来自：ITALIAN FANTASIES
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.
LUCREZIA BORGIA: OR THE MYTH OF HISTORY
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.
“Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln; Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst, Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.”
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:
“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.