Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice Part 6

As we look up from the sea to the mountains, we feel yet more strongly how purely Ragusa was a city of the sea. Venice was an inland power on that Italian land off which she herself lay anch.o.r.ed. She might pa.s.s for an inland power even on the Ragusan side of the Hadriatic. The Dalmatian territory of Venice looks on the map like a narrow strip; but, compared with the Ragusan coast, the Venetian coast has a wide Venetian mainland to the back of it. But Ragusa lies at the foot of the mountains, and the crest of the mountains was her boundary. She has always sat on a little ledge of civilization, for four centuries on a little ledge of Christendom, with a measureless background of barbarism behind her. Those hills, the slopes of which begin in the streets of the city, once fenced in a ledge of h.e.l.lenic land from the native barbarians of Illyric.u.m. Then they fenced in a ledge of Roman land from the Slavonic invader. Lastly, when we first looked on them, when we first crossed them, they still fenced in a ledge of Christian land from the dominion of the Infidel. And the newest arrangements of diplomacy make it still not wholly impossible to use the language which we used then. The Archduke of Austria and King of Dalmatia is immediate sovereign of Ragusa and her ancient territory; when we cross the line between Ragusa and Herzegovina, he rules only in the character familiar to some even of his Imperial forefathers, that of the man of the Turk. The Christian prince simply "administers;" it is the Infidel Sultan who is still held to reign. To form such a boundary as this has been no mean calling for the heights which look down upon Ragusa. It is well to climb those heights, best of all to climb them by the road which so lately led, which we might almost say still leads, from civilization to barbarism, from Christendom to Islam, and to look down on the city nestling between the sea and the mountains.

The view is of the same kind as the view of the city from the sea.

Rocks, inlets, walls, and towers, come out in new and varied groupings, but there is still no one prominent object. La Croma indeed, with its fallen monastery--its fortress is not seen--now comes in as a prominent object. But it shows by its very prominence the difference between this part of the Dalmatian coast, with its one island, all but invisible on the map, lying close to the sh.o.r.e, and the two archipelagos, one of small and obscure, one of great and historic islands, which the voyager has already pa.s.sed by.

It would thus be well if we could look on Ragusa both from the sea and from the mountains before we approach the city by the one possible to reach it, by the road which leads from its port of Gravosa. This last is a picturesque haven of thoroughly Dalmatian character, lying on a smooth inlet with a small fertile fringe between the water and the mountains. The road, rising and falling, looking out on both the mountains and the sea, leads along among villas and chapels which gradually grow into a suburb till we reach the gate. Here we see not a few ruined houses, houses which have remained ruined for nearly seventy years, houses whose ruin was wrought by Montenegrin hands in the days when Ragusa was an unwilling possession of France and Montenegro a valued ally of England. But, before we reach the gate, we see what there was not in the time of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, carriages standing for hire, carriages no very long drive in which will take us over the late borders of Christendom. In that suburb too the traveller will most likely take up his quarters--quarters, it may be, looking down straight on the rocks and waves. And there, when war was raging at no great distance, and when Ragusa was the special centre of the purveyors of news, he was sure to hear both the latest truths and the latest fables. But he is still outside the city. No city brings better home to us than Ragusa the Eastern hyperbole of cities great and fenced up to heaven. We must leave the military architect to discuss their military merits or demerits. To the non-professional observer they seem to belong to that type of fortification, between mediaeval and modern, which in these lands we naturally call Venetian, inapplicable as that name is at Ragusa. But they have clearly been strengthened and extended in more modern times. The city lies in a kind of hollow between the lower slopes of the mountain on one side, and a ridge which lies between the mountain and the sea, and which thus adds greatly to the appearance of the fortifications as seen from the sea. The one main street of Ragusa, the _Stradone_, thus lies in a valley with narrow streets running down towards it on both sides.

Indeed, before the great earthquake of 1667 which destroyed so much of old Ragusa, part at least of this wide street was covered with water as a ca.n.a.l. It is so pent in with buildings that we hardly feel how near we are to the sea; yet the small port, the true port of Ragusa, is very near at hand. The two ends of the Stradone are guarded by gates, which lead up--for the ascent is considerable--to the outer gates at either end, still strong and still guarded, reminding us that we are in what is still really a border city. And over those gates we see, not the winged lion for which we have learned to look almost instinctively everywhere on these coasts, but the figure of Saint Blaise, _San Biagio_, the patron of Ragusa, whose relics form some of the choicest treasures in the rich h.o.a.rd of her once metropolitan church. We pa.s.s under the saintly effigy, and we find that within the walls the general aspect of the city is comparatively modern. Most of the buildings, the metropolitan church among them, were rebuilt after a great earthquake in 1667. Such remains however of old Ragusa as are still left are of such surpa.s.sing interest in the history of architecture that we must keep them for a more special examination.

The history of Ragusa, as we have already said, is of a kind which must either be taken in at a glance or else dealt with in the minutest detail. All Dalmatian history for a good many centuries wants a more thorough sifting than has ever been brought to bear upon it. It wants it all the more because it is so closely connected with early Venetian history, than which no history is more utterly untrustworthy. But we may safely gather that Ragusa had its origin in the destruction of the Greek city of Epidauros, now _Ragusa Vecchia_. The old Epidaurian colony fell, like Salona, before the barbarians. Its inhabitants had no ready-made city to flee to, but they founded a city on the rocks which became Raousion or Ragusa. Whether any part of the Ragusan peninsula had ever become a dwelling-place of men at any earlier time it is needless to inquire. It is enough that Ragusa now became a city.

