Francis Marion Crawford’s work reminds us of the history and the greatness of Rome.
Francis Marion Crawford’s work reminds us of the history and the greatness of Rome.
In 2021, readers of National Review lost the irreplaceable Gerald Russello, editor of The University Bookman and frequent NR contributor. In remembrance, Cluny Media, a publisher to whom Gerald was a trusted adviser, has produced two fine works in his honor: first, How Do You Do It? The Selected Works of Gerald Russello, edited by David G. Bonagura Jr. and featured in this NR podcast interview; and second, new hardcover editions of Francis Marion Crawford’s Saracinesca tetralogy dedicated to the memory and life in letters of Gerald Russello.
With kind permission from Cluny Media, the new introduction to Crawford’s Don Orsino (1892) is reproduced below. Crawford’s novels are set in the dying days of the Papal States and Italy during the Risorgimento. Fitting for Gerald’s day job as a securities lawyer, the plot of this second novel relies on a web of financial transactions in the center of Rome. Gerald could have kept his editing and writing in the moonlight. Despite the extra scrutiny he risked as a practicing lawyer in Manhattan, he brought his extracurricular work into the light of day. He was a lighthouse for young professionals. Gerald helped to keep alive the legacy of Russell Kirk, Orestes Brownson, and Christopher Dawson. Gerry Russello from Brooklyn coulda, shoulda, woulda lived as an intellectual in their mold. But he had a touch more Walter Bagehot in him than he liked to admit. He worked at the center of things and lived in the service of the permanent things.
Gerald Russello is irreplaceable, but he joins the saints. Requiescat in pace.
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I n 1861, General McClellan’s dithering drove President Lincoln abroad in search of help. Backchannel inquiries were made to General Giuseppe Garibaldi as he idled in Italy after the conquest of Naples and Sicily. Would he accept a commission as Major General in the Union Army? Secretary Seward instructed America’s envoy: “Tell him that we have abundant resources, and numbers unlimited at our command, and a nation resolved to remain united and free.”
Lincoln sacked McClellan, but Garibaldi stayed in Italy. Lincoln eventually found his man in General Grant and won the war. Pius IX lost the Papal States and died after eight years of self-imposed imprisonment in the Vatican. After his own presidency, Grant toured the Vatican and met Pope Leo XIII who thanked him for allowing priests to minister as military chaplains to Catholic Union soldiers.
Grant was one of many American tourists streaming into Rome after the Civil War. One enthusiastic American was presented to Leo XIII. “Sir,” he exclaimed, seizing and shaking the hand of the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles. “I am glad to meet you. I knew your father, the late Pope!”
New excavations in the Roman Forum amused the tourists, and there were always Roman basilicas, which Henry James called the “churchiest churches.” The expat novelist and Catholic convert Francis Marion Crawford knew the city well and reassured American tourists that the “greater monuments of greater times are there still, majestic and unmoved, the larger signs of a larger age stand out clear and sharp; the tomb of Hadrian frowns on the yellow stream, the heavy hemisphere of the Pantheon turns its single opening to the sky, the enormous dome of the world’s cathedral looks silently down upon the sepulchre of the world’s masters.”
But Crawford and his friends were disturbed by the rapid changes in the city. “Twelve years of Sardinian rule — 1870–82 — have done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than all the invasions of the Goths and Vandals,” writes Augustus Hare, friend and mentor to Crawford and author of the once-essential guidebook Walks in Rome. “The glorious gardens of the Villa Negroni have been annihilated; many precious street memorials of medieval history have been swept away; ancient convents have been leveled with the ground or turned into barracks; historic churches have been yellow-washed or modernized.” If a convent was not demolished or confiscated for use as barracks, the resident nuns were often “condemned to extinction by the prohibition to receive any new members,” writes Crawford’s sister Mrs. Hugh Fraser.
The ambitions of the new government formed an unholy alliance with foreign capital seeking fresh opportunity in Roman real estate. By curious coincidence, several building projects required the demolition of property belonging to members of the Black nobility, those Roman families who remained loyal to the pope. For example, the Via Nazionale cut through the city and erased the Palazzo Aldobrandini and Villa Antonelli. Principe Aldobrandini was a member of Pius IX’s council of lay ministers assembled by Papal Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli. The villas of the Albani, Altieri, Montalto, and Negroni were lost. “One’s stomach is really turned here by the accounts of the hideous things that are being wrought upon the helpless seven hills,” writes Henry James. “Destruction and vulgarization everywhere — and the Villa Ludovisi cut up into building lots. The Villa Ludovisi — je ne vous dis que cela!”
