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SEEKERS IN SICILY
[Illustration: “Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children”]
SEEKERS IN SICILY
Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica
Done into the Vernacular
by
ELIZABETH BISLAND AND ANNE HOYT
New York: John Lane Company. MCMIX
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
Copyright, 1909
By John Lane Company
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Decoration]
To
ANDERS AND FRAU ZORN
FROM THE NORTH, IN MEMORY
OF THE SUN AND THE SOUTH,
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
BY
A PAIR OF “WORD BRAIDERS”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Decoration]
=NOTE=
_THE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the heads of the
chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhabitants of
the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and
are still considered as tokens of good luck and defenders from the
Evil-eye._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Decoration]
PREFACE
WHEN this book was written—in the spring of the year—the Land of the
Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which
wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908.
Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of “this
unintelligible world” carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when
the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages
then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose
history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the
greatest natural tragedy that man’s chronicles record because of this
line drawn by Time upon our planet’s face—yet it leaves her still so
fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty will—forgetting this
slight blemish—still journey to see the sweetest remnant of the world’s
youth. Happily Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where
travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still
exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and
charm was set down.
E. B. AND A. H.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 9
CHAPTER
I ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 15
II A NEST OF EAGLES 45
III ONE DEAD IN THE FIELDS 126
IV THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE 178
V A CITY OF TEMPLES 192
VI THE GOLDEN SHELL 229
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
“A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself” 68
“Pan’s Goatherd” 132
“Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily” 186
“The Saffron Mass of Concordia” 198
“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of 218
Flowers”
“Sicily’s Picture-book, The Painted 234
Cart”
“The Last Resting Place of Queen 248
Constance”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Decoration]
SEEKERS IN SICILY
CHAPTER I
ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS
“He ne’er is crown’d with immortality
Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.”
“OH, Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Koré is in Hell.”
This is a discouraged voice from the window.
“Peripatetica, that _sounds_ both insane and improper. Would it fatigue
you too much to explain in the vernacular what you are trying, in your
roundabout way, to suggest?”
Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire
picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns
she is really very dressy.
Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing-room two or three
times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before
it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like
desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the table, and
kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read
aloud.
These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud
without arousing the other to open violence.
“Persephone, sometimes called Koré—” read Peripatetica, “having been
seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint,
and the violet into her green kirtle—was carried, weeping very bitterly,
into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and
sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and
ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of
winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the
blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into
the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown
benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white——”
Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a
hassock under her for a seat.
“I see,” said Jane. “Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night,
poor dear! It’s a pity she can’t realize Persephone, that sweet soul of
Spring, will come back. She always does come back.”
“Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may
not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes
the same outcry about it.”
“I suppose she always finds her first in Enna,” Jane hazarded. “Isn’t
Enna in Sicily?”
“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know much about Sicily, though everybody
goes there nowadays. Let’s go there, Jane, and help Demeter find
Persephone.”
“Let’s!” agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went.
* * * * *
Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging
behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that
Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But
he did—as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so
unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.
It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from
under the side of the ship, threw its crest back—perhaps to look at the
stars—and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much
as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the
time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy,
sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of
depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the
unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their
hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or
coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by
the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her
too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.
That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.
Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon
Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their
opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one
voice for food and shelter. That one’s hard-won shelter was numbered 12
_bis_ (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an
unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should
have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies
sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13
endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should
have distrusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a
walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black
and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was
plainly, to an observant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so
much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded themselves up to that
serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their
impulsive confidence.
To begin with, Naples, instead of showing herself all flowers and
sunshine, tinkling mandolins, and moonlight and jasper seas, was as
merry and pleasing as an iced sponge. Loud winds howled through the
streets, driving before them cold deluges of rain, and in these chilling
downpours the street troubadours stood one foot in the puddles snuffling
songs of “Bella Napoli” to untuned guitars, with water dripping from the
ends of their noses. Peripatetica—whose eyes even under her low-spirited
hat had been all through the voyage full of dreamful memories of
Neapolitan tea-roses and blue blandness—curled up like a disappointed
worm and retired to a fit of neuralgia and a hot-water bottle. There was
something almost uncanny in the scornful irony of her expression as she
hugged her steaming comforter to her cheek, and paced the floor in time
to those melancholy damp wails from the street. Instead of tea-roses she
was prating all day of American comforts, as she clasped the three tepid
coils of the chilly steam-heater to her homesick bosom, while Jane
paddled about under an umbrella in search of the traditional ideal
Italian maid, who would be willing to contribute to the party all the
virtues and a cheerful disposition, for sixty francs a month.
