Piango, mi bagno - Score

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An actual full-on episode, another clip show? JavaScript is required to view this site. Log in Sign up. Most recent Most popular Most recent. Filter by post type All posts. Grid View List View. Afghanistan kabul adek berry doves kart-e sakhi mosque pattern oriental Oriental blog. Who the fuck is red?!?! Non voglio che tu ti presenti sotto casa mia con delle rose e un pacco di cioccolatini, ma con un libro di Charles Bukowski e una teglia di pizza.

Woh bachpan bhi kitna haseen tha Jab sar-e-aam roya karte thay, Ab ek bhi aansoon nikle toh log Hazaaron sawaal karte hain. Guido repre- sents the transition in poetry from chivalry to idealism; from a personal and romantic to a universal and philo- sophic concept of love. Love, which was for the Sicilian school a well-understood and often a purely conven- tional relation between the poet and his lady, becomes for him a spiritual force, a holy thing, the native genius of the human heart.

Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore com' a la selva augello in la verdura; n6 fe' amore avanti gentil core, n6 gentil core avanti amor, natura. Within the gentle heart Love shelters him As birds within the green shade of the grove: Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme, Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love. Jacopone, in the developed work of his later life, brings to the praise of Divine Love both the accent of passionate and romantic devotion and the deep thoughts and wide vision of the philosophic poets. It is reasonable to put the credit of these accomplishments to his residence in Bologna.

There he would be present at the cradle of Italian poetry and spend his most impressionable years in an atmosphere of poetic enthusiasm. There he would acquire the technical dexterity and the strong philosophic bent which characterise the best of his later works. Thence too may come the memories of Romance literature which decorate some of his songs, and some of the materials for those excursions into metaphysics which accord so oddly with his later Franciscan dread of " acquired knowledge. Perhaps his father was now dead. At any rate, the income of their small estate was quite inadequate to the needs of life as conceived by the brilliant and ambitious son of the house.

Non ce bastava niente el podere a recoprire le brighe presented The little manor did not near suffice To yield the price Our year's expense to pay. His ambitions at this time appear indeed to have been purely social: Asti e paraggi, calzare e vestire, mangiare e bere e star fra la gente. Pleasure and dress, display and rivalry. To eat and drink, and be in company. It was well within his power to rebuild the family fortunes if he chose; and his own luxurious tastes, which only money could satisfy, were a powerful in- centive to diligence.

The Vita gives a bad account of his professional years. He was, it says, " proud and avaricious, wrapped up in the vices and lusts of this world; the which held him in so great a blindness that not only did he ignore God, but was His adversary, the enemy and persecutor of all those who would walk in godly ways.

As Thomas of Celano exaggerates the youthful sins of St. When we consult the poems in which Jacopone pours out his own contrition for the past, we find that he has no very startHng sins of which to accuse himself. In another, more personal poem, he tells us that, like many other skilful advocates, he was not very particular as to the rights of the cases which he argued; that he often paid more attention to his clients' interests than to those of strict justice, and liked to get the criminal off when he could. Seen in the mirror of Truth: Town life in the thirteenth century offered many opportunities for luxury and delicate living.

Ser lacomo took full advantage of them. He liked ease and pleasure, and a certain beauty and order in his surroundings: These preoccupations seemed to him quite reasonable and harmless. Physical well-being, a " good time," represented his idea of happiness. The passion for clothes comes out in many places. And deeming all I did was right, I thought there was no fault in me.

Now blind and dead myself I see, For I have hurt and grieved my Lord. He was living to the full the life of the senses and intellect, at the expense of the life of the soul. On the contrary, the hostile attitude towards the temporal power, the un- sparing denunciation of clerical weaknesses, which are marked features of his satires, probably represent a survival and spiritualisation of the opinions and pre- judices of his unconverted days.

He was, then, at this time a normal prosperous cultivated man of the upper classes; shrewd, ambitious, intelligent, robustly human. He was both sensual and artistic. He liked to pay attention to good-looking women, but cast them aside without a scruple when they ceased to please his taste. He was in Todi, as he had struggled to be in his student days, a person of importance and a member of the best set. His natural arrogance had full play: Per la mala ricchezza ch'a sto mondo agio avuta, so visso en tanta alteza, I'alma n'agio perduta.

His zest for living, his demand for opportunity of self- expression, were fully met by the varied interests of his social and professional life. In one of these years he was married to Vanna, daughter of Bernardino di Guidone of the house of Coldimezzo; members, Hke the Benedetti, of the lesser Umbrian aristocracy, and Ghibelline in politics. Jacopone has told us what he demanded of an ideal wife.

She must have a large dowry, and must not have a nagging tongue. But, he adds, complete satisfaction is only found in heaven, and he who seeks it here is a thief. This suggests that his own experience fell short somewhere: As the Vita is our only authority for the tragedy of Jacomo's short married life, all that we can say of it must be deduced from this doubtful source, qualified by the scanty self-revelations of his poems.

