Part 18

But for aught we know they may have been dispensed in charity. And for aught history can tell us, she may have been as spotless as Desdemona. Gibbon, mark you, is by no means convinced of her guilt. If the couple were innocent, he observes oracularly, the husband was unfortunate; if they were guilty, he was still more unfortunate. “Unfortunate” is a mild word for the Margrave, as if his begetting of Hugo were a mere casualty. It is true that at this period in Italy there was little discrimination against bastards, especially those of Popes and Princes. Still Nicholas had only himself to blame for thrusting his Hugo into the contiguity of his wife. Byron, indeed, in his mediocre poem of “Parisina,” makes Hugo offer vivid reproaches to his father (mellifluously transformed to Azo, which the poet omits to say was really the name of the first Margrave of the line). But though these reproaches are comprehensive enough:

“Nor are my mother’s wrongs forgot, Her slighted love and ruined name, Her offspring’s heritage of shame,”

and embrace even the charge that Parisina was originally destined for Hugo himself, but refused to him by the father on the brazen ground that his birth was unworthy of her, nevertheless Byron, like most vicious men, preserves the conventional view of the husband’s rights.

In his poem Parisina’s fate is left artistically uncertain.

“No more in palace, hall, or bower Was Parisina heard or seen.”

But the guides know better. She was beheaded in her dungeon, and the original door leading to that dungeon is still standing in the mighty old castle, and I passed through it. The cell is two storeys below this grim portal, and is reached through a trap-door and passages, and then a second trap-door and more passages, and then a door of iron on wood, and then a door wholly iron, with an iron flap through which her food was pushed. Poor Parisina, poor fluttering bird, caught in that cage of iron! The very light filters into this cell only through a series of six cobwebbed gratings, tapering narrower and narrower, as though some elf of a prisoner might squeeze his way out into the moat. Through such peep-holes, and as fuscously, filters the light of history to us adown the cobwebbed centuries.

SICILY AND THE ALBERGO SAMUELE BUTLER: OR THE FICTION OF CHRONOLOGY

I

To cycle in Sicily is to experience the joys or the sorrows of the pioneer, to pedal backward on the road of Time, and revisit the pre-bicycle period ere man had evolved into a rotiferous animal. Palermo has witnessed the landing of many tribes and races: Phœnician and Greek, Roman and Goth, Saracen and Norman, Spaniard and Savoyard. But not till my comrade and I disembarked with our wheels had any cyclist troubled the Custom House. Others, indeed, had preceded us by land, but we hold the record by sea—the first marine invaders. And our arrival, by way of Tunis, fitly fluttered and puddered the guardians of the port. Three or four officials and a chaos of bystanders, quidnuncs, and porters, entered into excited discussion. The recording angel—a mild and muddled clerk, whose palsied pen shook in his fingers—turned over not only a new leaf, but a new book, and made us sign in three wrong places of the immaculate tome; we had to answer a world of questions, and await innumerable calculations and consultations. Meantime, without, the rich, romantic harbour fretted our curiosity, and the painted Sicilian carts gave an air of fairyland. The very dust-carts were perambulating art-galleries, pompous with grave historic themes, or pious with carven angels or figures of the Virgin; the horn of the horses was exalted, springing in scarlet from the middle of their backs, their blinkers and headpieces were broidered in red. The workaday world was transfigured to poetry, and the old Church-poet’s maxim,

“Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine,”

seemed translated into visual glorification of the dignity of labour and the joy of common life.

Everything combined to make us kick our heels with unusual viciousness. Finally we were condemned to pay about fourpence each, and, mounting our ransomed machines, we rode forth into the strange new world.

