SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY.

As it is good to have a plan and system in everything, whatever may be the miscellaneousness of its nature, we shall treat of our subjects in chronological order, beginning with the mythological times of Sicily, and ending with its latest modern poet.Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, at the foot of Italy, about half the size of England, and inhabited by a population a fifth less than that of London. Its shape is so regularly three-cornered, that Triangle or Triple-point (Trinacria) was one of its ancient names. Mount Ætna stands on the east, in one of these angles. The coast is very rocky and romantic; the interior is a combination of rugged mountains and the loveliest plains; and the soil is so fertile in corn as well as other productions, that Sicily has been called the granary of Europe. The inhabitants are badly governed, and there is great poverty among them; but movements have taken place of late years that indicate advancement; and the Sicilians, meantime, have all those helps to endurance (perhaps too many) which result from sprightliness of character, united with complexional indolence. They are good-natured but irritable; have more independence of spirit than their neighbours the Neapolitans; and are still a pastoral people as of old, making the most of their valleys and their Mount Ætna; not by activity, but by pipe and song, and superstition.

With this link of their newest and their oldest history we shall begin our Sicilian memories from the beginning.

Did Ætna exist before the human race? Was it, for ages, a great lonely earth-monster, sitting by the sea with his rugged woody shoulders and ghastly crown; now silent and quiet for centuries, like a basking giant; now roaring to the antediluvian skies; vomiting forth fire and smoke; drivelling with lava; then silent again as before; alternately destroying and nourishing the transitory races of analogous gigantic creatures, mammoths, and mastodons, which preceded nobler humanity? Was it produced all at once by some tremendous burst of earth and ocean?—some convulsion, of which the like has never since been known,—perhaps with all Sicily hanging at its root: or did it grow, like other earthly productions, by its own energies and the accumulations of time? In whatever way it originated, and however the huge wonder may have behaved itself at any period, quietly or tremendously, nobody can doubt that the creature is a benevolent creature,—one of the securities of the peaceful and profitable existence of the far greater and more mysterious creature rolling in the shape of an orb round the sun in midst of its countless like, and carrying us all along with it in our respective busy inattentions. We do not presume to inquire how the necessity for any such evil mode of good arose. Suffice for us, that the evil itself works to a good purpose; that the earth, apparently, could not exist without it; that Nature has adorned it with beauty which is another good, with fertility which is another, with grandeur which is another, elevating the mind; and that if human beings prefer risking its neighbourhood with all its occasional calamities, to going and living elsewhere, those calamities are not of its own willing, nor of any unavoidable necessity, nor perhaps will exist always. Suppose Ætna should some day again be left to its solitude, and people resolve to be burnt and buried alive no longer? What a pilgrimage would the mountain be then! What a thought for the poet and the philosopher! What a visit for those who take delight in the borders of fear and terror, and who would love to interrogate Nature the more for the loneliness of her sanctuary!

The first modes of organized life which make their appearance in these remotest ages of Sicily, are of course fabulous modes,—fabulous, but like all fables, symbolical of truth; and what is better than mere truth, of truths poetical. The mythic portion of the history of Sicily is like its region—small, rich, lovely, and terrible. It may be said to consist wholly of the stories of Typhoeus, of Polyphemus and the Cyclopes, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Sirens, of the Rape of Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Acis and Galatea—names, which have become music in the ears of mankind.

What! is Typhoeus a musical name? and Polyphemus and the Cyclopes? Yes, of the grander sort organ-like; the bass for the treble of the Sirens; the gloom and terror, along which floats away, through vine and almond, the lovely murmur of Alpheus and Arethusa.

We shall not explain away these beautiful fables into allegory, physics, or any other kind of ungrateful and half-witted prose. They may have had the dullest sources, for aught we know to the contrary, as beautiful streams may have their fountains in the dullest places, or delightful children unaccountably issue from the dullest progenitors; but there they were of old, in Sicily; and here they are among us to this day; in poets’ books; in painters’ colours; among the delights of every cultivated mind; true as anything else that is known by its effects; spiritual creatures, living and breathing in the enchanted regions of the imagination. The poets took them in hand from infancy, and made them the real and immortal things they are. We shall not deny their analogy with beautiful or grand operations in Nature, as long as the mystery and poetry of those operations are kept in mind. Typhoeus, or Typhon, for instance, may, if the etymologist pleases, be the Tifoon, or Dreadful Wind, of the Eastern seas; or he may be the smoking of Mount Ætna (from t?f? to smoke); or he may comprehend both meanings in one word, derived from some primitive root; for as long as his cause remains a secret, and his effect is poetical, so long the spirit of the mystery may be embodied as imagination pleases. Suffice for us, that the thing is there, somehow. All that we object to in the natural or supernatural historians of such persons, is their stopping at mechanical and prosaical causes, and thinking they settle anything.