In those poems, he never refers directly to his marriage. D'Ancona, Jacopone da Todi, p. His married life lasted only for a year. The Vita, which we have already seen cause to suspect as a conventual document, says that it was passed "in all pleasures and vanities"; perhaps, too, in great and innocent happiness. There may be personal reminiscence in the one appreciative description of womanhood in Jacopone's poems: Now I am tormented By thought of her delight.

We can imagine the completeness with which that vehement nature, which afterwards flung itself upon God as a wave upon a rock, ight surrender itself to the glamour of love: Ser Jacomo was a shrewd and experienced man of e world, at once sensual and keenly intelligent. Vanna is described as a young unsullied girl, deeply religious, with an almost puritanical dread of luxury: Ser Jacomo, whose best ideals were of the most earthly kind, wanted to spoil and pet her: He loved to dress his beautiful wife in magnificent garments, and see her taking her place in those social functions which the Vita curtly dismisses as " vain doings.

There were scenes which remind us of one of Jacopone's tenzoni between the body and the soul. Vanna explained the beauty of religion; Jacopone replied by a tempting selection of dresses and jewellery. Probably Jacomo thought that his conquest was complete, for she let him go his own way, and never spoke to him again of her rehgious convictions. But she was steadfast as well as discreet, and continued in secret her life of prayer and mortifi- cation; never letting him suspect her private austeri- ties, but trying to atone for her outward worldliness — and perhaps for his — by many acts of penance.

Pos- sibly the preaching of the friars, and processions of the flagellants, their invitations to penitence, renunciation, and simplicity of life, had touched her; so that already, though he knew it not, the spirit of Francis was laying siege to Jacopone's soul. Certainly, if the story told in the Vita be true, his conversion must be regarded as the direct result of Vanna's penances and prayers. One day, when they had been married for a year, Vanna, because it was Ser Jacomo's wish, went to a marriage festival, " such as are customary in that country.

There was dancing upon a balcony. All the dancers were injured; Vanna alone was mortally hurt. According to one account, she was already dead when her husband was brought to her. In great bitterness of spirit, because he loved her very tenderly, he caused her body to be carried home; and there stripped off the garments of vanity, that it might be prepared for the grave.

According to another version, which forms the basis of Modio's biography, he found her still living, though unable to speak. She was taken into a neighbouring house, and there he wished to unlace her, that he might find out the extent of her injuries: The sequel is the same in both legends. The beautiful girl had been an ascetic at heart. Ser Jacomo, standing by the body of the woman whom he had loved but never known, saw with amazement unexpected depths of existence and oppor- K unities of suffering opening before him. The sweet nd docile wife whom he thought that he loved and understood, whose life he had filled with luxuries and amusements, had never lived.

In one moment he was enlightened, bereaved, and cruelly mortified. Self-expression sought more vivid forms than the modem world seems able to tolerate. Those who would now be content with the medal of a guild or the uniform of the Salvation Army then demonstrated a change of heart by public scourging of their naked flesh.

She had behaved to him with infinite kindness and tolerance, satisfied his demands, indulged his fancies, and quietly gone her own way. The shock, says the legend, not only pierced Ser Jacomo to the heart, but drove him out of his mind. And feeling himself so greatly moved both in body and in soul, he retreated within himself, and, being recollected within his own heart, there began in a marvellous manner, and helped by divine light, to open his eyes and consider his past life, how far it was from God's ways: Critics are sharply divided as to its authenticity.

Our only evidence for it is the Vita ; and the Vita as we have it, though it may be based on earlier material, is at best a document of the second class. The story itself is thoroughly characteris- tic of life in thirteenth-century Umbria as we know it, with its mingled worldliness and missionary fervour. Our greatest difficulty in accepting it comes from the fact that its ultimate source can only be Jacopone himself: Neverthe- less, the character of his doctrine, the temper of his religion, do suggest the possibility of such an episode, as the determining fact of that turbulent career.

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The " perfect friar," the man of position and education, afterwards the friend of cardinals and leaders of religion, shows in his poetry a wildness, a want of balance, an ecstasy of contrition, which surely indicate great temperamental capacity for passion, consistent with some devastating emotional experience in his past. Those laude which internal evidence compels us to assign to his first period are the work of a passionate convert, a " twice-born " soul.

He seems always to be rediscovering, with new tenderness and remorse, the crucifixion of love, the sacrificial pain of God, suffering at the very heart of loveliness. The storms of mystic love which characterise his middle period represent the sublimation of a passion which has its erotic side. It is true that his attitude towards women, as disclosed in these poems, is hostile and even contemptuous: But we must remember that the great revulsion of feeling which accompanies adult conver- sion is most strongly marked in matters of sex.

The mystics who find room for women in their world — St. Francis, Richard RoUe — are those who turn to God in early life. Converted worldlings cannot act thus: Moreover, his whole career consisted in a series of breaks and renunciations: For a time, it seems likely that he was really mad: Prudent persons easily confuse enthusiasm with insanity: He seems to have been subject for many years to fits of nervous irritability, freakish moods, wild alternations of ecstasy and contrition: The Vita suggests that there had always been in him a tendency to extravagant action, already shown in the complete- ness of his surrender to pleasure, vanity, worldliness, and human love.