Palermo itself proved a disappointment; a monstrous, straggling, stony, modern city, wedged between mountain and harbour, as difficult to escape from as a circle of the Inferno. Miles on miles of hard riding still leave you hemmed in by unlovely houses, harried by electric trams. But at last, by muddy byways, you come upon fluting shepherds, grey olive-trees, flowering almonds, orange-groves, gleaming like fairy gold through bowers of green, and beyond and consecrating all, the blue-spreading, sun-dimpled sea. You have reached the land of Theocritus—though Theocritus himself, by the way, is quite unknown to the Palermese booksellers. And if Palermo is prosaic, Monreale, not five miles off, is one of the remotest towns in Europe. Perched eleven hundred and fifty feet above the sea, over which it looks superbly across a pastoral landscape, it is a dirty network of steep and ancient alleys, with shrines at street-corners, and running fountains down steps, and large yellowish jars on the house-ledges by way of cisterns. The roadway swarms with morose, shawled, swarthy men, lounging and gossiping, while the busy women stride along, bearing brimming vase-pitchers on their gracefully poised, kerchiefed heads; goats, greedy of garbage, feed ubiquitously, some rampant on tubs of squeezed lemons; poultry peck and scurry through the slime; the milkman passes with his mobile milk-can, the she-goat, to be tapped at every door; on the mouldering façades stream flaring insignia of orange-peel, strung together for sale to confectioners, or macaroni hangs a-drying in the sun. And, for crowning assurance of mediævalism, the magnificent Roman-Saracen cathedral, surely one of the seven wonders of Christendom, offers its bronze portals and its Byzantine blaze of mosaics, Bible illustrations naïve as a Noah’s ark. Monreale is already the true Sicily, with its aloofness from the modern age, and with its architecture carrying like geological strata the record of all the influences to which it has been exposed. Presently the cyclist or the motorist will leave a new imprint upon the historic soil, saturated with the blood of rival races, and with the finest poetry of Pagan mythology. At present there are few roads for him to follow, and fewer inns to lodge him, and the rumour of brigands dogs his footsteps, though we ourselves never encountered even an exorbitant landlord. Like Blondins of the bicycle, we pursued our unmolested way over tenuous ridges, ’twixt ditch and rut, daring to swerve no hair’s-breadth, and the only terror of the countryside was that which we ourselves produced. Wherever we passed, pigs scuttered and poultry fluttered, and goats bleated and kids scampered; horses reared and broke from their traces, mules stampeded in craven terror, dogs fled howling or dumb-struck, whole populations crowded to the doors and balconies, children escorted us literally by hundreds, racing by short cuts across the mountain-paths to get additional glimpses of us from parallel parapets. Like ominous comets we flared through the old Sicilian villages, scattering awe and wonder. The only sensible creatures were the donkeys; they regarded us stolidly, or turned a head of mere intelligent curiosity upon our receding mechanisms. Our wheels had become Time-machines, tests of the difference from standard central-European time, and they showed Sicily half a century—nay, a whole cycle—slow.

Chronology is indeed a metaphysical figment, and even this little globe still offers all the centuries simultaneously to the traveller.

Fantastic is the common reckoning of time by which our globe revolves in a temporal continuum, so that it is the same date—within twelve hours—all over its surface. The Irishman who spoke of the so-called nineteenth century was severely logical. The nineteenth century has not even yet dawned for the bulk of our planet, which presents in fact a bewildering diversity of dates. The Pyrenees divide not merely right from wrong, as Pascal was puzzled to find, but even century from century.

Meals in the byways of Sicily were rather haphazard. The hotels had often nothing in the house, and even when one advanced the money to get something, there might be a dearth in the neighbourhood. Macaroni is, however, a standby. But a single bed-sitting-dining-and-coffee-room spells adventure rather than accommodation. The possession of one spare room sets up the hardy Sicilian peasant-woman as a hotel-keeper. Ceres wandering through Sicily in search of Proserpina must have had a poorish time, unless she fell back upon her own horn of plenty. It was a voluptuous emotion to glide one evening into the broad white streets of Castelvetrano under a crescent moon and into the haven of a real hotel.

Castelvetrano was the nearest town to one of the great goals of our pilgrimage—the ruins of Selinunte. The Normans did not conquer Sicily as permanently as those old Greeks, and even in their decay the Greek temples of Sicily rank with the most precious vestiges of ancient art. Some hours of cycling brought us to the magnificent chaos of graven stone that fronts eternity on a barren field by a lonely shore. There they lie, seven temples, sublime in their very huddle and pell-mell, a wilderness of snapt and tumbled columns, Ossa piled on Pelion. Only one of Vulcan’s freaks—and the fire god had a workshop under Etna—could have wrought this mighty upheaval. In utter abandonment the land stretches towards the empty sea, and where priests sacrificed and worshippers trod, spring the wild parsley, the purple anemone, the marigold, and the daisy. From clefts of the great broken bases or in hollows of the fallen capitals push dwarf palms and myrtles, like the lower world of the vegetable reasserting itself over the stone that had mounted to beauty by alliance with man’s soul. An odd monolith left towering here or there but accentuates the desolation.

The temples of Concord and of Juno Lacinia still stand four-square to the winds at Girgenti. But of all the temples that preserve for us “the glory that was Greece,” that of Segesta stands predominant, if only by reason of its situation. From afar it draws the eye upwards, gleaming almost white on its hilltop. But, standing amid the wild fennel in its grassy court, you see that the noble Doric pillars, though marvellously preserved through three-and-twenty centuries, are corroded in great holes and bear the rusty livery of Time. Behind the temple the earth sinks into a gigantic cup, forming a natural theatre, and in front stretches a vast spread of rolling hills, with beautiful cloud-shadows of purple and brown and silver, and a little glimmer of the Gulf of Castellamare. The few cultivated patches, the faint trees and solitary farms in the dim background, scarcely modify the impression of Nature unadorned. Nothing is given you but the largest elemental things—the sun, the sea, the barren mountains, and the sternest, sublimest form of human architecture. Nothing is known even as to the god to whom the temple was dedicated.

