But even the Old Testament is comparatively sophisticated. This extinction of the native tribes of Palestine is enjoined, not on political grounds but on religious. It is not that Palestine, which offers the most convenient territory for the refugees from Egypt, happens unfortunately to be densely populated. No, virtue must be vindicated, not brute force. But one cannot too much admire that the Biblical historian chose the less nauseous of the two morals open to him. “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” By a remarkable exception in epics, Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story. But all the same, the story has to be coloured in the interests of righteousness. His successors in invasion have not been content to blacken the autochthones, they have brightened themselves. It is for their own uprightness that the Lord casts out the tribes before them or sets them to rule over the heathen. The Lord calls them to spread His word in countries closed to their commerce. He ordains they should bear the White Man’s burden—the Black Man’s ivory and gold are indeed no light weight. Pah! let us talk of politics like Machiavelli or forever hold our peace.

And yet something can be said for the world’s hypocrisy. It is the homage which the Relative pays to the Absolute, part of that yearning of mankind for indefectible ideals, for Luther’s “pearl of certainty.” Its Right must be Right in all circumstances under the stars, nay, before the stars were born. Ethics shall not be a child of conditions; what holds between man and man, must obtain equally between ruler and ruled, even between State and State. But what is to be done when ethics demands one thing and necessity the opposite? Necessity wins of course, but on condition of not blazoning its victory. The Church, forbidden to shed blood, exacts an expiation from its indispensable warriors, or gravely invents the bloodless stake for its heretics, or with an even more humorous preference of the letter to the spirit forbids its priests to practise surgery. The negro, enfranchised by the Quixotic theory of the American constitution, is disestablished by the Sancho Panzas who miscount his votes. The Jew, commanded to rid himself of leaven during Passover, sells his stock of groceries to an accommodating Christian till the Festival be over. The Christian, to whom money-lending is a sin against nature, hands over the necessary function to the accursèd Jew with the sanction of St. Thomas Aquinas, or founds the Monte di Pietà which Leo X permits to exact a fee on its loans to cover the cost of its officials. Ethics, like the old astronomy, complicates itself with the cycles and epicycles of practice, but the theory of the perfect circle of planetary motion remains immutable. In Lombardy, in Florence, under the very eye of the Pope, the industrial system of modern Europe founds itself on money-lending, but no Encyclical removes the prohibition or condones the sacrilege, or grants Christian burial to the impenitent financier. The irresistible force of facts comes into collision with the immovable body of principles, but the crash is soundless, and by a delicate instinct Society looks the other way. The immortal principle is buried silently—not a drum is heard, not a funeral note. For later generations its deadness is a matter of course.

Even so mankind founds its social systems upon beautiful ideals and averts its eyes from the rotten places of the fabric. It will concede almost anything to practice, if practice will only remain under the rose. This Social Conspiracy is sub-conscious. In war or in religion, in sex or even the smaller animal functions, it works towards a harmony of seeming, an artistic selection of the beautiful or the perfect with rejection of the ugly or the jarring. Is not this indeed our highest art, this art of civilisation, which, out of the raw stuff we are, fashions us into the figures of an heroic and poetic masque? Costumed in the skins of our fellow beasts or in the spoils of our vegetable contemporaries, our dames pranked in the web of a worm, we ruffle it in drawing-rooms as gods and spirits, no terrestrial weakness bewrayed. Our true superiority to the brutes is that we are artists, and they are naturals. Man will not be a creature of Nature, as Coleridge noted. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women players, or—to say it in Greek—hypocrites. It is for bad manners that Machiavelli has been boycotted.