It is probable that his marriage had awakened some of the deeper emotional possibilities of his nature ; had provided an object on which his ardour of temperament could spend itself. Now, disillusion was added to bereavement. The passion and self- surrender of the lover, fully developed, were suddenly arrested: It was like the checking of a river in full flood, which tears up old landmarks, wrecks established things, and cuts new channels to the sea. Such an experience must mean either death or re- birth for the self that undergoes it.

It drives a man in upon himself, confronting him with that spectre of im- permanence which we aU acknowledge but never realise SER JACOMO 55 till its corrupting touch is felt on our own lives. In this moment of complete destitution only one thing could save Ser Jacomo; the discovery of some new and durable object of devotion, some new outlet for his intensity of temperament.

Life he must have: Now his temporal life lay in ruins around him: It changed every value of existence; condemning the past, but showing a way out towards the future, a whole new order of reality waiting for his recognition. With characteristic thoroughness and zest he accepted not only the revela- tion but all that it implied: Francis, but in- finitely harder of accomplishment. Francis, an ardent boy of twenty-four, cast off the bondage of possessions gladly and easily, in a spirit of adventure.

Jacomo, a man nearly forty years of age, long past the suppleness of youth, was almost shattered by the convulsion which made possible his escape. He emerged from the first shock of bereavement, the devastating experience of loneliness, to find himself, as did St. Francis after the Crucified had spoken to him, " another man than he was before ": The Doctor of Law and man of the world, the delicate eater and accomplished musician, was gone.

In his place was a heart-broken penitent, already conscious of the stern demands which Divine Love makes on the soul: The life of the world had become mean- ingless to him. He gave up his establishment, distri- buted his wealth to the poor, exchanged his beautiful clothes for a rough tunic and hood, and was hereafter known as the mad fool Jacopone.

From the time of his conversion, Jacopone's poems become our best source for the history of his inner Hfe; for in many of them the varied moods of the penitent, the passion for self-abasement which the quaint in- cidents of the Vita crudely symbolise, and the slow moulding of his character to the purposes of eternal life, are vividly described. It must be remembered, however, that these poems stretch over a long period: Many are im- personal and didactic, few bear indications of date; and all must be used with a certain reserve in our attempt to trace the story of his development.

Some of these penitential laude seem to have been written in the years immediately following his conversion, as mental stability gradually returned to him. Others were plainly composed in later life, when he saw in a calmer light and in truer proportion the phases of mental unrest and moral purification through which he had passed. They represent, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, " emotion remembered in tranquillity. His atrophied spiritual faculties were not able to grasp the full splendour of the spiritual world.

Its character changed for him as his new consciousness grew in strength and span: En cinque modi appareme lo Signor en esta vita. These five ways, and the long growth on which they mark stages, are reflected in his poems; and it is the principal task of criticism, examining these works in the light both of reHgious psychology and of Hterary scholarship, to deduce their probable order of composi- tion and the relation in which they stand to their author's life. Mystics do not spring full-grown from the wreck of their worldly careers.

They mostly pass through a period of spiritual childhood and hard education, marked by the child's intensity of feeling and distorted scale of values, its abounding vitality, dramatic in- stinct and lack of control. The child's vivid sense of naughtiness, fear of consequences, and quick reaction to forgiveness and love, are all present in a sublimated form.

Bizarre acts of mortification, world-refusal of the most extravagant kind, an overpowering sense of sin, quickly succeed the revelation of newness and joy which marks their first change of heart. In all this, Jacopone was true to type. HlThe process was long. We can distinguish in it two "great phases: In this, the central interests are those peculiar to the contemplative life.

In the early days of his ascetic life, with which we are now concerned, Jacopone's mood seems to have been dominated by an intense revulsion against all the interests of his past existence, now perceived by him fto be unreal. His soul awoke to the immediate presence kf God, and was filled with horror of its own record, iand fear of the judgment provoked: He tells us how dreadful God [seemed when He thus appeared within the soul in His richness, and how this vision made his dead spirit [uick again.

Nel primo modo appareme neU'alma Dio Signore ; da morte suscitandola per lo suo gran valore. The poet latent in Jacopone, perhaps long smothered by other interests, perhaps nourished hitherto upon the satisfactions of sense, now emerged from the general upheaval of his nature, and took charge of his consciousness. It recognised and re- sponded to the vision which had broken in upon him: The result seems to have been one of those strange revulsions which often accompany sudden conversion: He could not live the new life under the old conditions of out- ward luxury.

A complete break was imperative; sanity could only return with the re-grouping of all his powers and instincts about a fresh centre. The old self must die that the new self might be born. Non posso esser renato s'io en men non so morto. Two other circum- stances tended to press Jacopone towards a total and dramatic change: His conversion had, it is clear, a definitely Franciscan character.