As to the name of the city, our Imperial guide helps us to one of his strange etymologies. With him Epidauros has sunk into [Greek: Pitaura]--the _t_ seems to have supplanted the _d_ at a much earlier time--and the city on the rocks which its exiles founded was first called from its site [Greek: Lausion], which by vulgar use ([Greek: he koine synetheia, he pollakis metaphtheirousa ta onomata te enallage ton grammaton]) became [Greek: Rhaousion]. He tells us that, [Greek: epei epano ton kremnon histatai legetai de Rhomaisti ho kremnos lau, eklethesan ek toutou Lausaioi, egoun hoi kathezomenoi eis ton kremnon]. What tongue is meant by [Greek: Rhomaisti]? It is only because the strange form [Greek: lau] seems to come one degree nearer to [Greek: laas anaides] than to anything in Latin, that it dawns on us that it means Greek. But, under whatever name, the city on the rocks, small at first, strengthened by refugees from Salona, grew and prospered, and remained one of the outlying Roman or Greek posts which in the days of Constantine, as now, fringed the already barbarian land.

For some centuries after the time of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the history of Ragusa defies abridgement. It is one web of intricate complications between the Emperors of the East and West, the Republic of Venice, the Kings of Hungary, Dalmatia, and Bosnia. Somewhat later the story begins to be more intelligible, when the actors get pretty well reduced to Venice, the Turk, and the Empire in a new form, that of Charles the Fifth. The republic of Ragusa contrived, which must surely have needed a good deal of skill, to keep on good terms at once with Charles and his son Philip and with their Turkish enemies. Yet Ragusa, though never incorporated by anything earlier than the dominion of Buonaparte, stood at different times in a kind of dependent relation both to Venice and to the Turk. At an earlier time the commonwealth for a short time received a Venetian Count. He was doubtless only meant to be like a foreign _podesta_, but Venice was a very dangerous place for Ragusa to bring a _podesta_ from. In her later days Ragusa must be looked on as being under the protection of the Porte; but it was a protection which in no way interfered with her full internal freedom--such freedom at least as is consistent with the rule of an oligarchy. The geography of Dalmatia keeps to this day a curious memorial of the feeling which made Ragusa dread the Turk less than she dreaded Venice. To this day the Dalmatian kingdom does not extend continuously along the Dalmatian coast. At two points territory which till late changes was nominally Turkish, which is still only "administered," not "governed," by its actual ruler, comes down to the Hadriatic coast. These are at Klek, at the bottom of the gulf formed by the long Ragusan peninsula of Sabioncello, and at Sutorina on the _Bocche_ di Cattaro. These two points mark the two ends of the narrow strip of coast which formed the territory of Ragusa. Rather than have a common frontier with Venice at either end, Ragusa willingly allowed the dominions of the Infidel to come down to her own sea on either side of her.

At last all dread from Venice pa.s.sed away, but only because Saint Mark gave way to a more dangerous neighbour. The base conspiracy of Campoformio gave Venetian Dalmatia to an Austrian master, and the strips of Turkish territory which had once sheltered Ragusa from the Venetian now for a while sheltered her from the Austrian. Then the dividers of the spoil quarrelled; the master of France took to himself what France had betrayed to Austria. Presently he disliked the small oasis of independence, and added Ragusa to the dominion which was presently to take in Rome and Lubeck. Lastly, when the days of confusion were over, and order came back to the world, order at Ragusa took the form of a new foreign master. The Austrian, who had reigned for a moment at Zara and Cattaro, but who had never reigned at Ragusa, put forth his hand to filch Ragusa as he has since filched Spizza. The motive need not be asked. The pleasure of seizing the goods of a weaker neighbour is doubtless enough in either case.

One point in the history of Ragusa which needs a more thorough explanation than it has yet found is the fact that the Roman or Greek city, founded by men who had escaped from barbarian invaders--who must surely have been largely Slavonic--has become so pre-eminently a Slavonic city. There is no Italian party at Ragusa. Not that the city is strongly Panslavonic; the memory of local freedom has survived through both forms of foreign rule. The Ragusan aristocracy is Slavonic, and the Slavonic language holds quite another position at Ragusa from what it holds, for example, at Spalato. There all that claims to be literature and cultivation is Italian; at Ragusa, though Italian is familiarly spoken, the native literature and cultivation is distinctly Slave. The difference is marked in the very names of the two cities. Spalato is in Slavonic _Spljet_, a mere corruption of the corrupt Latin name. But Ragusa, on Slavonic lips--that is on the lips of its own citizens speaking their own language--is _Dubrovnik_, a perfectly independent Slavonic name. It may be the name of some Slavonic suburb or neighbouring settlement--like the _Wendisches Dorf_ at Luneburg--but at all events it is no corruption, no translation, of Latin _Ragusa_ or of Constantine's _Raousion_.

As for King Richard, the Ragusan story is that he built the cathedral which was destroyed in 1667. It is said that he vowed to build a church on the island of La Croma, and that this purpose was changed into building one in the city instead of the former cathedral, while the commonwealth of Ragusa built a church on the island. La Croma thus becomes connected with the memory of two princes who died of thrusting themselves in matters which did not concern them. Richard, Count and King, might have lived longer if he had not quarrelled with his va.s.sal at Limoges; Maximilian, Archduke and self-styled Emperor, was perfectly safe at La Croma, but when he took up the trade of a party-leader in Mexico, he could hardly look for anything but a Mexican party-leader's end. Of the monastery which formed his dwelling-place the great church is so utterly desecrated and spoiled that hardly anything can be made out. But a good deal remains of the cloister, and at a little distance stand the ruins of a beautiful little triapsidal basilica, which surely, all save a few additions, belongs to the age of the Lion-hearted King. Indeed we should be tempted to fix on this, rather than any other church of Ragusa or its island, as the work of Richard himself. It looks greatly as if a Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine had had a hand in it. A single wide body, with three apses opening into it, is not a Dalmatian idea, as it is not an English idea. But something like it might easily be found in Richard's own land of southern Gaul.