I

It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of Lucrezia Borgia in the library of the University of Ferrara. I had already seen in a little glass case at Milan, in the Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious yellow hair, and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of its fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic. For the document was—of all things in the world—a washing list! The lurid lady—the heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo’s drama—checked, perhaps mended, her household linen! It has been sufficiently washed in public since her day. But this list alone should serve to cleanse her character. Indeed Pope Alexander’s daughter does not lack modern whitewashers—what ancient disrepute is safe from them? Roscoe, Gilbert and Gregorovius defend her, and even in her lifetime she had her circle of court laureates that included Ariosto himself. Her platonic friendship with Cardinal Bembo is rather in her favour. The copiously grey-bearded ecclesiast in cap and robe, whose portrait may be seen at Florence in the corridor between the Pitti and the Uffizi, does not look like a man who would consort with the legendary Lucrezia. Yet even a man of letters of Bembo’s status is liable to colour-blindness when the Scarlet Woman is a reigning duchess. Bembo, we know, was afraid to read the Epistles of St. Paul, for fear of contaminating his Latin; we are less certain that any fear of contaminating his character would keep him from reading the epistles of Lucrezia. But it seems fairest to accept the view that once freed by her third marriage from the vicious influences of the Vatican and the company of the Pope’s concubines, she became rangée, steadying herself into an admirable if pleasure-loving consort of the ruler of Ferrara! Nevertheless even in Ferrara rumour connected her with the murder of the poet Ercole Strozzi, and the guides used to count among their perquisites the blood-flecked wall of the Palace in which, by way of revenge for her extrusion from a respectable Venetian ball-room, she poisoned off at a supper-party eighteen noble Venetian youths, including a natural son of her own whom she poignarded in the frenzy of the discovery.

And Addington Symonds, even after the huge monograph of Gregorovius in her favour, can only exchange the idea of “a potent and malignant witch” for “a feeble woman soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle,” a woman who could look on complaisantly at orgies devised for her amusement, applauding even when Cesare chivied prisoners to death with arrows.

But it was reserved for the latest biographer of the Borgias (Frederick Baron Corvo) to write of her: “She was now the wife of royalty, with a near prospect of a throne, worshipped by the poor for her boundless and sympathetic charity, by the learned for her intelligence, by her kin for her loving loyalty, by her husband for her perfect wifehood and motherhood, by all for her transcendent beauty and her spotless name. Why it has pleased modern writers and painters to depict this pearl among women as a ‘poison-bearing mænad,’ a ‘veneficous Bacchante’ stained with revolting and unnatural turpitude, is one of those riddles to which there is no key.” As for there being no key to it, that is nonsense, for naturally Lucrezia Borgia would share in the opprobrium due to the pravity of Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, and Corvo himself claims that Gregorovius proves that these calumnious inventions came from the poisoned pens of her father’s enemies. This judgment of a reckless writer may however be discounted, for Corvo throughout defends that papal Antichrist, Lucrezia’s father, in a spirit which Machiavelli, to whom “virtù” and “magnanimità” meant efficiency whether for good or evil, could not possibly better. And he gaily announces in his preface that he does not write to whitewash the House of Borgia, “his present opinion being that all men are too vile for words to tell.” In such a darkness, in which all cats are grey, Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as white as a blue-eyed Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo may not impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings, Dreyfus might have gone down to history as a traitor to France, so may the Borgian Lucrezia have been as blameless as the Tarquinian to whom indeed Ariosto boldly compares her. The woman who protected the Jews during a famine, provided poor girls with dowries, passed evenings over her embroidery frame and held the esteem of the greatest poet and the greatest stylist of her day, may really have lived up to that washing list. Chose jugée is never absolutely true in history, and there is no trial but is liable to revision. Even the saints are not safe; the devil’s advocate may always appeal. Sir Philip Sidney himself has been sadly toned down in his latest biography, and per contra it may well be that Lucrezia Borgia has innocently shared in the blackness of the Borgias. But how shall we ever know? How is it possible—especially considering the public and private conspiracy of falsification and suppression—to uncover the truth even about our contemporaries? Our very housemates elude us. The simplest village happening is recounted by the onlookers in a dozen different ways; an historic episode varies according to the politics of the recording newspaper. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John recount their great story, each after his own fashion, so that even “gospel truth” is no synonym for objective veracity. Letters are taken as invaluable evidence in past history, yet every letter involves a personal relation between the writer and the receiver, is written in what the logicians in a narrower sense call “the universe of discourse,” so that words written to one man differ from the same words written to another man, and still more from the same words written to a woman. Facetiousness, exaggeration, under-statement, pet-words, words in special meanings, are the note of intimate intercourse. ’Tis a cipher to which nobody else has the key, and which can never be read by the chronicler. “Our virtuous and popular Gloster” might mean “our vicious and universally odious Gloster.” How shall the peering student of musty records behold the wink in the long-vanished eye of the writer, the smile on the skull of the reader? A frigid note may veil a burning love; a tropic outburst disguise a dying passion. Who has the clue to these things? And in the literature of an age the things that are understood are exactly the things that are not written down, and thus the things that are written down are the things that are not understood. What would we not give for a little realistic description of houses, clothes and furniture in the Bible! But such information only drifts into the text indirectly and by accident. Official documents are the bed-rock of history, yet even such formal things as birth-certificates are unreliable, for did not the wife of my dearest friend momentarily forget where her own baby was born? Suppose Peggy grows up a celebrity, an Academician or even a Prime Minister, what is to prevent her birth-plaque being affixed to the wrong house?