It can, as a matter of fact, be detected in Jaco- ne's prompt revulsion from material and intellectual ossessions, and his early cult of " holy folly " ; as well s in the penitential love for the Person and sufferings f Christ, so strongly emphasised by the Franciscan reachers, and so dramatically manifested in the great onverts who literally " left all to follow Him.

The brothers however, unlike their Founder, seem to have distrusted sudden conversions, and reminded him of his arrogant and worldly past; saying, with a humility more professional than convincing, " If you wish to live with us, you must become a donkey; that even as a donkey you may dwell among the donkeys. Admit then the donkey to live among the donkeys!

In any event, their reluctance to dmit so peculiar a novice is easily understood. San "ortunato followed the " relaxed " rule, and was OS tile to the Spiritual movement. Therefore that very ervour of self-abasement in which Jacopone showed he Franciscan character of his conversion, was best alculated to alienate its sympathies.

His performance ointed either to a fanaticism verging on insanity, or to n unpleasantly clear understanding of the pious shams with which the relaxati surrounded themselves. Either form of zeal indicated an uncompromising attitude, little to the taste of a comfortable religious house.

He was a man to whom self-expression, even display, was of the very essence of life. A hidden devotion did not come naturally to him. He had loved the world, and shown it. Now he despised the world, and must show that too. With a thoroughness and enthusiasm which is in harmony with his vehement character, he de- liberately sought degradation, poverty, discomfort of every kind, as the only means of escape from the fetters of appearance, and atonement for the mistakes of the past.

Seen from the outside, he must have seemed at this time simply a passionate man driven mad by grief. What appears to be another version of the story of the ass's skin was used by the writer of the Vita see below , but the episode of Jacopone's rejection by the friars of San Fortunato was, not unnaturally, suppressed. When the Vita was written, Jacopone had become the special glory of that convent and of his native town, and v no one cared to remember that the local Beatus had once been refused admission to the house which afterwards claimed him as peculiarly its own.

They formed a religious corporation, and might not plead in civil courts nor bear arms, which they could not be forced to take up even to defend the commune. JMany, like Jacopone, distributed all their property on entering the Order. They might not wear silk, coloured garments, or flowing sleeves.

The educated members were bound to the daily recitation of the psalter according to the use of the Papal Court, or an equivalent number of psalms; the others, to say a number of Paternosters at the canonical hours. Many undertook works of charity, especially nursing the sick poor. The tertiary congregations were nominally under the direction of the friars. This dependence, however, was disliked by the Conventual brothers ; and their closest connection and sympathy was with the Spiritual party, which drew some of its leading members from their ranks.

Cuthbert, Life of St. We can imagine what the general judgment would be, did some eminent and highly-cultivated lawyer of our own day suddenly give up his practice, forsake his home, abandon every decency and convention of his class, and become an itinerant preacher: Wearing the roughest clothes and abandoning all pre- tension to refinement, he now wandered about the streets of Todi, a half-crazy missionary; inviting men to repentance sometimes by words, more often by grotesquely symboHc deeds. And he was mocked and persecuted by the children. And all these things he seemed to enjoy, patiently enduring everything either for love of his Lord Jesus Christ who bore so many pains for sinners, or for hatred of the pride andjsinfulness of his own past life.

He became a by-word in Todi, and an object of great shame and embarrassment- to his unfortunate relations, who suddenly saw the wealthy and respected head of the family transformed into a religious fanatic of the most extravagant type. His relatives saw this with much shame and confusion, reprehending him and condemning him as a madman. And first they did all they could to recall him from this folly, but seeing that they could in no wise move him from his opinions, held their peace, though they endured it with vexation and the greatest shame ; since many times he did things which in the eyes of men of this world seemed of the utmost imbeciHty, though in the sight of God they were of singular wisdom.

Thus, once when a certain festa was taking place in Todi, where a great part of the inhabitants were gathered together, he being in fervour of spirit, burning with this shame and with love of this virtue of self-abase- ment, stripped himself naked, and took an ass's saddle and put it on, and the bit in his mouth, and went on his hands and feet, ambling like an ass.

And all who were at th. Entreated to behave in a normal manner or else leave the party in peace, he said " As my brother intends to honour the family by his wisdom, so I wish to honour it by my imbecility. In each case the victims were greatly edified by these tiresome perform- ances. Francis sent out to bring people to God by music and song; but to the holy simpletons whose antics entertain the angels and the saints.

Vita di Frate Ginepro. Francesco d' Assist, cap.

Ut sic dicam, ioculatores Dei sunt sanctorumque angelorum, quorum opera, si hi qui simplices non sunt, quandoque facerent, haud dubium quin Deum ofEenderent, qui in eis, dum per simplices fiunt, delectatur. Quoted by Tamassia, loc. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that he did, by de- claration, hold " madness for Christ's sake " to be the essence of wisdom and courtesy.