This said personage Typhoeus is, it must be owned, a tremendous fellow to begin stories with of beautiful Sicily; to put at the head of creations containing so much loveliness. He was a monster of monsters, brought forward by Earth as a last desperate resource in the quarrel of her Giants with the Gods. His stature reached the sky; he had a hundred dragons’ heads, vomiting flames; and when it pleased him to express his dissatisfaction, there issued from these heads the roaring and shrieking of a hundred different animals! Jupiter had as hard a task to conquer him as Amadis had with the Endriago.[1] A good report of the fight is to be found in Hesiod. Heaven trembled, and earth groaned, and ocean flashed with a ghastly radiance, as they lightened and thundered at one another. The king of the gods at length collected all his deity for one tremendous effort, and leaping upon his antagonist with his whole armoury of thunders, made his foaming mouth hiss in the blaze; the mountain hollows flashed fainter where he lay smitten; the rocks dropped about him like melted lead; and Jupiter tore up the whole island of Sicily, and flung it upon him, by way of detainer for ever. One promontory acted as a presser on one hand; another on another; a third on his legs; and the crater of Mount Ætna was left him for a spiracle. There he lay in the time of Ovid, making the cities tremble as he turned; and there he lies still, for all that Brydone, or Smyth, or even Monsieur Gourbillon has proved to the contrary; though scepticism has attained to such a pitch in that quarter, that the only danger in earthquakes is now attributed to people’s not being quick enough with displaying the veil of Saint Agatha.

Compared with this cloud-capped enormity, our old friend Polyphemus (Many-voice), the ogre or Fee-Faw-Fum of antiquity, becomes a human being. He and his one-eyed Cyclopes (Round-eyes), are the primitive inhabitants of Sicily, before men ploughed and reaped. They kept sheep and goats, and had an eye to business in the cannibal line; though what it was that gave them their name, is not determined; nor is it necessary to trouble the reader with the controversies on that point. Very huge fellows they were, beating Brobdingnagians to nothing. Homer describes Polyphemus as looking like a “woody hill.” He kept Ulysses and his companions in his cave to eat them, just as his Oriental counterpart did Sinbad, or as the giants of our childhood proposed to feast on Jack; and when Ulysses put out the eye of roaring Many-voice with a firebrand, and got off to sea, the blind monster sent some rocks after the ship, which remain stuck on the coast to this day.

And yet, by the magic of love and sympathy, even Polyphemus has been rendered pathetic. Theocritus made him so with his poetry; and Handel did as much for him in his musical version of the story, especially in those exquisite caressing passages between Acis and Galatea, (“The flocks shall leave the mountains,” &c.,) which might fill the most amiable rival with torment. Acis (Acuteness) and Galatea (Milky)—(we like this fairy-tale restitution of the meanings of ancient names, the example of which was at first set, we believe, by Mr. Keightley)—forgot themselves, however, too far, when they made love before the very eyes of the rival;—not the only instance, we fear, of similar provocation given by the vanity of happy lovers. We regret this ill-breeding the more on account of the monster’s hopelessness; and considering the little patience that was to be expected of him, almost pardon the rock which he sent on their ecstatic heads.Gay’s verses on this occasion would not have been unworthy of Theocritus:—

Acis and Galatea. [Duet.]
The flocks shall leave the mountains,
The woods the turtle-dove,
The nymphs forsake the fountains,
Ere I forsake my love.
Polyphemus. [Solo.]
Torture! fury! rage! despair!
I cannot, cannot, cannot bear.
Acis and Galatea.
Not showers to larks so pleasing,
Nor sunshine to the bee;
Not sleep to toil so easing,
As those dear smiles to me.
Polyphemus hurls the rock.
Fly swift, thou massy ruin, fly:
Die, presumptuous Acis, die.