That Richard did come to Ragusa and to La Croma seems plain from the narrative in Roger of Howden. He hired a ship at Corfu expressly to take him to Ragusa. He landed "prope _Gazere_ apud Ragusam." _Gazere_ suggests Jadera or Zara, but "Gazere apud Ragusam" can hardly fail to mean La Croma. "_Gazere_" is the Arabic name for _island_--the same which appears in _Algesiras_--one of the Eastern words which pa.s.sed into the _lingua franca_ of the Crusaders. After all, Ragusa gives more interest to Richard than any that it takes from him. Born and twice crowned in England, he had little else to do with England than to squeeze money out of it. It mattered little to Englishmen--or to Normans either--whether their Poitevin lord was astounding the world at Acre, at Chaluz, or at La Croma.

Two other rather longer excursions than that to La Croma may be profitably made from Ragusa. There is, first of all, the short voyage to the site of the city which Ragusa supplanted, the Dalmatian Epidauros, now known by the odd name of _Ragusa Vecchia_. Beyond a few inscriptions, there is really next to nothing to be seen of the ancient city besides its site; but the site is well worthy of study.

It is thoroughly the site for a Greek colony, and it has much in common with the more famous site of Korkyra and Epid.a.m.nos. The city occupied a peninsula, sheltered on the one hand by the mainland, on the other by another promontory, forming the outer horn of a small bay. In this position the town had the sea on every side; it had a double harbour, and was at the same time thoroughly sheltered on both sides. Such a site was the perfection of Greek colonial ideas. We have now got far away indeed from the earliest type of city--the hill-fort which dreads the sea, and which finds the need of the haven, and of the long walls to join the haven to the city, only in later times. The highest point of the promontory, the akropolis--if we can use that name in a city of such late date--is now forsaken, crowned only by a burying-ground and sepulchral church. The view is a n.o.ble one, looking out on the mainland and the sea, with the neighbouring island crowned by a forsaken monastery, and directly in front Ragusa herself on her rocks, with the beginnings of the Dalmatian archipelago rising in the distance. The modern town, which is hardly more than a village, with two or three churches and a small amount of fortification, covers the isthmus and the lower ground of the promontory. Such is all that is left of the northern city of Asklepios, the city which played its part alike in the wars of Caesar and in the wars of Belisarius, which in the great revolution that followed the Slavonic inroads perished to give birth to the more abiding city from which it has strangely borrowed its later name. That Ragusa Vecchia has so little to show is no ground for despising it or pa.s.sing it by; the very lack of remains in some sort adds to the interest of the spot.

The voyage from New to Old Ragusa is not a long one. A shorter land journey on the same side of the city will lead to the sea-side village of Breno, which will not supply the traveller with anything in the antiquarian line, but which will reward him with a good deal of Dalmatian mountain and land scenery, especially with a waterfall, though one not quite on the scale of Kerka. And, to those who peer pryingly into all corners, the little inn of the place will suggest some memories of very modern history. That piece of history it has been the interest of exalted personages to keep unknown, and their efforts have been crowned with a remarkable degree of success. As the inn at Curzola contains picture memories of an unsuccessful struggle for freedom in 1848, so the inn at Breno contains picture memories of a more successful struggle waged twenty-one years later in the same cause and against the same enemy. When in 1869 the present ruler of Austria and Dalmatia strove, in defiance of every chartered right and every royal promise, to trample under foot the ancient rights of the freemen of the Bocche di Cattaro, the troops of the foreign intruder were driven back in ignominious defeat by the brave men of the mountains, and the master who had sent them was forced to renew the promises which he had striven to break. People still chatter about the mythical exploits of Tell, but hardly any one has heard of this little piece of successful resistance to oppression done only twelve years back. The deed is not forgotten by the neighbours of those who did it, and in the inn at Breno rude pictures may be seen showing the victorious Bocchese driving the troops of the stranger down those heights which at Vienna or at Budapest it seemed so easy a matter to bring into bondage. Strange to say, the pictures which record this Slavonic triumph have the legend beneath them in the High-Dutch tongue. Stranger still, it is the eye only and not the ear by which any knowledge of the matter is to be picked up. The wary native, even when spoken to in his own tongue, will not enlarge on the subjects of those pictures to a man in Western garb. It is perhaps not without reason if a stranger in Western garb is suspected in those parts to be a spy of the enemy.