Francis himself seems to have put no bounds to individual self-abasement, and in his hatred of cleverness went a long way towards the deification of folly. He rejoiced over the silliness of Brother John the Simple, and kept his disapproval for the brother who desired a psalter, not the brother who behaved like a fool. They occupy in the Vita a far greater place than their importance can justify: Rhythm and thought are usually undistinguished, and often descend to the level of doggerel. It is hard to believe that Jacopone, child of a complete Latin culture, could write no better than this: They would thus be an expression of the general revolt against pride of intellect which is so strongly marked in the poems of his middle period.

Without adopting this extreme view, it is possible to account for these poems in two ways. First, as regards their manner, the history of literature assures us that the greatest poets may be subject to failures of in- spiration and of taste, in which they descend to incon- ceivable depths of futility. Religious emotion is specially apt to produce this atrophy of the critical sense. If we read these early laude side by side with those which contain later remi- niscences of his penitential period, we find in them traces of the slow restoration of his mental balance, the movement of his consciousness from the primitive and self-regarding state of fear, in which- the first reve- lation of God had thrown him, to the Christian attitude of humble and fervent love.

This evolution was almost certainly the work of years: There are five poems of undoubted authenticity in which the moods of Jacopone's primary phases of peni- tence seem to be expressed. The plan of the poem is simple. Goodness indicts the Created Affection at the bar of Divine Justice, because she has failed to love the Good; and causes her, with all her family, to be arrested and cast into gaol.

Being in this misery and bondage. Affec- tion repents; and Goodness, having mercy on her, feeds her with grace, whereby her will is changed and her whole being renewed. Or piagne '1 suo descionore e de te non gir curando. Jacopone was an orthodox Catholic. Even in his worldly period, though indifferent to religion, he does not appear to have been sceptical.

He was merely more interested in other things, and put off piety till his old age. In a poem of great beauty, probably written at a later date, he has celebrated the thoughts and feelings with which he returned to Holy Com- munion ; finding his way to its hidden mysteries " like a Wind man with a stick.

Here his misery and confusion of mind began to clear, and he perceived himself to be a " new man "; able, to his own amazement, to feel real love for his neighbour and accept with actual delight the contempt of the world. Signer, non te veio, ma veio che m'hai en altro om mutato; Tamor de la terra m'hai tolto, en cielo si m'hai collocato.

The ascetic impulse kept pace with the spiritual vision, and was felt by him in its most exaggerated form. Rooted as he was in the mediaeval world, it was an inevitable part of his general revulsion from the past. The penitent in any age is almost necessarily a dualist. In his first vigorous enthusiasm for the spirit, God and His order seem to be set over against the world and its order — a pair of incompatibles.

The stronger the new light, the blacker is the shadow that it throws. In a man of Jacopone's tempera- ment, some conflict with the body was essential. Old strong habits, the result of years of self-indulgence, must be broken. He seems to have undertaken this work with a suddenness and vehemence untempered by common sense: There was laughter and kindHness in St.

Francis' view of the body. Jacopone's early asceticism struck a more savage note. He could not afford to make any concessions to the senses; for they were strong and dangerous, accus- tomed to rule his life. For the time, at any rate, he must fight them: Sometimes this sense of impermanence is expressed with gentleness, and implies an invitation to perdurable joys: The senses, and the pleasures that they bring Must vanish and decay.

To God then take thy way, None else can satisfy; There is a land where the Good cannot die And happiness endures eternally. The body, he thought at this time, is worth nothing save as an instrument of penance. Its origin is nasty, its end is dust. The sheep bears wool, the apple-tree bears fruit: Underneath his fine clothes he is swarming with nits and lice; perpetually devoured by fleas. It induced in Jacopone a thirst for physical mortifications, which he carried to extreme and some- times to barbarous lengths: Hunger, thirst, cold, and general wretchedness he felt to be essential, if he was to be freed from the tyranny of the senses: O SIgnor, per cortesia, raandame la malsania!

A me la freve quartana, la contina e la terzana, la doppia cotidiana colla grande idropesia. The quartan, and the tertian too, And dropsy's misery. The falling sickness I desire, To fall in water and in fire. That from affliction fierce and dire I never may be free. Though a merciful Providence refused to grant this outrageous petition, and gave instead a strength of body which survived thirty years of voluntary austeri- ties and five years' confinement in the dungeons of Palestrina, yet we can hardly suppose that the ascetic life came easily to Jacopone.

It must have involved great sufferings; calling for high courage, and that quality of dogged perseverance which had contributed to his successful career in the world. Years of good feeding and soft clothing had formed habits which could only be broken at the cost of much pain, and almost intolerable discomfort.

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Moreover, the prayer that he may be afflicted with bad weather, " gelo, grandine, tempestate " — a real hardship to a wandering hermit — loses its force on the lips of a cloistered friar. If this poem indeed belongs to his second period, it can only refer to the moment of despair when he says that he was driven out of the community-life.