Once, and once only, did I strive to penetrate to the sources of history—it was the life of Spinoza—and I found to my amaze that the traditional detail of his doings and habits rested on little more solid than the mistranslated scribblings of a Lutheran pastor who had occupied his lodging a generation after his death. And once in my life did I examine State papers. It was in the Archives of Venice; and as I wandered through the two hundred and ninety-eight rooms of the Recording Angel—though I did not verify the statement that there are fourteen million documents—I saw enough chronicles and certificates, enough Orators’ letters in cypher from every court in Europe (with inter-bound Italian translations) to keep in life-long occupation a staff of Methuselahs. And this for only one town, or, if you will, for one empire! Who is it that has the patience to sift this mammoth dust-heap, or who, having the patience, is likely to have the insight to interpret, or the genius to embody its essence? How shall we know which ambassador lied abroad for his country’s good, and which for his own? How shall we abstract the personal equation from their reports? How allow for their individual prejudices, jealousies, stupidities, rancours, mal-observations and dishonesties?

As the wise Faust pointed out, History is a subjective illusion.

Or as honest Burckhardt puts it more prosaically in his preface to his “Renaissance in Italy”: “In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.”

This would be the case even were our information on the past complete. The reduction of this wilderness of material to ordered statement and judgment would permit innumerable ways of seeing and summarising. But consisting as our knowledge does for the most part of mere ruins and shadows, or worse, of substantial falsities, such infinite perspectives of misreading are opened up that the bulk of written history can be only an artistic manipulation of hypotheses. What wonder if the original research and original insight of successive historians is constantly changing the colours and perspectives? Read Pope Gregory’s letter to the German princes describing the humiliation of Henry IV, and judge for yourself whether the famous story of the three days’ penance can really be built up out of “utpote discalciatus et laneis indutus,” &c. or whether it should be blotted out from the history-books as some modern writers demand. Is there, indeed, any episode to which we can pin a final faith? Has history bequeathed us anything on which the duty to truth is not so large as almost to swallow up the legacy? Popular wisdom in insisting that “Queen Anne is dead” selects the only sort of historic affirmation which can be made with certainty. As for any real picture of a period, how can the manifold currents of the ocean of life be represented in a single stream of words?

No; the truth about Lucrezia Borgia will never be known. But what imports? Our librettists and dramatists need themes, our novelists cannot do without “veneficous Bacchantes.” If Lucrezia Borgia was not a “poison-bearing Mænad,” somebody else was. Perhaps that other has even annexed the reputation for virtue that should have been Lucrezia’s! What matters who is which? Let them sort themselves out. If the Mænad or the Bella Donna is indispensable to the novelist or the dramatist, so is the Vestal Virgin and the Saint, and though his models may have exchanged names, he keeps his canvas true to reality. Cleopatra, to judge by her coins, had a face of power, not beauty, but shall the artist therefore surrender the conceptual Cleopatra? Assuredly there has been no lack of beautiful women to sterilise statesmen! Great figures are even more necessary in life than in art. Life would indeed be a “Vanity Fair” if it were “a novel without a hero.” We need monuments, memorials, masses, days of commemoration—for ourselves, not for the heroic dead. Dead men hear no tales. Posthumous fame is an Irish bull. We cannot atone to the dead for our neglect of them in their lives, but we need the memory of their lives to uplift ourselves by, we need the outpour of reverence for nobility of soul, we need to lose ourselves in the thought of greatness. But whether we are worshipping the right heroes is comparatively immaterial. Let us not be depressed, then, at the dubiety of history or at that labyrinth of Venetian archives. We can do without the belief that history is a just tribunal, so long as we preserve the belief in justice, and keep a sufficient store of heroes to applaud and villains to hiss. “La vie des héros a enrichi l’histoire,” said La Bruyère, “et l’histoire a embelli les actions des héros.” It is a fair give and take.