Minna, when she did appear, proved to be Swiss instead of Italian, but
she carried an atmosphere of happy comfort about her, could spin the
threads of three languages with her gifted tongue, while sixty francs
seemed to satisfy her wildest dreams of avarice. So the two depressed
pilgrims, soothed by Minna’s promise to assume their burdens the next
day, fell asleep dreaming that the weather might moderate or even clear.
Eight o’clock of the following morning came, but Minna didn’t. Jane
interviewed the concierge, who had recommended her. The concierge
interviewed the heavens and the earth, and the circumambient air, but
spite of outflung fingers and polyglot cries, the elements had nothing
to say about the matter, and for twenty-four hours they declined to let
the secret leak out that other Americans in the same hotel had ravished
their Minna from them with the glittering lure of twenty francs more.
Finally it dawned upon two damp and depressed minds that some unknown
enemy had put a _comether_ on them—though at that time they had no
inkling of his identity. Large-eyed horror ensued. First aid to the
hoodooed must be sought. Peripatetica tied a strip of red flannel around
her left ankle.
“In all these very old countries,” she said oracularly, “secret malign
influences from the multitudes of wicked dead rise up like vapours from
the soil where they have been buried.”
Jane listened and, pale but resolute, went forth and purchased a coral
_jettatura_.
“Let us pass on at once from this moist Sodom,” she said.
Visions of sun and Sicily dawned upon their mildewed imaginations.
Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of
course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the
Mediterranean is a treacherous element in February. It had broken night
after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy
stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each
night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the
foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile
spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides
jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from
their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good
for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to
be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet
packed with luggage, and with the concierge’s tender, rueful smile
shedding blessings, at last they slid southward.
—Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces....
Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked
before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s
rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy
roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green
artichokes.... The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of
blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows
dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the
way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over
walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the
moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret
channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along
the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old
traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the
earth....
The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light
deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed
the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as
the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento
everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the
prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped
gestures.
It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as
sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the
astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the
same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank
deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of
Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.
Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the
steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes,—swinging about the bold
curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green
and purple as a dove’s neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange,
lemon, and olive groves climbed the narrow terraces five hundred feet
above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone,
where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens
marched; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three
hundred conquests! They were following—in a motor car—the passageway of
three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back
beyond history itself to the old, old gods.
The way was broad and smooth, looping itself like a white ribbon along
the declivity, and even Peripatetica admitted it was lovely, though she
has an ineradicable tendency to swagger about the unapproachable
superiority of Venezuelan scenery; probably because so few are in a
position to contradict her, or because she enjoys showing off her
knowledge of out-of-the-way places which most of us don’t go to. She had
always sniffed at the Mediterranean as overrated in the matter of
colour, and declared it pale and dull beside the green and blue fire of
Biscayne Bay in Florida, but it was a nice day, and a nice sight, and
Peripatetica handsomely acknowledged that _after_ Venezuela this was the
very best scenery she knew.
At Amalfi
“Where amid her mulberry trees
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas,”
they climbed 175 steps to the Cappucini convent which hangs like a
swallow’s nest in a niche of the cliffs, flanked by that famous terrace
the artists paint again and again, from every angle, at every season of
the year, at every hour of the day. There they imbibed a very superior
tea, while sea and sky did their handsomest, listening meanwhile to a
fellow tourist brag of having climbed to Ravello in his motor car.
If one cranes one’s neck from the Cappucini terrace, on a small peak
will be seen what purports to be a town, but the conclusion will be
irresistible that the only way to reach such a dizzy eminence is by
goat’s feet, or hawk’s wings, and the natural inference is that the
fellow tourist is fibbing. Nevertheless one hates to be outdone, and one
abandons all desire to sleep in one of those coldly clean little
monk-cells of the convent, and climbs resolutely down the 175 steps
again and interviews Berliet. Berliet thinks his chassis is too long for
the sharp turns. Thinks that the road is bad; that it is also unsafe;
that the hotel in Ravello is not possible; that he suspects his off fore
tire; that there’s not time to do it before dark; that his owner forbids
his going to Ravello at all; that he has an appointment that evening
with a good-looking lady in Amalfi; that he is tired with his long run,
and doesn’t want to any way. All of which eleven reasons appeared so
irrefutable, collectively and individually, that Jane and Peripatetica
climbed into their seats and announced that they would go to Ravello,
and go immediately.