For a middle-aged man of luxurious tastes, to whom com- fort has become second nature, these things represent a hard and painful sacrifice; a heroic effort, perpetu- ally renewed, and only made possible by the fervour of remorseful adoration, and passionate desire to make atonement, which now filled Jacopone's heart. We are to think of him, then, during the first years of his new life as developing simultaneously in these two directions; living a hard and bracing life of stern asceticism and perpetual self-discipline as towards the physical order, a more joyous life of growing love, devotion, and trust as towards the spiritual order.

He was no easy optimist. His enraptured celebration of Divine Love was balanced by full know- ledge of all that opposed it in himself and in the world. We taste in it the sharp flavour of the salt of Christ, not the sugar of the religious sentimentalist. His early poems show him moving in perpetual disequilibrium between these two poles of penance and joy, and reveal the growing intensity of his spiritual vision as de- pendent upon the drastic purification of mind and sense which had preceded it.

The writers of the Speculum describe St. Francis as " drunken with the love and compassion of Christ " and breaking out like a troubadour into " French-like rejoicings " in honour of his Love. It was probably about this time that he began to exhibit the characteristic phenomena of the beginner in the supersensual life. That frenzy of spiritual joy breaking out into incoherent songs and cries, which the old mystical writers called the jubilus and re- garded as a sign of ardent but undisciplined devotion, seems at times to have seized upon him, and probably increased his reputation for insanity.

In the early stanzas of " La Bontade se lamenta " he gives a vivid picture of the emotional fervours of the soul touched by grace, which is probably inspired by his own experience, and throws considerable light upon this phase of his development. The tale in the Vita which refers this poem to his conventual period see p. Empreso ha novo lenguaio, che non sa dir se non " amore. The will to wondrous change is wrought; Her former sins she doth lament, With yearning grief most vehement; She finds no comfort and no cheer.

Now a new language doth she speak, " Love, Love," is all her tongue can say. She weeps, and laughs ; rejoices, mourns. In spite of fears, is safe and gay; And though her wits seem all astray, — So wild, so strange, her outward mien — Her soul within her is serene; And heeds not how her acts appear. But these acute emotional reactions, often accompanied by eccentric outward behaviour, are a normal episode in the early development of many mystics ; upon whom 1 Lauda LXXIV.

Richard RoUe, Ruysbroeck, and others have left us vivid descriptions of the jubilus ; which seems to have been in their day, like the closely-related " speaking with tongues " in the early Church, a fairly common expression of intense reHgious excitement. Spiritual inebriation brings forth many strange gestures in men. It makes some sing and praise God because of their fullness of joy, and some weep with great tears because of their sweetness of heart. It makes one restless in all his limbs, so that he must nm and jump and dance; and so excites another that he must gesticulate and clap his hands.

And this is called the jubilus or jubilation; that is, a joy which cannot be uttered in words. Parlar de tale amor faccio foUia, diota me conosco en teologia, Tamor me constregne en sua pazia e famme bannire.

Piumini da canto : per coro a una e a due voci bianche

Abundance cannot hide herself apart; And joy, from out her nest within the heart, Breaks forth in song, and in the prophet's art; Even as did Elias long ago. For this reason, the poems in which it appears are very difficult to date. He discerned it not only in himself, but in the very heart of the universe. It was, he thought, a mutual madness. Non vol gir po' '1 tuo Signore?

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Non p6i aver maiur onore ch'en sua pazia conventare. Shall mine not be inebriate? And so be like my Lord above? No greater honour can I prove Than sharing His insanity. Whatever the date of their composition, this test assures us that it was neither a raw convert nor the initiate of an " ordered love " who described Love drawing him in its mesh Hke a helpless fish from the sea,i and sang the praises of the jubilus and the wisdom of folly. These are the natural expressions proper to a period of illumination, transition, and unrest, culminat- ing perhaps in that apparent " departure of grace " which is an inevitable phase of all intense spiritual experience, and inspires the bitter lament: Piangi, dolente anima predata, che stai vedovata de Cristo amore.

Nevertheless these are works of a transitional type.

They show him to us as developing along normal lines; yet in a way which is profoundly characteristic, and helps us to understand much that is puzzling in his career. We see in them the slow and diihcult emergence of a " new man ": Jacopone can still love hard, work hard, fight hard. He still tends to extra- vagance of feeling; swings between the extremes of rapture and despair. He is still ruled by desire, though his desire is now one of the noblest which is possible to man. Some of these were mere professional beggars and vagabonds.

Others were real wayside evangelists who lived a two-fold life of penance and prayer as towards God, missionary activity as towards men. In his adoption of this career, which he followed for the greater part of ten years, we may trace the continuing influence of the original Franciscan ideal: Where these years were chiefly spent is unknown to us. We gather that Jacopone did not break his connection with Todi, but made it in some sense his base; for it was here in that he at last became a friar.

Some think that he visited during this period the great Franciscan sanctuaries, and entered into those relations with John of Parma, John of la Verna, Conrad of Offida, and other leaders of the Spiritual party, which counted for so much in his later life; others that he rambled through Umbria as an itinerant minstrel and preacher, a giullare di Dio, attracting men by his sing- ing and then persuading them to God in the primitive Franciscan way; others that he hved much in solitude, devoted to prayer and contemplation.