One could wish that mighty Syracuse, with its memories of Æschylus and Pindar, had lapsed to such a wilderness instead of surviving as a small modern town for tourists. A Babylon with restaurants and cab-fares is bathos. But Taormina—the first Greek settlement—still remains, despite its pleasure-pilgrims, the culminating point of a visit to Sicily. Culminating, too, in a sense that will not recommend it to cyclists. Ours are perhaps the only machines that have laboured steadily and daily up this forbidding steep, some four hundred feet above the sea and the railway station. The road mounts even higher—past walled gardens of roses and lemons and almonds, till from the ruined castle at Mola you command a marvellous scape of land and sea. But the mere every-day view from Taormina itself is one of the greatest pictures of the Cosmic Master, for out beyond the sunlit straits shows the Calabrian foot of Italy, generally muffled in a fairy mist, while the Sicilian shore is washed by a pale rainbowed streak of sea. And for eternal background Etna towers, infinitely various, now in snow-white majesty, now cloud-veiled and sombre, now ablaze with an apocalyptic splendour of sunset. But it is in the wooded gorges around Taormina, with their tumbling rock-broken streams, that the climax of Sicilian picturesqueness is reached: here is all the wild witchery of romantic landscape, set to music, as it were, by the piping and trilling of some solitary, far-off shepherd, whose every note travels clear-cut in the lucid air. In the grove below you passes a procession of young women, their right hands supporting lemon-baskets on their shawled heads. Their feet are bare, and they sing a wistful Eastern melody as they move slowly on. A boy leads a black cow by a string round its horns. All is antique and pastoral. Or rather, the Eclogues of Virgil and the Idylls of Theocritus seem contemporary.

At the Greek Theatre, too, that naked majestic amphitheatre, how tinkling and trivial would have sounded the dialogue of modern drama. Sophocles and Æschylus alone could fill the spaces with due thunder. Or was not the large drama of the Greeks positively forced upon them by this great natural theatre, o’er-towered by mountains, roofed by the sky, and giving on the sapphire sea? The infinities and the eternities conspired with the dramatist in a religious uplifting, and his utterance must needs be spacious and noble.

II

I was not aware that any English writer had achieved the distinction of stamping his name upon a Sicilian street, or even—quainter, if lesser glory—upon a Sicilian inn. Yet at Calatafimi, a little town so obscure (despite its heroic Garibaldi memories) that it had not yet reached the picture-postcard stage, a town five miles from a railway station, up one of the steepest and stoniest roads of the island, I lodged at the Albergo Samuele Butler, and walked through the Via Samuele Butler. Yes, this peculiar immortality was reserved in a Catholic land for our British iconoclast. It was the Communal Council that resolved that the street leading from the Nuovo Mercato towards Segesta should “honour a great man’s memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation.” But the change in the name of the inn, which is in another street, must have been due to the personal initiative of the proprietors, in commemoration of their distinguished client. Meantime “the friendly English nation” cares even less about Samuel Butler of “Erewhon” than about Samuel Butler of “Hudibras,” if indeed it distinguishes one from the other.

Thus the super-subtle satirist, understanded not of the British people, paradoxical in death as in life, has left his highest reputation in the hearts of Sicilian peasants. The recluse of Clifford’s Inn, the stoic and cynic of civilisation, was hail fellow well met with the cottagers of Calatafimi.

It was only natural that the pundits of Trapani should welcome with complacent acquiescence the theory of “The Authoress of the Odyssey,” which was received in England with such raised eyebrows; for did not Butler locate the adventures of Ulysses as a voyage round Sicily, and identify Trapani as the place where the lady writer composed the Odyssey? Butler won equal gratitude in Italy by his exhumation and glorification of the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he identified with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. But these learned lucubrations of his would not have sufficed to enthrone Butler in the hearts of the simple. That was the reward of his Bohemian bonhomie. “He always remembered all about everybody,” says his friend, Mr. Festing Jones, “and asked how the potatoes were doing this year, and whether the grandchildren were growing up into fine boys and girls, and never forgot to inquire after the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York.”

“He called me _la bella Maria_,” the septuagenarian landlady of the Albergo Samuele Butler told me, as she showed me the photograph he had given her—the portrait of the melancholy tired thinker, whom she survives with undiminished vitality and fire. He was done in a group, too, with her and her husband, and altogether appeared to have found a rest from the torture of thought and the bitterness of “The Way of All Flesh” in these primitive personalities.