If the voyage from New to Old Ragusa is not a long one, the sail on the other side of the city up the river's mouth to Ombla is shorter still. Its starting-point will be, not Ragusa itself but its port of Gravosa. Here the main object is scenery; but several houses, one at least of which will deserve some further mention, a nearly forsaken monastery with a good bell-tower and a not ungraceful church, and one or two living or forsaken chapels may be taken in, and they help us to complete some inferences as to the architecture of the district. But our business at this moment is mainly with the basin which lies at the foot of the limestone rock. The hills of Greece and Dalmatia constantly suggest, to one who knows the West of England, the kindred, though far lowlier, hills of Mendip. As the gorge under the akropolis of Mykene at once suggests the gorge of Cheddar, so the basin of the Trebenitza at Ombla suggests, though the scale is larger, the basin of the Axe at Wookey Hole. The river runs out from the bottom of the rocks, and, to those who have been adventurous enough to cross the heights and to make their way through the desolate land of Herzegovina--the very land of limestone in all forms--as far as Trebinje, the river that reappears at Ombla is an old friend. There seems no doubt that it is the Trebenitza which, after hiding itself in a _katabothra_, comes out again to light in the Ombla basin. The journey to Trebinje itself is in its own nature less exciting now than it was in 1875. What it was when the drive thither from Ragusa enabled the traveller to say that he had been into "Turkey," and that he had seen a little of a land in a state of warfare, may perhaps be worth some separate mention. At present it is reported that Trebinje is cleaner than it was then, that it has been adorned with a _Rudolfsplatz_, and that justice is there administered to its Slavonic folk, Christian and Mussulman, in the tongue of which _Rudolfsplatz_ is a specimen. It would therefore seem that the direct rule of the stranger is at least better than his "administration." At Ragusa men are allowed to speak their own tongue in which they were born.

RAGUSAN ARCHITECTURE.

1875--1877--1881.

We have spoken in a former article of the general aspect and the historical position of the city and commonwealth of Ragusa, her hills, her walls, her havens, her union of freedom from the lion of Saint Mark with half dependence on the crescent of Mahomet. But this ancient and isolated city has yet something more to tell of. There are several of the munic.i.p.al and domestic buildings of the fallen republic, buildings which, as far as we know, have never been described or ill.u.s.trated in detail in any English work, and of which no worthy representation can be found on the spot. In the work of Eitelberger much will be found; but for the ordinary English student there is no help at all. Yet, on the strength of these buildings, Ragusa may really claim a place among those cities which stand foremost in the history of architectural progress. And this fact is the more remarkable, and the more to be insisted on, because of the seemingly general belief that there is little or nothing to see at Ragusa in the way of architecture. But the truth is that far more of the old city escaped the earthquake of 1667 than would be thought at first sight. Because the cathedral is later, because the general aspect of the main street is later, the idea is suggested that nothing is left but the munic.i.p.al palace. That alone would be a most important exception, but it is by no means the only one. If the traveller leaves the main street and turns up the narrow alleys which run from it up the hills on either side, alleys many of them which, at present at least, lead to nothing, he will find many sc.r.a.ps of domestic architecture which must belong to times earlier than the great blow of the seventeenth century. Signs of that blow are seen in many places in the form of sc.r.a.ps of detail of various kinds irregularly built up in the wall; but there are a great number of pointed doorways still in their places which no man can think are later than 1667. Some of these are simply pointed; others combine the pointed arch with the tympanum, sometimes with both the tympanum and the spandril. There is also a not unpleasing type of _Renaissance_ doorway, a lintel resting on two pilasters with floriated capitals, which one can hardly believe are due to a time so late as the days after the earthquake. At all events, if they are later than the earthquake, they only go to strengthen the general position which we have to lay down, namely the way in which early forms lived on at Ragusa to an amazingly late date. This same examination of the narrow streets will also bring to light a few, but only a few, windows of the Venetian Gothic. The strength of Ragusa, as far as sc.r.a.ps of this kind are concerned, undoubtedly lies in its doorways.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA.]

In the churches too there is more left than the mere sc.r.a.ps which are built up again. Parts at least of the tall towers--neither of them detached--of the Franciscan and Dominican churches, the former in the main street, the latter near the eastern gate, are also earlier. In the former the line of junction between the older tower and the ugly church which has been built up against it is clearly to be seen. The upper stage of this tower, and the small cupola which crowns it, _may_ be later than the earthquake; but if so, they have caught the spirit of earlier work in an unusual degree, and all the lower part is in a form of Italian Gothic less unpleasing than usual. Both this tower and that of the Dominican church show how long the general type of the earliest Romanesque campaniles went on. Save in the small cupola, this tower has the perfect air, and almost the details, of a tower of the eleventh century: three ranges of windows with mid-wall shafts rise over one another; only they are grouped under containing arches in what in England we should call a Norman fashion. But, as this tower forms part of a Dominican monastery, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and its smaller details also cannot belong to any earlier date. Yet the general effect of this tower, even more than of the other, is that of a tower of the Primitive type. The Dominican church also keeps some details of Italian Gothic which must be older than the earthquake, and the cloister is one of the best specimens of that style. Its groupings of tracery under round arches, the poverty of design in the tracery itself, strike us as weak, if our thoughts go back to Salisbury or to Zurich; but the general effect is good, and the cloister--as distinguished from the buildings above it--may almost be called beautiful. Of more importance in the history of Ragusan architecture is the Franciscan cloister. Being Franciscan, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and it may well be much later.

But it is essentially Romanesque in style. The general effect of the tall shafts which support its narrow round arches differs indeed a good deal from the general effect of the more ma.s.sive Romanesque cloisters to which we are used elsewhere. But it is essentially one with them in style, and it is one of the many witnesses to the way in which at Ragusa early forms were kept in use till a late time.

