Thus goes life In Pistoja and the rest of the world.
DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO
From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch what
cooler airs may drift into this cup of earth, I can
see above the straggling tiles of gable and loggia
the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know
they are all dead; for I have wound a devious way
through the close inhospitable streets and met them
or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of
a dead church is the worst of all disembodied sighs:
he wails and chatters at you. Here I have seen
churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes
laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world.
There were churches with ugly gashes in them, fresh
and smarting still; some had sightless eyes, as of
skulls; and there were churches piecemeal and scattered
like the splinters of the True Cross. A great
foliated arch of travertine would frame a patch of
plaster and soiled casement just broad enough for some
lolling pair of shoulders and shock-head atop; a sacred
emblem, some Agnus indefinably venerable, some
proud old cognisance of the See, or frayed Byzantine
symbol (plaited with infinite art by its former contrivers),
such and other consecrated fragments would stuff a
hole to keep the wind away from a donkey-stall or
Fabbrica di pasta in a muddy lane. I met
dismantled walls still blushing with the stains of
fresco—a saint’s robe, the limp burden
of the Addolorata;—I met texts innumerable,
shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, mocked with dead
flowers. And now, as I see these grey towers and
the grand purple line of the hills hemming in the
Tiber Valley, I know I am come down to the sated South,
to the confines of Umbria, the country of dead churches,
and of Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken
toys. This appears to me the disagreeable truth
concerning the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint
Bernardine, and of Roberto da Lecce, a man who, if
everybody had his rights, would be known as great
in his way as either. You will remember that
Luther found it out before me. The religious enthusiasm
we bring in may serve our turn while we are here:
it will be odd if any survive for the return; impossible
to go away as fervid as we come. Other enthusiasms
will fatten; but the wonderful Gothic adumbration of
Christianity was born in the North and has never been
healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven southward,
runs speedily to seed; an amazing luxuriance, a riot,
strange flowers of heavy shapes and maddening savour;
and then that worse corruption to follow a perfection
premature. So mediaeval Christianity in Umbria
is a ruin, but not for Salvator Rosa; it has not been
suffered a dignified death. That is the sharpest
cut of all, that the poor bleached skull must be decked
with paper roses.