Peculiarly immaterial, so long as we preserve an ennobling conception of majesty, is the real character of that most embellished class of heroes—the Kings. Were we pinned down to drab reality, popular loyalty would not infrequently be paralysed. For that on the hereditary principle a constant and unfailing succession of genius and virtue should be supplied to a nation, contradicts all biological experience, yet nothing less than this is demanded by the necessities of State and the yearning of every people for wise and righteous leadership. In truth heredity is ruled out of court. Kings are not born but made. By a marvellous process of mythopoiesis the monarch is manufactured to suit the national need, and from the most unpromising materials prodigies of goodness and genius are created, or, in the case of female sovereigns, paragons of beauty. It is wonderful how far a single feature will go with a princess, and what crumbs of sense and courage will suffice for the valour and wit of a prince. Bricks can be made—and of the highest glaze—without a single wisp of straw. Of course a neutral character supplies the best basis for apotheosis: traits too positive for evil or for ugliness would render the material intractable. But there are few things too tough for the national imagination to transform. Perhaps the manufacture of monarchs is thus facile because the article is not required to last. The duration of the myth need not exceed a couple of reigns, nor need it be robust enough for exportation. Humanity, while insisting on the perfection of its own monarchs, is prepared to admit that prior generations and foreign peoples have not been so fortunate: indeed my school history of England made out that the country had been governed up till the Victorian era by a succession of monsters or weaklings. ’Tis distance lends disenchantment to the view. Even, however, when the hero is real, he never bulks as large as the phantasy of his idolaters. Napoleon himself was a pigmy, compared with the image in the heart of Heine’s “Zwei Grenadiere.”

II

Parisina, the Marchioness d’Este, that other heroine whom Ferrara has contributed to romance, or—if you will—to history, for she makes her first English appearance in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” has been less fortunate in finding defenders; perhaps because her guilt was less. Very shadowy appears that ill-starred Malatesta bride, of whom nothing seems recorded save that she and her paramour, Hugo, her husband’s natural son, were beheaded by her righteously indignant spouse. Yet she grew suddenly solid when I found a scribble of hers neighbouring Lucrezia Borgia’s washing-list. “Mandate per lo portatore del presente dieci ducati d’oro per una certa spesa la quale habiamo fatto.” It sounds suspiciously vague, I fear. “For a certain expense.” What could Parisina have bought with those ten ducats?

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:

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

I

Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the Pictures or the “National Monuments.” Ci vuol pazienza. I fear you will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have cried many a time in these endless galleries congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to be weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the good, besides having the advantage of numbers. Civerchio, Crespi, Garofalo, the Caracci, Penni, Guercino, Domenichino—the very names recall acres of vast glaring canvases, and the memory of Pistoja with only one picture to see—and that a Lorenzo di Credi—is as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Berenson, that prince of connoisseurs and creative critics, has done brave service both in dethroning and uplifting. Yet am I convinced there is still a wilderness of invaluable pictures by unvalued artists, who, to-day obscure, shall to-morrow be exalted in glory. Mutations of taste are not yet foreclosed: Michelangelo himself with his Super-statues, may recede and rejoin the mellifluous Raphael, while Siena replaces Florence. The art of Japan may win further victories, or we may follow the great expounder of Renaissance painting to his Chinese Canossa. Or the revolt against anecdote may spread to sacred anecdote, and disestablish the bulk of Christian art. I can imagine a newer Pre-Raphaelitism ruling the vogue, and Stefano da Zevio’s St. Catherine in the Rose-Garden becoming the centre of the world’s desire. I have a weakness myself for this Veronese picture, just because it is so frankly free from so many artistic virtues, so unpretentious of reality, so candidly a pattern, a reverie in roses and birds and angels and gold, a poem, a melting music. I like this new chord of roses and haloes, it is a rare harmony, a lovely marriage of heaven and earth. I can well imagine a visual art arising which will repudiate realities altogether. The cinematograph has come to complete the lesson of the camera, and to throw back the artist on his own soul.

But whatever revolutions in taste await us, my peregrinations have convinced me that there is no single consciousness in the world that holds a knowledge of the treasure of art, even though we limited the art to Italian, nay though we omitted sculpture and architecture and tapestries, and the delicious terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, and ivories and bronzes and goldsmiths’ work, and the majolicas of Urbino and Pesaro, and cameos and medallions and glass-work, and book-binding and furniture, and the intarsiatura of cassoni and pulpits and choir-stalls and lecterns, and the pavement art of the graffiti, and everything save drawing and painting. For when every church, house, and gallery in the world had been ransacked for every trace of Italian brush or pencil on plaster, canvas or paper, and all this registered in the one poor human brain, there would still remain the unexplored ocean of illumination—the manuscript books and missals, and decrees and charters of guilds and confraternities and Monti di Pietà, and lists of monks and rules of monasteries, and matricular books of Drapers and Mercers, and even decorative wills and deeds of gift—all that realm of beauty so largely extinguished by printing.