Berliet muttered unpleasant things in his native tongue as to signori
being reckless, obstinate, and inconsiderate; wound them up sulkily and
took them.
Peripatetica admitted in a whisper that up to that very day she had
never even heard of Ravello, which proved to be a really degrading piece
of ignorance, for every human being they met for the next three months
knew all about the place—or said they did. Further experience taught
them to know that Italy is crowded with little crumbling towns one has
never heard of before, which when examined prove to be the very
particular spots in which took place about a half of all the history
that ever happened. History being a thing one must be pretty skilful if
one means to evade it in Italy, for the truth is that whenever history
took a notion to _be_, it promptly went on a trip to Italy and _was_.
They hooted slowly again through narrow streets, pushed more goats and
children out their way, and then Berliet swung round on one wheel and
began to mount. Began to climb like the foreseen goat, to soar like the
imagined hawk, up sharp zigzags that lifted them by almost exact
parallels. Everything that puts on power and speed, and makes noises
like bomb explosions in a saw-factory, was pushed forward or pulled
back. They rushed noisily round and round the peak at locomotive speed,
and finally half way up into the very top of the sky they pulled up
sharply in a cobble-paved square. Berliet leaped nimbly out, unscrewed a
hot lid—with the tail of his linen duster—from which lid liquids and
steam and smells boiled as from an angry geyser, and they found
themselves in the wild eyrie of Ravello. That ubiquituosity—(with the
name of a hotel on his cap)—who springs out from every stone in Italy
like a spider upon the foolish swarming tourist fly, was waiting for
them in the square as if by appointment, and before they could draw the
first gasp of relief he had their possessions loaded upon the backs of
the floating population, and they were climbing in the dusk a stone
stairway that called itself a street—meekly and weakly unwitting of
their possible destination. The destination proved to be a vaulted
courtyard, opening behind a doorway which was built of a choice
assortment of loot from four periods of architecture and sculpture;
proved to be a reckless jumble of winding steps, of crooked passages, of
terraces, balconies, and loggias, and the whole of this destination went
by the name of the Hotel Bellevue. And once there, then suddenly, after
all the noise and odours, the confusion and human clatter of the last
three weeks, they stepped quietly out upon a revetment of Paradise.
Below—a thousand feet below—in the blue darkness little sparks of light
were Amalfi. In the blue darkness above, hardly farther away it seemed,
were the larger sparks of the rolling planets. The cool, lonely darkness
bathed their spirits as with a blessed chrism. The place was, for the
night, theirs alone, and for one holy moment the swarming tourist failed
to swarm.
* * * * *
“In the Highlands! In the country places!”—
murmured Jane, gratefully declining upon a broad balustrade, and
Peripatetica echoed softly—declining in her turn—
... “Oh, to dream; oh, to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render
Through the trance of silence
Quiet breath.”...
And Jane took it up again—
... “Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And forever in the hill recesses
Her more lovely music broods and dies.”
Just then essential silence was broken by the last protesting squawk of
a virtuous hen, who seemed to be about to die that they might live.
Peripatetica recognized that plaintive cry. Hens were kept handy in
fattening-coops on the Plantation, against the sudden inroads of
unexpected guests.
“When the big-gate slams chickens begin to squawk,” was a
well-remembered Plantation proverb.
“How tough she will be, though,” Jane gently moaned, “and we shan’t be
able to eat her, and she will have died in vain.”
Little did she reck of Signor Pantaleone Caruso’s beautiful art, for
when they had dressed by the dim, soothing flicker of candles in big
clean bed-rooms that were warmed by smouldering olive-wood fires, they
were sweetly fed on a dozen lovely dishes; dishes foamy and yellow, with
hot brown crusts, made seemingly of varied combinings of meal and
cheese, and called by strange Italian cognomens. And the late—so very
late—pullet appeared in her due course amid maiden strewments of crisp
salads; proving, by some Pantaleonic magic, to be all that a hen could
or should be. And they drank gratefully to her manes in Signor Caruso’s
own wine, as mellow and as golden as his famous cousin’s voice. After
which they ate small, scented yellow apples which might well have grown
in Hesperidian gardens, and drowsed contentedly by the musky olive-wood
blaze, among bowls of freesias and violets, until the almost weird hour
of half past eight, when inward blessedness and a day of mountain air
would no longer be denied their toll.