But the architectural glory of Ragusa is certainly not to be looked for among its churches. The most truly instructive work that Ragusa has to show in any of its ecclesiastical buildings does not show itself at first sight, and its full significance is not likely to be understood till the civic and domestic buildings of the city and its suburbs have been well studied. When this has been done, it will be easily seen that certain arches and capitals in the subordinate buildings of the Dominican church have their part in the history of Ragusan art; but the great civic buildings must be seen and mastered first. Of these two of the highest interest escaped the common overthrow. They both show the Italian Gothic in its best shape; but they also show something else which is of far higher value. They show that peculiar form of _Renaissance_ which can hardly be called _Renaissance_ in any bad sense, which is in truth a last outburst of Romanesque, a living child of cla.s.sical forms, not a dead imitation of them. Examples of this kind often meet us in Italy; we see something of it in the north side of the great _piazza_ at Venice as compared with the southern side; but the Ragusan examples go beyond anything that we know of elsewhere. Give the palace of Ragusa--the palace, not of a Doge, but of a Rector--the same size, the same position, as the building which answers to it at Venice, and we should soon see that the city which so long held her own against Venice in other ways could hold her own in art also. The Venetian arcade cannot for a moment be compared to the Ragusan; the main front of the Ragusan building has escaped the addition of the ugly upper story which disfigures the Venetian. As wholes, of course no one can compare the two in general effect. Saint Blaise must yield to Saint Mark. But set Saint Blaise's palace on Saint Mark's site; carry out his arcade to the same boundless extent, and there is little doubt which would be the grander pile. The Venetian building overwhelms by its general effect; the Ragusan building will better stand the test of minute study.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALACE, RAGUSA.]

The palace of the Ragusan commonwealth was begun in 1388, and finished in 1435, in the reign, as an inscription takes care to announce, of the Emperor Siegmund. What name shall we give to the style of this most remarkable building, at all events to the style of its admirable arcade? Here are six arches--why did not the architect carry on the design through the whole length of the building?--which show what, as late as the fifteenth century, a round-arched style could still do when it followed its natural promptings, instead of either binding itself by slavish precedents or striving after a helpless imitation of foreign forms. Never mind the date; here is Romanesque in all its truth and beauty; here, in the land which gave Rome so many of her greatest Caesars, the arcade of Ragusa may worthily end the series which began with the arcades of Spalato. Siegmund, the last but one to wear the crown of Diocletian in the Eternal City, has his name not quite unworthily engraved on a building less removed in style than a distance of more than eleven centuries would have led us to expect from the everlasting house of Jovius. Does some pedantic Vitruvian brand the columns as too short? The architect has grasped the truth that, as the arch takes the place of the entablature, the height of the arch may fairly be taken out of the height of the column. Does he blame the ma.s.sive abaci? They are wrought to bear the greater immediate weight which the arch brings upon the capital, and they avoid such shifts as the Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital. Does he blame the capitals, which certainly do not follow the exact pattern of any Vitruvian order? Let us answer boldly, Why should art be put in fetters? A Corinthian capital is a beautiful form; but why should the hand of man be kept back from devising other beautiful forms? The Ragusan architect has ventured to cover some of his capitals with foliage which does not obey any pedantic rule; in others he has ventured--like the artists of the n.o.ble capitals which may still be seen in the Capitol and in Caracalla's baths--to bring in the forms of animal and of human, as well as of vegetable, life. In one point his taste seems slightly to have failed him; on some of the capitals the winged figures with which they are wrought savour a little of the vulgar _Renaissance_. But who shall blame the capital long ago engraved and commented on by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in which however a neighbouring inscription shows that tradition was right in seeing the form of Asklepios, and not that of a mere mortal alchemist, though tradition was certainly wrong in believing that Asklepios had been brought ready made from his old home at Epidauros? And the capitals bear arches worthy of them, round arches with mouldings and ornaments, which thoroughly fit their shape, though, like the capitals, they do not servilely follow any prescribed rule. Altogether this arcade only makes us wish for more, for a longer range from the same hand. Compare it with the vulgar Italian work of the two neighbouring churches. Pisa and Durham might have stretched out the right hand of fellowship to Romanesque Ragusa before the earthquake; they would have held it back from Jesuited Ragusa after it.

The rest of the front cannot be called worthy of this admirable arcade. The windows behind the arcade are of the worse, those above it are of the better, kind of Italian Gothic. These last in fact are about as good as Italian Gothic can be. They are well proportioned two-light windows with Geometrical tracery, and in the general effect they really agree better than could have been looked for with the admirable arches below. Still they are Italian Gothic, and at Ragusa we should not welcome the loveliest form of tracery that Carlisle or Selby could give us. A Pisan arcade, pierced for light wherever light was wanted, would have been the right thing for the columns and arches to bear aloft. He who duly admires the arcade will do well to shut his eyes as he turns round the corner by the west front of the cathedral; but let him go inside, and the court, if not altogether worthy of the outer arcade, is no contemptible specimen of the same style. It contains one or two monuments of Ragusan worthies. The figure of Roland, which lay there neglected when we first saw Ragusa, has since been set up again in the open _piazza_. And, strange to say in these lands, it ventures to proclaim itself as having been set up, as it might have been in the old time, by the free act of the _commune_ of Ragusa, without any of those cringing references to a foreign power which are commonly found expedient under foreign rule. The court is entered by a side door with two ancient knockers, one of them a worthy fellow of the great one at Durham or of that which we saw more lately at Curzola. But its chief interest comes from its strictly architectural forms, and from the comparison of them with those which are made use of on the outside. The court is very small, and it is surrounded on all sides, save that which is filled by the grand staircase, by an arcade of two, supporting a second upper range. The composition is thus better than that of the front itself, as there are two harmonious stages in the same style, without any intrusion of foreign elements, like the pointed windows in the front; but the arcades themselves, though very good and simple, do not carry out the wonderful boldness and originality of the outer range. Columns with tongues to their base with flowered capitals, showing a remembrance, but not a servile remembrance, of Corinthian models, support round arches. Over these is the upper range of two round arches over each one below, resting on coupled shafts, the arrangement which, from the so-called tomb of Saint Constantia, has spread to so many Romanesque cloisters and to so many works of the Saracen. Were this range open, instead of being foolishly glazed, this design of two stages of a true Romanesque, simpler, but perhaps more cla.s.sical, than the outer arcade, would form a design thoroughly harmonious and satisfactory.