Upon which fathomless ocean embarking, we may well behold without too much of awe or envy the sails of the master-mariners. Sufficient to drift and anchor at the first enchanted isle.

Less enchanted, however, are even the galleries of masterpieces than the quiet bowers one finds for oneself—like that chapel in Arona where, unveiling an altar-picture in despite of a tall candle-stick, I caught my breath at the sudden serene beauty of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Holy Family; or like that reclusive Venetian church, where the luminous unity of Bellini’s Madonna and Saints pierces the religious gloom. Pictures in collections are as unreal as objects in museums, less so perhaps to-day than when each was painted for a definite altar, refectory, wall or ceiling, yet none the less destroying one another’s beauties. ’Tis only in the visual arts that we surrender ourselves to a chaos of impressions; imagine Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Gounod, sounding simultaneously. I could have wept to see how Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Uffizi had suffered by being transplanted to more gilded society. Gone was that golden and lilied purity which used to illumine the corridor.

And yet to see a picture in its own place is often equally heartbreaking. Some of the greatest pictures have carefully selected the most sombre and inaccessible situations.

Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than that art-shrine in Rome in which the pleasure-pilgrims of the world crick their necks or catch bits of frescoed ceiling in hand-mirrors. ’Tis not merely the bad light—for even in the best morning light the Sistine Chapel is fuscous—nor the sombre effect of the discoloured and chaotic Last Judgment, with its bluish streakiness and dark background—nor the dull painted hangings, nor the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic episodes and figures, nor even the Signorellis and Botticellis round the walls, though all contribute to the stuffy sublimity.

The oppressiveness is partially due to the fact that the architectural ceiling that Michelangelo painted—as artificial as the hangings—has faded rather more than the frescoes themselves, so that the figures seem to droop higgledy-piggledy upon the spectator’s head instead of standing out statuesque in their panels and spandrils. I dismiss the specious theory of a painting friend that they thus only hover the better, as prophets and patriarchs should. I refuse to be crushed even by Michelangelo. I know that a ceiling can soar, not menace, for have I not expanded under the gay lightness of the Pintoricchio ceiling in the Borgia apartments! Even the heavy and gilded ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice, sombre enough in all conscience, by preserving architectural plausibility, and resting on painted pillars, escapes seeming to fall upon one’s head. Yet at best a ceiling is a poor place for any save the most simple design. Michelangelo, or rather his papal employer, went against the principle of decoration. A room with such massive masterpieces on its ceiling could not but be top-heavy. Moreover the art feeling can only be received in comfort. If we are to be transported outside our bodies, we must not be distressfully reminded of them by the straining of neck muscles. How foolish and provoking of Correggio to put his finest soaring figures not only into a cathedral cupola, but into a cupola lit only by a few round windows. And his frescoes in the other dome at Parma are equally invisible. One is reduced to enjoying them in the copies. Michelangelo himself undertook the dizzying task of vault-painting with vast reluctance, and complained in a sonnet that he had grown a goitre, and that his belly had been driven close beneath his chin. He achieved a miracle of art—in the wrong place. Perhaps Julius II was not so Philistine in thinking more ultramarine and gold-leaf would have brightened it up.

II

A prophet is never without honour in his own country after his fame has been recognised by the world; indeed, his own country will cling piously to him after the tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as slow to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of painters. And when the artist has achieved the feat of substituting himself for a town in the popular imagination, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato, Correggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough to identify itself with his glory. But it must be humiliating for a town like Correggio, once the capital of a principality, to owe its only hold upon the present to a painter who did not live there, and of whom it does not possess a single picture. Let arrogant cities take warning: the time may come when their only niche in history will be provided by some obscure citizen now neglected, if not ill-treated or repudiated.