Yet all through the hours of sleep “old forgotten, far-off things, and
battles long ago” stirred like an undertone of dreams within dreams. The
clank of armed feet moved in the street. Ghostly bells rang whispered
tocsins of alarm, and shadowy life swept back and forth in the broken,
deserted town. The “Brass Hats” glimmered in the darkness. Goths set
alight long extinguished fires. Curved Saracen swords glittered faintly,
and Normans grasped the heights with mailed hands. The Rufolis, the
d’Affliti, the Confalones, and della Maras married, feasted, and warred
again in dumb show, and up and down the stairs of this very house
rustled the silk robes and soft shod feet of sleek prelates.
Even the sea below—where the new moon floated at the western rim like a
golden canoe—was astir with the myriad sails of _revenants_. First the
white wings of that—
“Grave Syrian trader ...
Who snatched his rudder and shook out his sail ...
Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily.”
After him followed hard the small ghostly sails of the Greeks.
“They were very perfect men, and could do all and bear all that could be
done and borne by human flesh and blood. Taking them all together they
were the most faultlessly constructed human beings that ever lived, and
they knew it, for they worshipped bodily health and strength, and spent
the lives of generations in the cultivation of both. They were fighting
men, trained to use every weapon they knew, they were boxers and
wrestlers, athletes, runners and jumpers, and drivers of chariots; but
above all they were seamen, skilled at the helm, quick at handling the
sails, masters of the oar, and fearless navigators when half of all
navigation led sooner or later to certain death. For though they loved
life, as only the strong and the beautiful can love it, and though they
looked forward to no condition of perpetual bliss beyond, but only to
the shadowy place where regretful phantoms flitted in the gloom as in
the twilight of the Hebrew Sheol, yet they faced dying as fighters
always have and always will, with desperate hands and a quiet heart.”
The golden canoe of the young moon filled and sank behind the sea’s rim,
but through the darkness came the many-oared beat of ponderous Roman
galleys carrying the dominion of the earth within their great sides, and
as they vanished like a fog-wreath along the horizon, followed fast the
hawk-winged craft of the keen-bladed, keen-faced Saracen, whose
sickle-like crescent would never here on this coast round to the full.
For, far away on the grey French coast of Coutance was a Norman
gentleman named Tancred, very strong of heart, and very stout of his
hands. There was no rumour of him here, as he rode to the hunt and
spitted the wild boar upon his terrible length of steel. What should the
Moslems know of a simple Norman gentleman, or care?—and yet in those
lion loins lay the seeds of a dozen mighty whelps who were to rend their
Christian prey from the Moslem and rule this warm coloured South as
kings and dukes and counts, and whose blood was to be claimed by every
crown in Europe for a thousand years. Very few among the shadowy sails
were those of the de Hautevilles, but quality, not quantity, counts most
among men, and those ships carried a strange, potent race. Anna Comnena
thus describes one of them:
“This Robert de Hauteville was of Norman origin—he united a marvellous
astuteness with immense ambition, and his bodily strength was
prodigious. His whole desire was to attain to the wealth and power of
the greatest living men; he was extremely tenacious of his designs and
most wise in finding means to attain his ends. In stature he was taller
than the tallest; of a ruddy hue and fair-haired, he was
broad-shouldered, and his eyes sparkled with fire; the perfect
proportion of all his limbs made him a model of beauty from head to
heel, as I have often heard people tell. Homer says of Achilles that
those who heard his voice seemed to hear the thundering shout of a great
multitude, but it used to be said of the de Hautevilles that their
battle cry would turn back tens of thousands. Such a man, one in such a
position, of such a nature, and of such spirit, naturally hated the idea
of service, and would not be subject to any man; for such are those
natures which are born too great for their surrounding.”
* * * * *
When morning dawned all spirits of the past had vanished, and only the
noisy play of the young hopes of the Caruso family disturbed the peace
of the echoing court. Jane insisted upon calling these innocent infants
Knickerbockers, because, she said, they were only short
Pantaleones—which is the sort of mild pleasantry Jane affects.
Peripatetica doesn’t lend herself to these gentler forms of jest. It was
she who put in all that history and poetry. (See above.)
