Chapter 4

And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her poet. Perhaps none who will see these words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few of his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which Seneca quotes, saying of him, "No one out of so many talented men deplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus." Some dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. These fragments may not he easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; and, if it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the "Georgics," called "Etna." This is the work of Cornelius Severus. An early death took from him the perfection of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion.

VII

It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise from my old station by the Greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and men gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I wished I were among them, for it is their annual fair; and still I dwell on every feature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. The afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easy climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silent country! There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard no bird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other side of the wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the women of Mola washing by the old fountain which is its source. There is no other sign of human life. The fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over all--that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barren spot--a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over the battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and cannot be surprised at its record of defence.

Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and it was the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the Saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untaken and unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story; but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past.

He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the Messenians revolted against the chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed over this castle; and when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given into Matteo's charge, and imprisoned here. The Messenians came and surprised the lower city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuade Matteo to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to overcome his fidelity cruelly. They took his wife and children, who were at Messina, threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. Then they sent Matteo's brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count knew the reason of the visit he said: "It seems to me that you little value the zeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neither knows how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and children would look on me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the reward that sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." Then he was silent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was already escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save his wages," struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in his blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in the castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes.

VIII

Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear the long roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers' lights, and Etna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surge still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I have wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovely paradise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man should fear! He should fear his brother-man.

IX

The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out to depart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging to her side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. What brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was gone.

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY

There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself, was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures. Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. Conscience and imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel of Spenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips? The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain speak for that learning which has to me been light. I use this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the masters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent; my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old fountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argument is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on in the lives as well as on the lips of men. It is a question how to live as well as how to express life. Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but, change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his few great thoughts.

The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age. Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? I hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--

Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;

but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--Plato, being dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. That which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on which idealism rests.

The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import is not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence it comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most should heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms than paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the great body of the people's knowledge. They are the living words upon the lips of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries; the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily,--happy the youth whose purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it arises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty,--familiarity endears and makes it more precious. What is common is for that very reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring fire from heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet? How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweetness of God's sunshine in the happy heart! Common as light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and electricity,--were not all, like the spark, within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength that are nigh unto it. The service of man to man in the ways of the spirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold water to him who is athirst.

Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given to the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of impressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and were memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literature would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in their order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. In every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,-- abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,--of uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. To this work it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferes arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm what was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutes rational knowledge.

Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing faculty whose operation has just been described. The office of the reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that experience which memory preserves in the mass,--to penetrate, that is, to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they arise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences are advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it deals with, as these are more or less embracing.

The matter of literature--that part of total experience which it deals with--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.