Once arrived, then, the Old Masters are not to be shaken off, even after they have departed again. Their birthplace or their working centre makes a cult of them, and it is touching to see them at home, each presiding over a sala at least of his works, and though depreciated abroad, yet still at an exorbitant premium in his local shrine, like some obscure paterfamilias basking and burgeoning at the family hearth. Guercino is still a god at Cento, his statue in the piazza, his pictures in the gallery. Possagno has a shrine with casts of all Canova. With what a gusto did the cicerones of Mantua talk of Giulio Romano! How the name rolled from the tongue, how it brightened a dingy fresco and glorified a dubious canvas. Si! Si! Tutto di Giulio Romano! Poor Giulio Romano! Not that those giants of yours tumbling on their heads in the Palazzo Te are as detestable as Dickens said. Those of David and Goliath in the great courtyard are even charming. And more fortunate than poor Guido, who must share his Bologna with Francia, you have a town to yourself. Even in his own sala poor Guido is put in the shade by the poetry of Niccolò da Foligno.

Moretto is properly the hero of Brescia, though not born there, and he dominates the Palazzo Martinengo with his charming St. Nicholas presenting the School Children to the Virgin, and a dozen other pictures, as he dominates the bishop’s palace and the churches. It is rare that so large a proportion of a painter’s work should remain at home, even when the painter himself is as homekeeping as was Moretto.

Very proud are they in Forli of Melozzo, exhibiting engravings of all his works, and even a rescued shop sign of his representing a pepper-brayer banging with his pestle. Marco Palmezzani, too, is high in honour in Forli. Correggio, who made his home in Parma, has been adopted by that city, and it is one of the few things to the credit of Marie Louise that she inspired this sacrosanct treatment of his work, in rich pilastered frames, under sculptured and vaulted ceilings, with two pictures to a room, or in the case of the Madonna della Scodella a room to itself. Poor Parmigiano, the real native of Parma, is thrown into the shade, though there is a Parmigiano room in the Pinacoteca and a Parmigiano statue in the Piazza della Steccata.

Urbino, a city as dead as Correggio, except for the fame of its ancient majolica, resembles it further in not possessing a single example of the work of its greatest son, so that Raphael’s father, who had the talent which so often sires a genius, pathetically holds the place of honour with his Santa Chiara and other more or less mediocre pictures. And yet there were five years at least in which Guidobaldo Montefeltro might have summoned Raphael to that famous Court which Castiglione depicted as a model. To-day, of course, the steep cobbled old city is all Raphael, with the exception of Polidoro Virgili, “the most learned man of letters of the fifteenth century,” and Gianleone Semproni, “Epic Poet”(!). A Contrada Raffaello, and a bronze bust, and a monument 36 ft. high, all attest his glory. But it would have been far wiser to have perpetuated his exclusion from the Montefeltro Palace than to represent him by a hideous complete set of cheap tiny photographs of his works, all set side by side in a large frame which stands in the chapel, together with his skull in a glass case! At least, it is not really his skull—it has not even that excuse—it is merely a cast in clay, though the clay was taken from his skeleton, from the cavity where once the heart that loved all beauty had pulsed. And here, looking upon the scenes his youthful eye had dwelt on; here, where one would wish to surrender oneself to memories of his magical creations, this skull with its perfect teeth is set to grin its mockery of art and life.

An anthropologist, we are told by an eminent historian of art, supposed this cast to be that of a woman, and we are invited to see in it the explanation of Raphael’s suavity. But I had been satisfactorily explaining this suavity myself by the amenities of the tame landscape—olives, poplars, hawthorn, a half-dried river, pairs of white oxen—as I trudged the forty kilometres from Pesaro to Urbino, till to my chagrin the character of the country changed and grew wilder and wilder as I approached his birthplace.

At dusk I was climbing up to an Urbino towering romantically above me with its few twinkling lights and wafting down the music of its vesper bells. My persuasion that I had explained Raphael dwindled with every painful step up the “Contrada Raffaello,” probably the steepest and worst-paved street in the world, and vanished altogether by the time I had climbed one of the gigantic stone staircases of the rock-hewn fortress city. And next morning I looked from the loggia of the great hook-nosed Duke upon wonderful rolling mountains, range upon range, snow-capped at the last, and winding paths twisting among them in a great poetry of space. Ha! Poetry of space! Was not that now set down as Raphael’s one real claim to greatness? And it was here no doubt he had found it, just as Piero dei Franceschi had found it, when here at the Duke’s invitation. But a hundred thousand other people—I suddenly remembered—have been born or have lived at Urbino, and why—I asked myself—were they not inspired to paint like Raphael? And a hundred thousand other men have had feminine skulls (not to mention women), and why have they not produced Transfigurations and Schools of Athens? Alas! I fear the Taine method has its limitations. Rousselot in his “Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel” talks as if Calabria with its solitary mountains and valleys could not help producing Joachim of Flora, nor Assisi St. Francis. But why do these places not go on producing saints and mystics?