Scylla and Charybdis, or Scylla and Glaucus rather, is a far more appalling story of jealousy. Scylla properly belongs to the opposite coast of Naples; but as she and her fellow-monster Charybdis are usually named together, and the latter tenanted the Sicilian coast, and the strait between them was very narrow, she is not to be omitted in Sicilian fable. Charybdis (quasi Chalybdis, Hiding? though some derive it from two words signifying to “gape” and “absorb”) was a personage of a very unique sort, to wit, a female freebooter; who, having stolen the oxen of Hercules, was condemned to be a whirlpool, and suck ships into its gulf. Nevertheless she was a horror not to be compared with Scylla, though the latter was thought less dangerous. Mr. Keightley has so well told this story out of Homer, that we must repeat it in his words:—

“Having escaped the Sirens, and shunned the Wandering Rocks, which Circe told him lay beyond the mead of these songsters, Odysseus (Ulysses) came to the terrific Scylla and Charybdis, between which the goddess had informed him his course lay. She said he would come to two lofty cliffs opposite each other, between which he must pass. One of these cliffs towers to such a height, that its summit is for ever enveloped in clouds; and no man, even if he had twenty hands and as many feet, could ascend it. In the middle of this cliff, she says, is a cave facing the west, but so high, that a man in a ship passing under it could not shoot up to it with a bow. In this den dwells Scylla (Bitch), whose voice sounds like that of a young whelp: she had twelve feet and six long necks, with a terrific head, and three rows of close-set teeth on each. Evermore she stretches out these necks and catches the porpoises, sea-dogs, and other large animals of the sea, which swim by, and out of every ship that passes each mouth takes a man.

“The opposite rock, the goddess informs him, is much lower, for a man could shoot over it. A wild fig-tree grows on it, stretching his branches down to the water: but beneath, ‘divine Charybdis’ three times each day absorbs and regorges the dark water. It is much more dangerous, she adds, to pass Charybdis than Scylla.

“As Odysseus sailed by, Scylla took six of his crew; and when, after he had lost his ship and companions, he was carried by wind and wave, as he floated on a part of the wreck, between the monsters, the mast by which he supported himself was sucked in by Charybdis. He held by the fig-tree, till it was thrown out again, and resumed his voyage.”—Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. Sec. edit., p. 271.

It has been thought by some, that by the word Scylla is meant the bitch of the sea-dog, or seal—a creature often found on this coast. Be this as it may (and the seal having a more human look than the dog, might suggest a more frightful image, to say nothing of its being more appropriate to the water), who was Scylla? and how came she to be this tremendous monster? From the jealousy of Circe. Scylla was originally a beautiful maiden, fond of the company of the sea-nymphs; and Glaucus (Sea-green), a god of the sea, was in love with her. She did not like him; and Glaucus applied to Circe for help, from her skill in magic. Circe fell in love with the lover, and being enraged with the attractions that made him refuse her, poisoned the water in which Scylla bathed. The result was the conversion of the beauty’s lower limbs into a set of barking dogs. The dogs became part of her; and when in her horror she thought to drive them back, she found herself “hauling” them along—one creature, says Ovid, hauling many:

Quos fugit, attrahit una.—Metam. xiv. v. 63.

This is very dreadful. Yet Homer’s creature is more so. Scylla’s proceedings, in the Odyssey, exactly resemble the accounts which mariners have given of a huge sea-polypus—a cousin of the kraken, or sea-serpent—who thrusts its gigantic feelers over the deck of an unsuspecting ship, and carries off seamen. There is a picture of it in one of the editions of Buffon. But the dog-like barking, and the terrific head and teeth, to which the imagination gives something of a human aspect, leave the advantage of the horrible still on the side of the poet.

An old English poet, Lodge, at a time when our earliest dramatists, who were university men, had set the example of a love of classical fable, wrote a poem on Glaucus and Scylla, in which there are passages of the loveliest beauty; though it was spoilt, as a whole, with conceits. In describing the nymph’s yellow hair, he makes use of a Sicilian image, very fit for our Blue Jar:—

Her hair, not truss’d, but scatter’d on her brow,
Surpassing Hybla’s honey.

We are to suppose it lying in sunny flakes. Lodge, though he was an Oxford man, or perhaps for that reason, has curiously mixed up Paganism and Christianity in Glaucus’s complaint of his mistress: but the second verse is fine, and the last truly lover-like and touching:—

Alas, sweet nymphs, my godhead’s all in vain;
For why? this breast includes immortal pain.
Scylla hath eyes, but two sweet eyes hath Scylla;
Scylla hath hands, fair hands, but coy in touching:
Scylla in wit surpasseth grave Sibylla:

(This is the Sibyl of Æneas)

Scylla hath words, but words well-stored with grutching;
Scylla, a saint in look, no saint in scorning,
Look saint-like, Scylla, lest I die with mourning.