Ravello used to be famous for her dye stuffs, and for the complete
thorough-goingness of her attacks of plague, but her principal
industries to-day are pulpits, and fondness for the Prophet Jonah. Her
population in the day of dyes and plague was 36,000, and is now, by
generous computation, about thirty-six—which does not include the
Knickers. Just opposite the Hotel Bellevue is one of these pulpits, in
the church of St. John of the Bull; a church which about a thousand
years ago was a very superior place indeed; but worse than Goths or
Vandals, or Saracens, or plague, was the pernicious activity of the
Eighteenth Century. Hardly a church in Italy has escaped unscathed from
its busy rage. No sanctuary was too reverend or too beautiful to be
ravaged in the name of Palladio, or of “the classic style.” Marbles were
broken, mosaics torn out, dim aisles despoiled, brass and bronze melted,
carvings chopped and burned, rich glass shattered, old tapestries flung
on the dust heap. All the treasures of centuries—sweet with incense,
softened and tinted by time, sanctified by a thousand prayers, and
beautified by the tenderest emotions—were bundled out of the way of
those benighted savages, and tons of lime were had into the poor gaunt
and ruined fanes to transform them into whited sepulchres of beauty.
Blank plaster walls hid the sweetest of frescoes; clustered grey columns
were limed into ghastly imitations of the Doric; soaring arches—flowered
like forest boughs—vanished in stodgy vaultings; Corinthian pilasters
shoved lacelike rood-screens out of the way, and fat sprawling cherubs
shouldered bleeding, shadowy Christs from the altars.
The spirit which inspired this stupid ruthlessness was perfectly
expressed by Addison, who, commenting upon the great Cathedral of Siena,
said pragmatically:
“When a man sees the prodigious pains that our forefathers have been at
in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy what miracles of
architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in
the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than
it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal
of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic
churches as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings
than have been raised before or since that time. Than these Gothic
churches nothing can make a prettier show to those who prefer false
beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity”—of
dull plaster!
Much has been said of the irreverence of the Nineteenth Century. The
Eighteenth respected nothing their forefathers had wrought; not even in
this little far-away mountain town, and St. John of the Bull is now—poor
Saint!—housed drearily in a dull, dusty, echoing white cavern, with not
one point of beauty to hold the protesting eye save the splendid marble
pulpit—escaped by some miracle of ruth to stand out in that dull waste
upon delicate twisted alabaster columns, which stand in their turn upon
crawling marble lions. Its four sides, and its baldachino, show
beautiful patterns of precious mosaics, wrought with lapis lazuli, with
verd antique, and with sanguine Egyptian marbles. The carefullest and
richest of these mosaics, of course—along the side of the pulpit’s
stair—is devoted to picturing that extremely qualmish archaic whale who
in all Ravello’s churches _unswallows_ the Prophet Jonah with every
evidence of emotion and relief.
Recently, in the process of removing some of the acres of Eighteenth
Century plaster, there was brought to light in a little chapel in the
crypt a life-sized relief of St. Catherine and her wheel.
Such a lovely lady!—so fair, so pure, so saint-like; with faint memories
of old tinting on her small lips, on her close-folded hair, and her
downcast eyes—that even the most frivolous of tourists might be moved to
tears by the thought that she alone is the one sweet ghost escaped from
all that brutal destruction of mediæval beauty; resurrected by the
merest chance from her plaster tomb.
Jane at the thought of it became quite dangerously violent. She insisted
upon digging up the Eighteenth Century and beating it to death again
with its own dusty old wig, and was soothed and calmed only by being
taken outside to look once more by daylight at the delicious marble
mince of fragments which the Hotel Bellevue has built into its
portals—Greek and Roman capitals upside down; marble lambs and crosses,
gargoyles, and corbels adorning the sides and lintels in a charming
confusion of styles, periods, and purposes.
Ravello, as are all these arid ancient towns from which the tides of
life have drained away, is as dry and empty as an old last year’s nut; a
mere hollow shell, ridged and parched, out of which the kernel of
existence has vanished.
A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway—the
stair-streets—with feet as light and sure as a goat’s. An old, old man,
with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen
hawk-like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a
doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent
confidence that his age and helplessness will touch them, does touch
them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint
anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial-finger which for them too
creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old
skeleton city....
A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so
narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of
his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others
have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking
not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears
burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive
any gratitude....
These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the
Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that
the Cathedral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still
remain the fine bronze doors by the same Barisanus who made the famous
ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most
beautiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very
biggest whale in all Ravello.
