Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry
G >>
George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 HEART OF MAN
BY
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY
COPYRIGHT 1899,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
1899
"Deep in the general heart of man"
--WORDSWORTH
TO THE MEMORY OF
EUGENE MONTGOMERY
MY FRIEND
DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'TWERE TO ME,
ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT;
IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE
HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT
February 18, 1899.
PREFACE
OF the papers contained in this volume
"Taormina" was published in the _Century
Magazine_; the others are new. The intention
of the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics,
and religion are the flowering of the same
human spirit, and have their feeding roots in
a common soil, "deep in the general heart of
men."
COLUMBIA COLLEGE,
February 22, 1809.
CONTENTS
TAORMINA
A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY
DEMOCRACY
THE RIDE
TAORMINA
I
What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village
to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the
darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the
pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne
up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina.
There is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality of
mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping
upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. At
morning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights above
me. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop
Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek
the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a
thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer
height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined
citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward
its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other
horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old
castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a
hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over these
hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they
darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the
next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of
Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the
other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face
down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the
cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the
profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which
delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic
moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of
recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the
Sicilian landscape.
One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger
anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not
only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come.
When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain
tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there
too,--that which I have always known,--but marvellously transformed and
heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the
offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I
have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of
cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still
tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of
noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure
emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what
has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for
my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of
mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a
near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes
of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All
day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself
has taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats
the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour
before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion is
conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes
the recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of
Etna."
The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is
the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never
known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw
nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the
valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is
not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or
ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like
Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon
Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses,
lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the
clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it
draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends
it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its
face: it is the Sicilian winter.
II
But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this
season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back
the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in
impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casement
and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter,
expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds
spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the
snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages
and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay
the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away.
From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than
twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western
fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so
large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the
distance of the stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed snows,
and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds
innumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain.
How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea and
of the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and I
rejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of
heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud.
III
Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair,
pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of
Taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the
small temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It is
such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever
commanded a more noble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or five
hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each
hand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the
rising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with the
Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the
Cape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front
expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay
and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great
blue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills
the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid
cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the
intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, to
the round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long shoreward
descent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with its
hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further
off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte
Venere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, and
northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range.
A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically
grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the
impression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and
dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but
constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells
unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltation
which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit
of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this
landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its
perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather,
and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the
eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer
features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill of my
station falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and then
becomes the Cape of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea.
Yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance and
strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of Sant' Andrea, and
beside it a cluster of small islands lies nearer inshore. On the other
side, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, the
village of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white
main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands.
The port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where
ancient Naxos stood; and just beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plain
and flows to the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' Andrea,
is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eight
miles away, the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the shore view
with a mass of rock that in former times completely shut off the land
approach hither, there being no passage over it, and none around it
except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. All this ground,
with in several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the Alcantara, and
beyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of Taormina.
The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore and
the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out
into the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, the
site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite
shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between,
possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines of
the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic
tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand
out among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like
oblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If
you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, which
overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the
town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the
plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the
gate toward Messina.
The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine of
Taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are
terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock
permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less
steep slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive trees
cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe
the country. It is gray to look at, because of the masses of natural
rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the
terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone.
The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear,
whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and
often extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green to
the scene. This plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man's
height, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. A
closer view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at
my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or run
over the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in the
prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray of
Taormina--this is the scene.
Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage
road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the
northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo
below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly
opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses
above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. The
second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna,
and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern
spur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill)
closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent
of Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way,
leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge
between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with
here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a
sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign
of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands
by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main
road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a
hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge;
one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land,
exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the
castle.
This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor,
how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent
beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This
theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by
great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick
strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour
and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in
position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet
whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the
long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame.
Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The
enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many
thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the
roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I
entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the
round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and
mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the
fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a
mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I
come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces
of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the
ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout
below was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over
Giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents
pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, but
now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in the
Casa Timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from
its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?
IV
I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep
that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find
there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on
unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the
hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like
the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed
by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth,
often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most
unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and
foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The
multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for
here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few
moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the
Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely
pictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined
unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere
change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and
colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day
to day, with the unsettled weather.
Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which
is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up
and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept
the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the
vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the
gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some
discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I
found the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such
as I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern
shore of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchards
yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and
everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under
the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a
landscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of San
Nicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down the
hollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in a
dell that is like a nook in the Berkshire hills, and then along the
upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I came
out through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slow
implements on the gray or party-coloured stone. I passed through the
rather silent group, who stopped to look at me, and a short distance
beyond I crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to the shore.
I found it strewn with seaside rock, as a hundred other beaches are, but
none with rocks like these. They were marble, red or green, or shot with
variegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined; and the
sea had polished them. Very lovely they were, and shone where the low
wave gleamed over them. I had wondered at the profusion of marbles in
the Italian churches, but I had not thought to find them wild on a
lonely Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had seen a block rosy in
the torrent-beds, and it had seemed a rare sight; but here the whole
shore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful stone.
I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these marbles. Over
thirty varieties were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won the
prize. I got this information from the keeper of the Communal Library,
with whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory the ship that
Hieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had
twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and space to hold a library, a
gymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers
for assault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many ingenious
mechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required for
its construction. I describe it because its architect, Filea, was a
Taorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archimedes
in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley
he used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian told
me also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean,
which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; but
now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour.
The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But the
mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that once
went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers,
the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as
long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient
memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated
in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the
Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the
straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast
up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.
The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries
in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination,
more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had
strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came,
after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for
the road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a
low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from
the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more
piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand
music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and
reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed
the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that
lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had
become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the
Psalmist's song. It seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought over
how many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted upon
it as they passed to their death on this shore. I came back slowly in
the twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing
on me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted like
the bright December breezes of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on
my cheek.
V
Will you hear the legend of Taormina?--for in these days I dare not call
it history. Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped to
recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which
patriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear
city. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the
town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these
little paper-bound memorials of their city. "But," he said, "I told them
I had given you my word." So I possess these books with a pleasant
association of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest.
As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to
know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the
temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the
last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is
pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date
with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the
last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living
memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue,
the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air
preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man
holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and
fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books
in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a
narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring
deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy
figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand
years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded,
if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15