from Birdlip, only with mountains rising to thousands of feet, and far more precipitous and with a narrower valley, with snow-covered peaks on the left to take the place of the South Welsh hills and stretching away to another range on the extreme right correspond- ing to the Malvern hills. Below in the plain an eminence, but larger and steeper, reminded the spectator of the hill of Churchdown. Switzerland itself would with difficulty have rivalled the spectacle as the light slowly penetrated into the green valley below and revealed at our very feet the railway-station of Cassino.
After breakfast came the conventual High Mass, said at St. Gregory's altar in the nave of the ornate baroque church in honour of the "Apostle of the English" whose festival it was. Two features of the service impressed themselves on my mind. The less startling was the dignity and reverence with which the service was conducted, in sharp contrast with the almost incredible slovenliness of the Chapter Mass at Salerno the day before ; the other was the music. We were still in the days of Pope Leo XIII, and Italian church music had not yet been overshackled by the well-intentioned reforms of Pope Pius X, and I think that even on St. Gregory's Day we had no anthems in Gregorian chant. But our surprise may be imagined when, at the Elevation, the organist played a voluntary having as its theme the melody associated in the minds of English- men with Isaac Watts's hymn on the Passion. At once a host of questions arose. How did that melody, written by an obscure English composer, come to a monastery in Southern Italy? Did the organist realise the full appropriateness of the tune to the Elevation at any Mass, but more especially to the ft ast of St. Gregory, to whom, as the legend tells, it was granted in a vision at that moment in the service to "survey the wondrous Cross On which the Prince of Glory died " ?
What again would good Isaac Watts have said had he been told that music connected with his poetry was to be used for a " Popish " service? Questions like these passed through my mind then, and have often passed since ; but whenever I hear the hymn my mind goes back to Monte Cassino.
The service over, w..!. went to work in the bright and spacious library, where there were manuscripts to consult, and in the after- noon started back again down the hairpin-bended road to Cassino, past caves any one of which might have been that in which St. Benedict lived, but which presumably are now being used for purposes of war on which the mind prefers not to rest. But the recollections that will never fade are those of our kindly hosts, of the colours of Nature during that sunrise, and, above all, of the coincidence (if it were such) that brought that particular music to be played at that particular point in a service in honour of that particular saint. Indeed, a fanciful optimist might see an omen of a common Christian religion in the linking, by the wordless language of music, of the poetry of an English Protestant Non- conformist of two centuries ago with the liturgy that bears the name of the great Italian bishop who, eleven centuries earlier, placed our ancestors under so great a debt.
Previous page