Before that accursed Bishop Tafuri turned it into a white-washed cavern
the old chroniclers exhausted their adjectives in describing the glories
of Saint Pantaleone’s Cathedral. The richness of its sixteen enormous
columns of verd antique; its raised choir with fifty-two stalls of
walnut-wood, carved with incredible richness; its high altar of
alabaster under a marble baldachino glowing with mosaics and supported
upon huge red Egyptian Syenite columns—its purple and gold Episcopal
throne; its frescoed walls, its silver lamps and rich tombs, its
pictures and shrines and hangings—all pitched into the scrap heap by
that abominable prelate, save only this fine pulpit, and the Ambo. The
Ambo gives itself wholly to the chronicles of the prophet Jonah. On one
stairside he leaps nimbly and eagerly down the wide throat which looks
so reluctant to receive him, as if suspecting already the discomfort to
be caused by the uneasy guest. But Jonah’s aspect is all of a careless
gaiety; he is not taking this lodging for more than a day or two, and is
aware that after his brief occultation his reappearance will be dramatic
and a portent. On the opposite stair it happens as he had prophetically
foreseen, the mosaic monster disgorging him with an air of mingled
violence and exhausted relief.
No one can tell us why Jonah is so favourite a topic in Ravello. “_Chi
lo sara_” everyone says, with that air of weary patience Italy so
persistently assumes before the eccentric curiosity of Forestieri.
Rosina Vokes once travelled about with a funny little playlet called
“The Pantomime Rehearsal,” which concerned itself with the sufferings of
the author and stage manager of an English house-party’s efforts at
amateur theatricals. The enthusiastic conductor used to say
dramatically:
“Now, Lord Arthur, you enter as the Chief of the fairies!”
To which the blond guardsman replies with puzzled heaviness: “Yes; but
_why_ fairies?”
Producing in the wretched author a sort of paralysis of bafflement. The
same look comes so often into these big Italian eyes. The thing just
_is_. Why clamour for reasons? It is as if these curious wandering folk,
always staring and chattering and rushing about, and paying good money
that would buy bread and wine, merely to look at old stones, should ask
_why_ the sun, or why the moon, or why anything at all?...
So they abandon Jonah and take on the pulpit instead, the most famous of
all the mosaic pulpits in a region celebrated for mosaic pulpits. It is
done after the same pattern as that of St. John of the Bull, but the
pattern raised to the _n_th power. More and bigger lions; more and
taller columns; richer scrolls of mosaics; the bits of stone more deeply
coloured; the marble warmed by time to a sweeter and creamier blond. The
whole being crowned, moreover, by an adorable bust of Sigelgaita Rufolo,
wife of the founder of the Cathedral and giver of the pulpit. A pompous
Latin inscription under the bust records the virtues of this magnificent
patron of religion. The inscription including the names of all the long
string of stalwart sons Sigelgaita brought forth, and it calls in
dignified Latinity the attention of the heavenly powers to the eminent
deserts of this generous Rufolo, this mediæval Carnegie.
Sigelgaita’s bust is an almost unique example of the marble portraiture
of the Thirteenth Century—if indeed it truly be a work of that time, for
so noble, so lifelike is this head with its rolled hair, its princely
coronet and long earrings, so like is it to the head of the Capuan Juno,
that one half suspects it of being from a Roman hand—those masters of
marmoral records of character—and that it was seized upon by Sigelgaita
to serve as a memorial of herself.
Bernardo Battinelli, a notary of Ravello, writing in 1540 relates an
anecdote which shows what esteem was inspired by this marble portrait
long after its original was dust:
“I remember in the aforesaid month and year, the Spanish Viceroy Don
Pietro di Toledo sent for the marble bust, which is placed in the
Cathedral and much honest resistance was made, so that the first time he
that came returned empty-handed, but shortly after he came back, and it
was necessary to send it to Naples in his keeping, and having sent the
magnifico Giovanni Frezza, who was in Naples, and Ambrose Flomano from
this place to his Excellency, after much ado, by the favour of the
glorious Virgin Mary, and by virtue of these messengers from thence
after a few days the head was returned.”
In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time
of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had
fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century
destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its
broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a
powerful Republic, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fishing
village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now
poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began
to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their
Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into
ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English
traveller, making the still fashionable “grand tour,” happened into
Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of
the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from
its indifferent Neapolitan owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers
and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scornfully amused
that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard
money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country
town.