Now when we come to examine this inner court more minutely, we shall find that it is certainly of later date than the outer arcade, and that it supplanted earlier work which formed part of the same design as the outer arcade. It is impossible to believe that the court is later than the great earthquake; but 1667 was not the only year in which Ragusa underwent visitations of that kind; and it is an allowable guess that a rebuilding took place after an earlier earthquake in the beginning of the sixteenth century. That some change took place at some time is certain. There are preparations for spanning arches at one point of the outer wall of the court, which could never have agreed with the position of the present columns. And we have a most interesting piece of doc.u.mentary evidence which carries us further. In a ma.n.u.script account of the building of the palace, it is mentioned that at the entrance were two columns, on the capital of one of which was carved the Judgement of Solomon, while the other showed the Rector of Ragusa sitting to administer justice after the model of Solomon. Now this cannot refer to the outer arcade, where none of the capitals show those subjects. Still less is there anything like it in the arcade of the court, nor can there have been since the present arrangement was made. But the description is no freak of the imagination; both capitals are in being; one of them is still within the palace. The capital showing the Rector in his chair dispensing justice to his fellow-citizens is built in at a corner in the upper story of the court. And a capital of exactly the same style, and with the Judgement of Solomon carved on one face of it, may still be seen in the garden of a house outside the city of which we shall have presently to speak. It is thus perfectly plain that the inner court was rebuilt at some time later than the days of Siegmund, and that this rebuilding displaced an inner design more in harmony with the outer arcade, and of which these two capitals formed a part.

To our mind this palace, to which Sir Gardner Wilkinson hardly does justice, and of which Mr. Neale takes no notice at all, really deserves no small place in the history of Romanesque art. It shows how late the genuine tradition lingered on, and what vigorous offshoots the old style could throw off, even when it might be thought to be dead. One or two capitals show that the Ragusan architect knew of the actual _Renaissance_. But it was only in that one detail that he went astray. In everything else he started from sound principles, and from them vigorously developed for himself. And the fruit of his work was a building which thoroughly satisfies every requirement of criticism, and on which the eye gazes with ever increased delight, as one of the fairest triumphs of human skill within the range of the builder's art.

But the palace must not be spoken of as if it stood altogether alone among the buildings of the city. There is another civic building, which, though it does not reach the full perfection of its great neighbour, must also be treated as a true fruit, in some sort a more remarkable fruit, of the same spirit which called its greater neighbour into being. This is the building which acted at once in the characters of mint and custom-house, the second character being set forth by its name wrought in nails on the great door. This building stands just where the main street and the _piazza_ join, close by the arch leading to the town-gate. Here we have an arcade of five, the columns of which are crowned with capitals, Composite in their general shape, but not slavishly following technical precedents, nor all of them exactly alike. They have a heavy abacus, which, as well as the soffit of the round arch, is enriched with flowered work. One or two of them are none the better for being new chiselled in modern times.

Here is something which is quite unlike Northern Romanesque, but which still is absolutely identical with it in principle. The column and the round arch are there in their purity, and the enrichment is of a kind which we instinctively feel is in place at Ragusa, though it would be out of place at Caen or Mainz or Durham. Whatever the date may be, the thing is thoroughly good, incomparably better than either the Italian Gothic or the cosmopolite Jesuit style. Above the arcade are windows with the usual Venetian attempt at tracery, a large square window between two with ogee arches; above is a stage with square windows, which we may hope is a later addition. The merits of the three stages lessen as they get higher. Yet from the date, when we come to find it out, it seems not impossible that the arcade and both the stages above it may really be of the same date. In the inner court there are no such discordant elements as there are without, though the forms of different styles are quite as much mingled. Octagonal piers support round arches; pointed doorways with thoroughly Ragusan tympana open into the chamber behind them. On this arcade rests another, with round arches on the short sides of the court, and pointed arches on the long sides, rising from columns and square piers alternately.

Above is a range which might as well be away. Square windows, round Ragusan windows, might well be endured; but _Renaissance_ shields and _Renaissance_ angels show that the infection had begun. Now this beautiful piece of Romanesque work--we give it that name in defiance of dates--was finished in 1520, when the world on the southern side of the Alps was, for the most part, running after the dreariest forms of the mere revived Italian. This amazingly late date makes this building even more wonderful than the palace, though it certainly is not its rival in beauty. The arcades, good as they are, cannot be compared to those of the palace, and the Venetian work above is still more inferior. Still, the later the date, the more honour to the architect who designed such a work at such a time. And the later the date, the more likely that he built his arcade according to the promptings of his own genius, and added the two ranges of windows in deference to the two rival fashions of his time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOGANA, RAGUSA.]

The arcade of this building, taken alone without reference to the windows above, is the last link in a chain which shows that the preservation of good architectural ideas at so late a time is no mere accident. Indeed, if we pa.s.s from public buildings within the city to private buildings outside of it, we shall begin to doubt whether the _dogana_ is the last chain, and whether there are not still later buildings which are fairly ent.i.tled to the Romanesque name. The best of the houses of the Ragusan patricians are to be found, not within the city, but by the port at Gravosa, and further on on the way to Ombla. Several of those, while their other features are Venetian Gothic, or even later still, have--commonly in their upper _loggie_--a column or two supporting a round arch, which are certainly not vulgar _Renaissance_, and which keep on the sound tradition of the palace and the _dogana_. The finest of these is the house of the Counts Caboga, known as Batahovina, on the coast on the way to Ombla. Here, as in the palace, as in the _dogana_, an arcade of this late local Romanesque supports an upper story of Venetian Gothic, very inferior and most likely much later than that in either of the civic buildings.