And here again I had occasion to note the absurdity of chronology, the first century and the fortieth lodging under the same roof—for Butler was at least as far ahead of the twentieth century as his hostess was behind it. Pleasant it is to think that there is a possible human community between epochs so sundered.

Spring after spring came Butler to the inn that now bears his name, and having followed unconsciously in his footsteps, and slept in his very bed, I wonder how he could have found life tolerable there. The Admirable Crichton of his day, novelist and poet, musician and painter, scientist and theologian, art critic and sheep farmer, and perhaps the subtlest wit since Swift, Samuel Butler seems to have reduced his personal demands upon the universe to a smaller minimum than Stevenson in his most admired moments. And that not from poverty, for his resources in later life were adequate, but from sheer love of “plain living and high thinking.” The walls of his bedroom in the formerly yclept Albergo Centrale are whitewashed, the ceiling is of logs, the washstand of iron, and even if the water-jug is a lovely Greek vase with two handles, and the pail a beautiful green basin, this is only because Sicily supplies no poorer form of these articles. The bed is of planks on iron trestles. The Albergo itself, with its primitive sanitation, is in keeping with its best room. For Sicily it is, perhaps, a Grand Hotel, embracing as it does an entire flat of three bedrooms on the second floor (a cobbler occupies the ground floor, and the mystery of the first floor I never penetrated). This three-roomed hotel is shut off from the rest of the house by a massive portal. On the first night there appeared to be even a dining-room, but morning revealed this as a mere ante-chamber, windowless, and depending for its light upon the bedroom doors being open. On the second night even this substitute for a dining-room vanished, owing to the advent of another traveller, and the ante-room became a bedroom, so that I had to make my entrances and exits through the new lodger’s pseudo-chamber. The landlady also passed through it on her morning visit to me, which was made without any regard for my morning tub. “_È permesso?_” she asked gaily, as she sailed in. This was her ordinary formula—first to come in, and then to ask if she might.

When I opened my door I had a curious double picture impressed upon my memory: the shirted backs of two young men dressing, each in his room; the one in the bedroom proper was seen in a pale morning light, the occupant of the windowless ante-room was vividly Rembrandtesque under his necessary lamp. Each was singing cheerily to himself as he made his toilette.

Nor was the food superior to the accommodation. Butter was unobtainable during my stay, and breakfast consisted of dry bread, washed down by great bowls of coffee. Fish was not, and the meat had better not have been. I must admit that the dry bread was served with an air that made it seem wedding-cake. “_Pane!_” _la bella Maria_ would exclaim ecstatically, dumping the coarse, scarce edible loaf on the table with a suggestion of Diana triumphant in the chase. “_Caffè!_” was another hallelujah, as of a Swiss Family Robinson discovering delectable potions. And “_Latte!_” bore all the jubilation of a cow specially captured and despoiled for the first time in human history of the treasure of its dugs. Maria’s manner of waiting revitalised the common objects of the breakfast table, made them a fairy-tale again; under her magic gestures every piece of sugar grew enchanted and every spoon an adventure. And Butler’s tastes were of the simplest, even in Clifford’s Inn, where, out of consideration for his old laundress, he made his own breakfast before she turned up. All the same, the attraction of Calatafimi for Butler is difficult to explain. It is one of the dingiest Sicilian towns, littered with poultry, goats, children, and refuse, though, of course, you are soon out of it and amid the scenery of Theocritus. But the view from Butler’s own balcony—often a paramount consideration for a writer—was not remarkably stimulating; hemmed in by the opposite houses, though rising into hills and a ruined castle.

Nor was he a student of the campaign of the Thousand, Homeric as was the battle of Calatafimi. It may be that he found the spot more secluded than a seaport like Trapani for pursuing his topographical investigations into the wanderings of the woman-made Ulysses; or it may be that he found unceasing rapture in the contemplation of the aforesaid temple of Segesta that dominates the landscape from its headland, albeit a closer contemplation of its noble columns costs a five-mile walk and climb. Here Goethe came and philosophised on the passing show of human glory, and here, too, Butler may have loved to muse.

In a fine sonnet on Immortality, published in the _Athenæum_ a few months before mortality claimed him, Butler expressed his belief that the only after-life for the dead lay in the hearts of the living, and only upon their lips could those meet whom the centuries had parted.

“We shall not even know that we have met, Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.”

It is strange to me, who lived—as chronology would say—in the same age as Butler, and in the same London, and only a minute’s walk from him, to think that I should yet never have met him save on the lips of the peasants of Calatafimi, lips that spoke only Sicilian.

INTERMEZZO

I