The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up
from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns,
destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made
for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that
charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane
and Peripatetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them
with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they
find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress,
such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffodils and blue
hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that
their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and—forgetting quite
their quest of Persephone—that they were therefore unable to linger in
the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks
to exploring the neighbouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and
more Jonahs in the nearby churches.
In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk
they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so
furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind
them as he crawled after, jeering as at “scare-cats,” who dared mount,
but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines
except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes.
At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt—the _va et
vient_, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of
the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in
which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously
along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and
terraces under the icy moonlight, and Jane said in one of these—her
utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for
Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm—Jane
said:
“What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe
having no love for, no eye for, Nature’s beauty! Did you ever come
across a mediæval monastery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed
with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look
best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from
it?”
“Of course I never did,” Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic
conviction. “We get that absurd impression of their indifference from
the fact that our forebears were not nearly so fond of talking about
their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man’s
comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know
things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t’s carefully
crossed and our i’s elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always
illustrating that same confidence in other people’s imaginations,
stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest
simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our
ancestors happily were not ‘inebriated with the exuberance of their own
verbosity.’... And now, Jane, bring that congealed nose of yours in out
of the open air. The moon isn’t going on a vacation. She will be doing
her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we
are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night.”
Berliet was all his old self the next day, and they swooped and soared,
slid and climbed toward Pæstum, every turn around every spur showing
some new beauty, some new effect. Gradually the coast sank and sank
toward the sea; the snow-caps moved further back into the horizon; grew
more and more mere white clouds above, more and more mere vapoury
amethyst below, and at last they shot at a right angle into a wide level
plain, and commenced to experience thrills. For the guide-books were
full, one and all, of weird tales of Pæstum which lay, so they said, far
back in a country as cursed and horrible as the dreadful land of the
Dark Tower. About it, they declared, stretched leprous marshes of
stagnant ooze choked with fat reeds, where fierce buffalo wallowed in
the slime. The contadini passed through its deadly miasma in shuddering
haste, gazing large-eyed upon a dare-devil Englishman who had once had
the courage to pass a night there in order to gratify a bold, fantastic
desire to see the temples by moonlight. It was such a strange,
tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Pæstum.
Long ago those adventuring mariners from Greece had seized the fertile
plain which at that time was covered with forests of great oak and
watered by two clear and shining rivers. They drove the Italian natives
back into the distant hills, for the white man’s burden even then
included the taking of all the desirable things that were being wasted
by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists—whom the
philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the same
pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the oaks,
and ploughed the land, and built cities, and made harbours, and finally
dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labour and
wrought splendid temples in honour of the benign gods who had given them
the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness.
Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the hills
upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with
bloody contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And
more and more the oaks were cut down—mark that! for the stories of
nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees—until all
the plain was cleared and tilled; and then the foothills were denuded,
and the wave of destruction crept up the mountain sides and they too
were left naked to the sun and the rains.
At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, unhindered by the lost
forests, only enriched the plain with the long hoarded sweetness of the
trees, but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomiting
mud into the ever-shallowing harbours, and the lands soured with the
undrained stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper ports,
and mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making fast
between the city and the sea. Who of all those powerful land-owners and
rich merchants could ever have dreamed that little buzzing insects could
sting a great city to death? But they did. Fevers grew more and more
prevalent. The malaria-haunted population went more and more languidly
about their business. The natives, hardy and vigorous in the hills, were
but feebly repulsed. Carthage demanded tribute, and Rome took it, and
changed the city’s name from Poseidonia to Pæstum. After Rome grew weak
Saracen corsairs came in by sea and grasped the slackly defended riches,
and the little winged poisoners of the night struck again and again,
until grass grew in the streets, and the wharves crumbled where they
stood. Finally the wretched remnant of a great people wandered away into
the more wholesome hills, the marshes rotted in the heat and grew up in
coarse reeds where corn and vine had flourished, and the city melted
back into the wasted earth. So wicked a name had the miasmatic,
fever-haunted plain that age after age rolled away and only birds and
serpents and wild beasts dared dwell there, or some outlaw chose to face
its sickly terrors rather than the revenge of the law.
“Think,” said Jane, “of the sensations of the man who came first upon
those huge temples standing lonely in the naked plain! So lonely that
their very existence had been long forgotten. Imagine the awe and
surprise of such a discovery——”
They were spinning—had been spinning for half an hour—along a rather bad
highway, and Peripatetica found it hard to call up the proper emotions
in answer to Jane’s suggestion, so occupied was she in looking for the
relishing grimness insisted upon by the guide-books. There were reeds;
there were a very few innocuous-looking buffalo, but for the most part
there were nice cultivated fields of grain and vines on either hand, and
occasionally half a mile or so of neglected shrubby heath.
