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.