All these things may be true, but they are matters of conjecture. Here neither laude nor documents give us any information. We find in fact from this point onwards two distinct strains in his poetry. In them speak by turns the experienced man of the world, with a sure knowledge of human nature: All are coloured by that intense asceticism which was the natural complement of his mystical life, and which was, as we have seen, specially pronounced in its earlier stages.

The dreamer wants to embody his dream in action, the man of action is possessed and driven by his dream: If we are to get the real man, with his disconcerting changes, his abrupt transitions between earth and heaven, satire and prayer, we must keep both aspects of him in view: A comparison of our Lord's most transcendental sayings with His scathing denunciations of Pharisees and scribes proves that this double reaction to existence does not lack the highest sanctions. As a missionary, Jacopone seems to have had all the qualities of a successful revivalist: Such poems as " Jesu, Lover of my soul," and " Come!

O thou Traveller unknown," in which Wesley reveals his strong mystical bias, are very near in spirit to the great Franciscan. On the other hand. Wesley's popular hymns, often roughly phrased, but always vigorous and sincere, help us to under- stand the circumstances under which Jacopone's didactic laude were composed. We find in his didactic songs the " straight talk " which makes the sermons of St. Bernardino so vivid and sometimes so startling. Jacopone's object is to convict his hearers of sin, to awaken them to the real facts of life and death; and he does not mince matters.

The most violent invective, the most loathsome imagery, the crudest and most audacious physical parallels, are used without stint to drive his meaning home. He knows the value of terse and pungent phrases; that where a long discourse bores, the rhyme arrests attention and is remembered. La longa materia suol generar fastidia, lo longo abreviare suole I'om delettare. Abbrevio mei ditta, longheza breve scritta; chi ce vorra pensare ben ce porra notare.

The song thus introduced is a peculiarly daring and detailed description of the " Spiritual Marriage "; which can hardly be offered to the modern reader, but must certainly have entertained and impressed those who heard it. It is perhaps the most startling — and also probably one of the latest — examples of Jacopone's popular style which has come down to us. Then, as now, we find that women were accustomed to excuse their own extravagance by saying that their husbands expected them to dress well; but as a matter of fact were con- cerned only to outvie each other, and attract admira- tion.

They wore high heels under their long trains to make their " little persons " look taller, tampered with their complexions, and adorned their heads with false hair; thus presenting a very attractive appearance in public, but preparing a painful disillusion for those who followed them into the intimacies of private life.

Per temporal avenesse che I'om la veda sciolta vedi che fa la demona colla sua capovolta 1 le trez'altrui componese non so con que girvolta; farattece una colta che paion en capo nate. She twines another's tresses, see! On her own head they seem to grow. I This familiar realism. There is nothing original in it. It is but a dramatic variation, of special vigour and nastiness, upon a theme which was dear to every thirteenth- century moralist, and which the tragedy of his own life may have compelled him to face in its most terrible form — the transitory character of all bodily strength and beauty, the imminent death and decay of the flesh.

Renier in Giotnale Stotico delta Letteraiura Italiana, xi. Worse is the position of the prosperous old man, once a gallant and handsome knight, now reduced to the undignified dotage of the worn-out worldling. His daughter-in-law is hard, with a serpent's tongue and a voice like a neighing horse, and abuses him all the time; pointing out how revolt- ing are his weaknesses, how nasty his habits, how hideous his appearance.

The moral, as in " O vita penosa," is always the worthlessness of earthly life taken alone; the miseries and discomforts which out- weigh its satisfactions, the retribution which follows indulgence in its pleasures. It was by the negative and ascetic way of disillusion with the here-and-now, by perpetual demonstration of the folly of a life devoted to mere worldly success, that Jacopone first strove to turn his hearers to eternal things. O gente che amate en belleza delettate, venite a contemplare, che ve porra giovare!

That sight may wholesome be. Yea, in this glass behold Me, wretched, hideous, old! Such beauty was my crown. That every soul would run To see so fair an one. Now, how am I disguised, Undone, deformed, despised! My face makes men afraid, So woful, so decayed. In these poems, then, we may still see the character of much of Jacopone's early preaching, and are able to look at him through the eyes of those contemporaries to whom these menacing compositions were first sung.

He was evidently at this time a blunt evangelist, who mocked, bullied, and scolded the sinner to repentance; unwilling, as indeed all the great missionaries have been, to offer the sweetness of the spiritual hfe to those who had not yet realised their own deep need of moral reformation. He did not hesitate to draw in darkest colours the horrors of sin and its inevitable result: Even in the words of the dullest and most ignorant revivalist there is a burning sin- cerity which arrests attention; and Jacopone was neither dull nor ignorant.

He brought from the old life to the new a trained intellect, skilled eloquence, and a thorough understanding of the world he had left. He was by nature both fervent and acute; sometimes exuberant, racy, even humorous, sometimes terrible in his denunciations. Those to whom he sang would enjoy both extremes.