“Why, half of Long Island is wilder than this!” grumbled Peripatetica.
“Where’s the Dark Tower country? Childe Roland would think this a formal
garden. I _insist_ upon Berliet taking us somewhere that will thick our
blood with horror.”
As it turned out, a wise government had drained the accursed land,
planted eucalyptus trees, and was slowly reclaiming the plain to its old
fertility, but the guide-books feel that the story is too good to be
spoiled by modern facts, and cling to the old version of 1860.
Just then—by way of compensation, Berliet having fortunately slowed down
over a bad bit—an old altar-piece of a Holy Family stepped down out its
frame and came wandering toward them in the broad light of day. On the
large mild gray ass—a real altar-piece ass—sat St. Anna wrapped in a
faded blue mantle, carrying on her arm a sleeping child. At her right
walked the child’s mother, whose thin olive cheek and wide, timid eyes
seemed half ghostly under the white linen held together with one hand
under her chin. Young St. John led the ass. A wreath of golden-brown
curls blew about his golden-red cheeks, and he wore goat-hide shoes, and
had cross-gartered legs.
Jane now says they never saw them at all. That it was just a mirage, or
a bit of glamourie, and that there is nothing remaining in new Italy
which could look so like the typical old Italy—but if Jane is right then
how did the two happen to have exactly the same glamour at exactly the
same moment? How could they both imagine the benign smile of that
strayed altar picture? Is it likely that a motor car would lend itself
to sacred visions? I ask you that!
There was certainly some illusion—not sacred—about the dare-devilishness
of that Englishman who once spent a moonlit night at the temples, for a
little farming village lies close to the enclosure that shuts off the
temples from the highway, the inhabitants of which village seemed as
meek as sheep and anything but foolhardy, and there was reason to
believe that they spend every night there, whether the moon shines or
not.
But the Temples were no illusion, standing in stately splendour in the
midst of that wide shining green plain, by a sea of milky chalcedony,
and in a semicircle behind them a garland of purple mountains crowned
with snow. Great-pillared Neptune was all of dull, burned gold, its
serried columns marching before the blue background with a curious
effect of perfect vigour in repose, of power pausing in solid ease. No
picture or replica gives the sense of this energy and power. Doric
temples tend to look lumpish and heavy in reproductions, but the real
thing at its very best (and this shrine of Neptune is the perfectest of
Greek temples outside of Athens) has a mighty grace, a prodigious
suggestion of latent force, of contained, available strength that wakes
an awed delight, as by the visible, material expression of an ineffable,
glorious, all-powerful god.
“Well, certainly those Greeks——!” gasped Jane when the full meaning of
it all began to dawn upon her, and Peripatetica, who usually suffers
from chronic palpitation of the tongue, simply sat still staring with
shining eyes. Greeks to her are as was King Charles’ head to Mr. Dick.
She is convinced the Greeks knew everything worth knowing, and did
everything worth doing, and any further proof of their ability only
fills her with a gratified sense of “I-told-you-so-ness.” So she lent a
benign ear to a young American architect there, who pointed out many
constructive details, which, under an appearance of great simplicity,
proved consummate grasp of the art, and of the subtlest secrets of
architectural harmonics.
Before the land made out into the harbour Poseidon’s temple stood almost
on the sea’s edge. The old pavement of the street before its portals
being disinterred shows the ruts made by the chariot wheels still
deep-scored upon it, and it was here
“The merry Grecian coaster came
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine—”
anchoring almost under the shadow of the great fane of the Lord of the
Waters; and here, when his cargo was discharged, he went up to offer
sacrifices and thanks to the Sea-god of Poseidonia, and
“Hung his sea-drenched garments on the wall,”
and prayed for skill to outwit his fellows in trade; for fair winds to
blow him once more to Greece.
Besides the temple of Neptune there was, of course, the enormous
Basilica, and a so-called temple of Ceres, and some Roman fragments, but
these were so much less interesting than the golden-pillared shrine of
the Trident God, that the rest of the time was spent in looking vainly
and wistfully for Pæstum’s famous rose gardens, of which not even the
smallest bud remained, and then Berliet gathered them up, and went in
search of the Station of La Cava.
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[Illustration: Decoration]