III

If a painter’s skull is so offensive artistically and so futile scientifically, what shall we say of a poet’s heart? “Look into thy heart and write” may be a sound maxim, but to look into somebody else’s heart, is another matter. Separate sepulture for the poet’s heart is not unknown. But the exhibition of a poet’s heart as a literal literary asset, or library decoration, is, I imagine, only to be seen in the University of Ferrara. ’Tis the heart of the poet Monti who died in 1828, after having frequently resided in Ferrara, as a local tablet to “the sovereign poet of his age” testifies. Be it known that to Ferrara’s University turn the hearts of all poets, inasmuch as hither were transported the bones of Ariosto—and here a beautifully bound Ariosto album by all the poets of the day still awaits Napoleon’s promised attendance at the osseous installation, side by side with a lonely phalange of Ariosto that was equally belated for the ceremony. Monti could not resist the desire to bequeath his heart to this shrine of the Muses, and lo! there I beheld it, in a sort of air-tight hour-glass, a little brown heart, preserved in alcohol like a physiological specimen. Could anything be more prosaic of a poet, nay, more heartless? Fie upon you, Vincenzo! Was it not enough that your side-whiskers are perpetuated in the bust in the Ambrosian library? Are you an Arab that you should hold the heart the centre of the soul? Would you persuade us that this quaint ounce of flesh was the heart that contracted and dilated with tragic passion as you wrote your “Aristodemo,” the heart that beat out the music of “Bella Italia, amate sponde,” the heart that swelled with the tropes of the Professor of Eloquence at Pavia? Was it with these auricles and ventricles that you pumped up your poetry, was it these cardiac muscles that wrested the laureateship from Foscolo and Pindemonte? Was this “the official organ” of Napoleon?

Go to! Wear your heart on your sleeve, if you will, so long as it throbs with your life, but foist not upon us this butcher’s oddment as the essential you. Is it that you would abase us like Hamlet’s gravedigger with abject reminders of our mortality? Pooh! a lock of your hair during your lifetime were no more distressing. Not with this key did Shakespeare unlock his heart. And if we wish to behold your heart, we shall turn to your poems, and see it divided among many loves, equally susceptible to Dante and Homer. But this offal—let it be buried with Ariosto’s phalange!

Indeed, in justice to Italian taste, it should be stated that this heart has already been buried once. The courteous librarian of the University informed me that at Monti’s death in 1828, it was sent to the library by a beloved friend who had placed it in a pot of alcohol. But Cardinal Della Genga vetoed its exhibition and it was interred in the Certosa, under the poet’s monument. There it remained till 1884, when it was decided to carry the lead case in which the heart was buried to the library. In 1900 the case was opened in the presence of the authorities and the heart found splendidly preserved. It was therefore placed on view in a chest belonging to the poet, and containing papers of his. But the sooner it is removed again the better. That sort of “literary remains” scarce goes with the atmosphere of libraries.

IV

But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of another University affair of the heart which I stumbled upon in Bologna.

As we know from old coins, Bononia docet. But somewhere about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Rector with his scholars and sets down in Latin a record of the episode. “The scholars of our University being reconciled with the city, from which they had departed in resentment at the capital punishment inflicted upon their colleague Giacomo da Valenza, for the ravishing of Constanzia Zagnoni, by him beloved, the Church of Peace was erected in the year 1322, in the Via S. Mamolo and this memorial was placed there.”

What a tragic romance! What a story for a novelist, the Church, the World, and the University all intermingled, what a riot of young blood all stilled six hundred years ago!

The Doctors of that day still sit in carven state beside this memorial; learned petrifactions, holding their stone chairs for a term of centuries, Bartoluzzo de’ Preti, Reader of Civil Law, who died in 1318, and Bonandrea de’ Bonandrei, Reader of Decretals, who died in 1333. The “pleasant” Doctor this Bonandrea is styled; seasoning, no doubt, his erudition with graces of style. I figure him deeply versed in the decisions published by Gregory IX in 1234, and a profound expounder of the Isidorian Decretals.