The newly unified Italian government also attacked primogeniture, forcing a more equal distribution of any inherited wealth across all immediate heirs, not just the first-born son. This is the challenge and perhaps opportunity that greets one future heir in Crawford’s Don Orsino, his third novel in the Saracinesca tetralogy. Don Orsino is the eldest son of Prince Sant’Ilario and grandson of Prince Saracinesca. We meet him just as he is coming of age. His father “saw that the abolition of primogeniture had put an end to hereditary idleness, and that although his sons would be rich enough to do nothing if they pleased, yet his grandchildren would probably have to choose between work and genteel poverty, if it pleased the fates to multiply the race.” Under the new Italian dispensation, half of the total property of an estate must be divided equally among all heirs and the remaining half was typically left to the eldest son, which meant quick dissipation in a few generations of even the largest estates.
The great Irish Dominican preacher Fr. Thomas Burke asks: “What did Pius IX do for Rome? If you want to know what Pius IX did, all you have to do is to look to what Victor Emmanuel is doing, and just take the opposite of that, and you will know what the Pope did for Rome.” Father Burke went to Rome in 1864 as Rector to the Dominican Convent of San Clemente. He saw that Rome under the popes was more charitable, more just, without conscription, and with a lighter burden of taxation. “Pius IX always put the heaviest tax on the priests,” Burke remarked in a lecture, and said: “Let us spare the people; you pay me the money.”
Crawford wrote prolifically because he wrote profitably. He understood the value of a dollar, and he could write with a novelist’s eye for accounting that was perfected by the great Scottish chartered-accountant-turned-novelist Bruce Marshall. Crawford noticed the unintended consequence of the new government’s clumsy lunge for new tax revenue. “Another law, however, forbids the alienation of all collections of works of art either wholly or in part, if they have existed as such for a certain length of time, and if the public has been admitted daily or on any fixed days, to visit them,” he writes of the new squeeze put upon the old princely families. “It is not in the power of the Borghese, or the Colonna, for instance, to sell a picture or a statue out of their galleries, nor to raise money upon such an object by mortgage or otherwise.” Many families were left property rich and cash poor, a situation which endures to the present era.
To satisfy tax bills and to increase liquid inheritances for their children, many princely families reached for investment returns in the white hot Roman property market. The most serious obstacle to commercial development in Italy was a psychological one, argues the late historian of medieval economics Roberto Sabatino Lopez. “Trade was regarded as a base occupation, unworthy of gentlemen though not really unbecoming for commoners who would be unable to find a more dignified means of support. This prejudiced view was sanctioned by laws which, purportedly in order to make it easier for poorer people to earn their living, forbade noblemen to engage in commerce.” In Crawford’s telling, the Princes Saracinesca and Sant’Ilario inherit this legacy and are content to steward their country estates.
But young Don Orsino is drawn into the frenzy. His motivations are dignified. He wants to be a self-made man and a man of action. But his adversaries in the market are men of avarice, including Ugo Del Felice, the antagonist of the first Saracinesca novel brought back from exile. “Like many of those who had played petty and dishonourable parts in the revolutionary times, he had succeeded in building up a reputation for patriotism upon a very slight foundation, and had found persons willing to believe him a sufferer who had escaped martyrdom for the cause, and had deserved the crown of election to a constituency as a just reward of his devotion.” A prosperous bank director as well, Del Felice assumed a leading role in the financial future of Rome.
Don Orsino borrows with Del Felice’s help and enters into a construction partnership with an architect. This being a novel by the great Romanticist, he also falls in love with the newly arrived Madame d’Aranjuez. Both pursuits attract the unexpected attention of Count Spicca the cadaverous duelist. One of Crawford’s unforgettable supporting characters from earlier novels, whose backstory Crawford has teased until now. Spicca is a living memento mori and a revered Roman wit. “I like the way you did it, in spite of everybody’s advice,” said Spicca, kindly to Don Orsino. “A man who can jump through the paper ring of Roman prejudice without stumbling must be nimble and have good legs.”
Leo XIII forgave his eager American visitor for mistaking the papacy for a hereditary office. The pontiff knew that his Apostolic inheritance was guaranteed by the Son of God, whom St. Paul called the prime beneficiary of primogeniture — the first-born of all creation. St. Paul wrote and preached as a wise architect. “I have laid the foundation; and another buildeth thereon.”
At his villa in Sorrento, Francis Marion Crawford was his own wise architect, tallying the brickwork for buttresses in his head and reinforcing the sea wall to hold back the Bay of Naples. He built reservoirs with a year’s supply of freshwater sweetened with a swarm of live eels, an ancient Italian trick. His sisters thought he did not go far enough in critiquing the hastily built new Rome. In Don Orsino, Crawford wrote as a wanderer who “goes down again through the chilly evening air to the city below, to find it less modern than he had thought. He has found what he sought and he knows that the real will outlast the false, that the stone will outlive the stucco and that the builder of today is but a builder of card-houses beside the architects who made Rome.”