It has however at each end an open _loggia_ matching the arcade below.

The columns, plain and with twisted flutes--distant kinsfolk of Waltham, Durham, Dunfermline, and Lindisfarn--have capitals such as we might look for in much earlier Romanesque.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA.]

This, we may note by the way, is the house in whose garden the column from the palace, wrought with the Judgement of Solomon, still lies hid. Indeed we might go further away from the palace than the _loggie_ of the houses. At Ragusa art extends itself to objects which might have been thought hardly capable of artistic treatment. Stone is common, and it is used for all manner of purposes. Among other things stone vine-props are common. In not a few cases these take the form of columns, slenderer doubtless than the rules of cla.s.sical proportion, realizing the description of Ca.s.siodorus about the tall columns like reeds, the lofty buildings propped as it were on the shafts of spears.

Sometimes the columns are fluted or twisted; in a great many cases they have real capitals, with various forms according to taste. It often happens that a row of such columns, whether on a house-top or in a vineyard, really becomes an architectural object, a genuine colonnade. Here the style, the construction at least, is Greek rather than Romanesque; but the principle is the same. A good and rational artistic form is kept in use, and is applied to a purpose for which it is fitted.

All these examples, the palace, the _dogana_, the houses, the remains in the Dominican church, we might almost say the vine-props, look one way. All point to the existence of a Ragusan style, to an unbroken Romanesque tradition, which could not wholly withstand the inroads of the _pseudo_-Gothic of Italy, but which could at least keep its place alongside of the intruder. All help us to see how instructive must have been the course of architectural developement at Ragusa, and how much has been lost to the history of art by the destruction of so many of the buildings of the city in the great earthquake. It is easy to see that for a long time the struggle between the genuine Romanesque tradition, the Italian Gothic, and the new ideas of the _Renaissance_, must have been very hard. How long real Romanesque went on, bringing in new developements of its own, but remaining still as truly Romanesque by unbroken succession as anything at Pisa or Durham, is shown by the n.o.ble arches of the palace, and the still later _dogana_.

The slight touch of _Renaissance_ in some of the capitals of the palace in no sort takes away from the general purity of the style.

Still over these n.o.ble arcades are windows of Venetian Gothic, and one of the most characteristic features of the Ragusan streets are the flat-headed doorways. But these, alternating as they do with pointed ones, help to make out our case. On the other hand, it is equally plain that in some cases the _Renaissance_ came in early. A little chapel by the basin at Ombla, bearing date 1480, is in a confirmed _Renaissance_ style, and looks more like 1580. Yet of true _Renaissance_ there is very little. One large house in the city, older than the earthquake, stands quite alone as the kind of thing which might easily have been built in Italy or copied in England. But at Ragusa, in the near neighbourhood of several native doorways of different shapes, of many native vine-props, of several native wells--for wells too take an artistic style and copy the form of a capital--the regular trim Palladian building looks strangely out of place. Even in the _Stradone_, where in the houses there is little architecture of any kind, a touch of ancient effect is kept in the form of the shops, with their arches and stone dressers, thoroughly after the mediaeval pattern. And some architectural features never died out. The round window with tracery goes on long after every other feature of Romanesque or Gothic is forgotten. It is to be seen in endless little chapels of very late date in the city and suburbs, sometimes standing apart, sometimes attached to private houses.

The plain conclusion from all this is that at Ragusa the use of the round arch for the chief arcades never went out of use; that it always remained as a constructive feature, pa.s.sing from Romanesque to _Renaissance_, if fully developed _Renaissance_ can at Ragusa be said to exist at all, without any intermediate Gothic stage, and continuing to invent and adopt any kind of ornament which suited its constructive form. In windows and doorways, on the other hand, the forms of the Italian Gothic came in and stood their ground till a very late date.

In most cases we wish the Venetian features away; in the upper story of the palace they may be endured; but conceive palace, _dogana_, Caboga house, with smaller arcades and windows to match the great constructive arches. Such buildings as these, now so few, make us sigh over the effects of the great earthquake, and over the treasures of art which it must have swallowed up. If Ragusa, in her earlier day, contained a series of churches to match her civic arcades, she might claim, in strictly artistic interest, to stand alongside of Rome, Ravenna, Pisa, and Lucca. Her churches of the fifteenth century must have been worthy to rank with anything from the fourth century to the twelfth. One longs to be able to study the Ragusan style in more than these few examples. It is not indeed absolutely peculiar either to Ragusa or to Dalmatia. Many buildings in Italy and Sicily show a good native Romanesque tradition, holding its own against the sham Gothic, and showing a good fight against the _Renaissance_. Not a few arcades, not a few cloisters, of this kind may be found here and there. But it would be hard to light on another such group of buildings as the palace, the _dogana_, and their fellows. In any case the Dalmatian coast may hold its head high among the artistic regions of the world.

It is no small matter that the harmonious and consistent use of the arch and column should have begun at Spalato, and that identically the same constructive form should still be found, eleven ages later, putting forth fresh and genuine shapes of beauty at Ragusa.

A TRUDGE TO TREBINJE.

1875.

[This paper, as giving the impressions of a first visit to the soil of Herzegovina, during an early stage of the war, has been reprinted, with the change of a few words, as it was first written.]