Moreover, even in that time of great converts, his social position and dramatic abandonment of the world, his first strange antics and subsequent austerity of life, would give to him con- siderable notoriety. Long before the end of his mis- sionary period, he must have become a well-known and perhaps a popular figure in the religious life of Umbria: This growing celebrity may well have been one of the factors which brought about the second great spiritual crisis in Jacopone's life. The fact remains that he was not at rest; that he felt a growing need, as the years passed and the powers of his soul developed, for some more complete abnegation of self.

He appeared, it is true, to be living a life of heroic mortification. The records prove to us how passionate was his interest in human affairs, how diflicult he found it to leave his fellow-men alone. In the world he had struggled with them for profes- sional and social supremacy. Now he struggled with them that he might win their souls.

Hence the career of the wandering missionary, as it developed, made ever greater calls on his attention and energy; and ended by giving too much scope to the artist and orator, too little to the contemplative and penitent — a situation only too common in the lives of great preachers, teachers, and revivalists. He wants to be despised of men, but cannot go in rags without attracting their notice, and consequently becoming puffed up and in- jured by vanity. When he gives himself to contempla- tion he has a horrible fear that he is wasting his time.

He sways helplessly between these extremes of thought and action, his emotional instability increased by this external disharmony and unrest. We shall probably be right in conceiving this situation, in an aggravated form, as a dominant feature in the last phases of his free ascetic life. He might have said with Augustine, " I was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, and dragged back by my own weight.

That three-fold vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which summarises the demands of Christian y asceticism, represents not merely three external obliga- tions, but three essential interior conditions of the soul which seeks for union with God. They are interde- pendent forms of spiritual freedom, based on the liberating virtue of humility.

Now outward poverty Jacopone certainly possessed. But interior poverty he had not: He had merely exchanged one sort of wealth for another. The second great stage of detachment was yet beyond his reach — the painful renunciation of his spiritual treasure. The fundamen- tally self-regarding hope of heaven and fear of hell, the craving for God's sweetness and dread of His dark, so hard to evict from the human heart, still prevailed with him.

Queste quattro spogliature piu che le prime so dure; se le dico, par emire a chi non ha capacitate. De lo 'nfemo non temere e del ciel spem non avere ; e de nullo ben gaudere e non doler d'aversitate. He lusted after God with the fierceness and heat of his old unmortified passions turned to a supernal objective. But perhaps it is in the matter of obedience that the falling-short is most glaringly apparent. From one point of view, Jacopone's convert life had been an orgy of spiritual self-will, noble indeed, but with the untamed nobility of the wild.

It had been marked first by self-chosen and im- moderate asceticism, then by uncontrolled wanderings and undisciplined spiritual exaltation. He was a free- lance, fervent and zealous in prayer and good works, but subject to no authority other than his private inter- pretation of God's will. We do not know when or how the unsatisfactory character of such a liberty became clear to him: In this poem he accuses himself with great bitterness of having wandered far from the pathway traced by the saints: Delongato me so de la via e storto me so en ipocrisia; e mostro a la gente che sia lo spirito illuminato.

Corrocciato me so per usanza qual om en mio onore ha mancanza; ma quel che ci ha fede e speranza, con lui me so delettato. Delettato me so en mostra fare, perche altri me deia laudare ; odendo '1 mio fatto blasmare, da tal compagnia so mucciato. El mucciare aio fatto ad engegno, perche altri me tenga de meglio; ma molto m' apiccio e destregno che paia ch'el mondo ho lassato.

Very far my feet have strayed From the road the saints have made! Illuminate, my lying part I play Heartfelt humility my false array; Yet, unless men due honour to me pay At once I rage within, disconsolate. Disconsolate my heart with all around If any praise with faint uncertain sound; But he whose faith and hope in me abound.

In him is my delight immoderate. Immoderate is my desire to claim The praise bestowed upon a holy name But if instead I hear a word of blame Straightway I turn and flee precipitate. Precipitate I flee, with purpose clear That worthy in men's eyes I may appear; With many a fast and penances austere I feign to spurn this world degenerate.

It was, then, if we accept the evidence of this poem, the old talent for success, the old pride of life reappear- ing in a new disguise which first revealed to Jacopone the fact that self-love had not yet been evicted from the centre of his consciousness: Probably the mood which is here expressed was exaggerated: Again and again he names with horror a reputation for holiness as one of the worst weapons which Satan can use against the soul.

Spiritually, it effects the difficult purification of the will, which here if any- where learns the lesson of complete surrender and enters the " second heaven " of poverty. Always en- tailing the most awful loneliness possible to the spirit of man, this condition presses with special weight on those who are subject to no rule but that of their own enthusiastic and undisciplined wills, and who lack the support of a solid ascetic tradition, an enclosing cor- porate life.

In these passionate songs we feel again the alternate moods of anguish and tenderness, self-abase- ment, entreaty, despair, through which he passed.

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