The first step which any man takes beyond the bounds of Christendom can hardly fail to mark a kind of epoch in his life. And the epoch becomes more memorable when the first step is taken into an actual "seat of war," where the old strife between Christian and Moslem is still going on with all the bitterness of crusading days. In Europe it is now in one quarter only that such a step can be made by land with somewhat less of formality than is often needed in pa.s.sing from one Christian state to another. It is now only in the great south-eastern peninsula that the frontier of the Turk marches upon the dominions of any Christian power; and, now that Russia and the Turk are no longer immediate neighbours, the powers on which his frontier marches are, with one exception, states which have been more or less fully liberated from his real or a.s.serted dominion. That exception is to be found in the Hadriatic dominions of Austria; and certainly no more striking contrast can be imagined than that which strikes the traveller as he pa.s.ses on this side from Christian to Moslem dominion.

Let us suppose him to be at Ragusa, with his ears full of tales from the seat of war, all of which cannot be true, but all of which may possibly be false. The insurgents have burned a Turkish village. No; it was a Christian village, and the Turks burned it. The Turks have murdered seven Roman Catholics. The Turks have murdered seventy Roman Catholics--a difference this last which may throw light on some cases of disputed numbers in various parts of history. The Turks have threatened Austrian subjects. Austrian subjects have attacked the Turks. An Italian has had his head cut off by the Turks just beyond the frontier. A Turkish soldier has been found lying dead in the road a little further on. These two last stories come on the authority of men who have seen the bodies, so that we have got within the bounds of credible testimony. Meanwhile the one thing about which there is no doubt is the presence and the wretchedness of the unhappy Herzegovinese women and children whose homes have been destroyed either by friends or by enemies, and who are seeking such shelter as public and private charity can give in hospitable Ragusa. All these things kindle a certain desire to get at least a glimpse of the land where something is certainly going on, though it may not be easy to know exactly what. Between Ragusa and Trebinje there is just now no actual fighting; the road is reported to be perfectly safe; only it is advisable to get a pa.s.sport _vise_ by the Turkish consul. The pa.s.sports are _vise_, but, so far for the credit of the Turks, it must be added that, though duly carried, they were never asked for. The party, four in number--three English and one Russian--presently set forth from Ragusa. It is now as easy to get a carriage at Ragusa as in any other European town. So our party sets out behind two of the small but strong and sure-footed horses of the country, to get a glimpse of what, to two at least of their number, were the hitherto unknown lands of Paynimrie.

As long as we are on Austrian territory there is nothing to fear or to complain of but those evils which no kings or laws can cure. The day was rainy--so rainy that a word was once or twice murmured in favour of turning back; but it was deemed faint-hearted to turn again in an undertaking which had been once begun. On the Austrian side the rain was certainly to be regretted, as damping the charm of the glorious prospect from the zigzag road which winds up from Ragusa to the frontier point of Drino. Ragusa, nestling among hills and forts and castles, the isle of La Croma keeping guard over the haven which has ceased to be a haven, the wide Hadriatic stretching to the horizon, form a picture surpa.s.sed by but few pictures even in the glorious scenery of the Dalmatian coast. On the other side, it was perhaps no great harm if the rain made the savage land between Drino and Trebinje seem more savage still. At the top of the height the Austrian guard-house is reached, a guard-house which the line of the frontier causes to be overlooked by a Turkish fort above it. The guardians of the borders of Christendom look wild enough in their local dress; but the wildness is all outside, though one certainly does not envy them their watch on so dreary a spot. Hard by is the place where the Italian lost his head; but the Italian was openly in the ranks of the insurgents; so, though the thought is a little thrilling, our present travellers feel no real danger for their heads. The frontier is now pa.s.sed; we are in the land where the Asiatic and Mahometan invader still holds European and Christian nations in bondage. We see no immediate sign of his presence. The Turkish guard-house is at some distance from the Austrian, in order to watch the pa.s.s on the other side, where the road begins to go down towards Trebinje, as the Austrian guards the road immediately up from Ragusa. But, if as yet we see not the Turk, we feel his presence in another way. In one point at least we have suddenly changed from civilization to barbarism. The excellently kept Austrian road at once stops--that is to say, its excellent keeping stops; the road goes on, only it is no longer mended in Austrian but in Turkish fashion--a fashion of which the dullest English highway board would perhaps be ashamed. We presently begin to see something cf the land of Herzegovina, or at least of that part of it which lies between Ragusa and Trebinje. It may be most simply described as a continuous ma.s.s of limestone. The town lies in a plain surrounded by hills, and it would be untrue to say that that plain is altogether without trees or without cultivation. Close to the town tobacco grows freely, and before we reach the town, as we draw near to the river Trebenitza, the dominion of utter barrenness has come to an end. But the first general impression of the land is one of utter barrenness, and for a great part of our course, long after we have come down into the lower ground, this first general impression remains literally true. It is not like a mountain valley or a mountain coast, with a fringe of inhabited and cultivated land at the foot of the heights. All is barren; all is stone; stone which, if it serves no other human purpose, might at least be used to make the road better.

That road, in all its Turkish wretchedness, goes on and on, through ma.s.ses of limestone of every size, from the mountains which form the natural wall of Trebinje down to lumps which nature has broken nearly small enough for the purposes of MacAdam. Through the greater part of the route not a house is to be seen; there are one or two near the frontier; there is hardly another till we draw near to the town, when we pa.s.s a small village or two, of which more anon. Through the greater part of the route not a living being is to be seen. In such a wilderness we might at least have looked for birds of prey; but no flight of vultures, no solitary eagle, shows itself. As for man, he seems absent also, save for one great exception, which exception gives the journey to Trebinje its marked character, and which brings thoroughly home to us that we are pa.s.sing through a seat of war.