The modulation and antithetical turn of these verses will remind the reader not only of Lodge’s friends, Peele and Greene, who had both a fine ear for music, but of Shakspeare’s first production, Venus and Adonis, in which he exhibited that fondness for classical fable which never forsook him. It is remarkable indeed, that the old English poets, and those true successors of theirs whom we have seen in our own time, have been almost more Greek in this respect than the Greeks themselves. Spenser was half made up of it; Milton could not help introducing it in Paradise Lost; and it was rescued from the degradation it underwent in the French school of poetry, with its cant about the “Paphian bower,” and its identifications of Venus and Chloe, by the inspired Muse of Keats. The young English poet has told the present story in his Endymion, though not in his best manner, except where he speaks of Circe; of the inflictions of whose sorcery he gives a scene of the finest and most appalling description:—

A sight too fearful for the feel of fear.—
In thicket hid—

(It is Glaucus who is speaking, and whom the poet represents as having been beguiled into Circe’s love)—

In thicket hid I curs’d the haggard scene—
The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen,
Seated upon an uptorn forest root,
And all around her shapes, wizard and brute,
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpenting.
Fierce, wan,
And tyrannizing was the lady’s look,
As over them a gnarled staff she shook.

The look of a sorceress, full of bad passions, was never painted more strongly than in the meeting of those epithets, “wan and tyrannizing;” and the word “lady” makes the fierceness more shocking.

But Keats had not the heart to make the love-part of the story end unhappily, much less to endure the brutification of the lovely limbs of Scylla. He revived her to be put into a Lovers’ Elysium. So, in telling the story of Alpheus and Arethusa, he will not let Arethusa reject Alpheus willingly. He makes her lament the necessity as one of the train of Diana; and leaves us to conclude that the lovers became happy. It would hardly be necessary to tell any reader (only it is as pleasant to repeat these stories, as it is to hear beautiful old airs) that Alpheus was a river-god of Greece, who fell in love with the wood-nymph Arethuse; and that the latter, praying for help to Diana, was converted into a stream, and pursued under land and sea by the other enamoured water, as far as the island of Sicily, where the streams became united. The strangeness of the adventure, and the beauty of the names, have made everybody in love with the story. All the world knows how “divine Alpheus,” as Milton says—

Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse;

or rather they all knew the fact; but the how, or manner of it, was a puzzle, till Keats related the adventure as it was witnessed by Endymion in a grotto under the sea. The lover of the Moon suddenly heard strange distant echoes, which seemed—

The ghosts, the dying swells
Of noises far away—hist!—Hereupon
He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone
Came louder; and behold! there, as he lay,
On either side out-gush’d, with misty spray,
A copious spring; and both together dash’d
Swift, mad, fantastic round the rocks, and lash’d
Among the conchs and shells of the lofty grot,
Leaving a trickling dew.

(These are the two living streams, one in pursuit of the other.)

At last they shot
Down from the ceiling’s height, pouring a noise
As of some breathless racers, whose hopes poise
Upon the last few steps, and with spent force
Along the ground they took a winding course.
Endymion follow’d, for it seem’d that one
Ever pursued, the other strove to shun.

After a while, he hears a whispering dialogue, in which the female voice shows plainly enough, that the speaker would stay if she might; but suddenly the severe face of Diana is before her, and in an instant

Fell
Those two sad streams adown a fearful dell;

and Endymion puts up a prayer for their escape.

When the writer of the present book was in Italy, he saw on a mantelpiece a card inscribed, Le Marquis de Retuse. This was the Frenchified denomination of a Sicilian nobleman, who, strangely combining Greek and Gothic in his title, was no less a personage than the Marquis of Arethusa! He was proprietor of the spot where the fountain exists under its old name, though, according to travellers, deplorably altered; for it has become, says one of them, the public “washtub!” It is the Syracusan laundry. Divers, he informs us, are the jokes cracked on the “nymphs” that now attend it. Some critics are of opinion, that such were the “only nymphs” that ever existed; and they are very merry over the fallen condition of the once exquisite Arethusa. Poor devils! taking pains to vulgarize their perceptions, and diminish the amount of grace and joy. As if Arethusa, like themselves, were at the mercy of a homely association; or all that had been written about her was no better than their own account with the laundress! They flatter themselves. They leave her just where she was—everywhere, and immortal. It may not be very pleasant to look for a poetic fountain, and find a laundry; but the imagination is a poor one indeed, which is to be overwhelmed by it. The nymphs of minds like these could never have been very different from laundresses, if the truth were known; or, at the utmost, of little higher stock than such as laundresses and milliners are the making of.

There are two things, we confess, about the Sirens, that perplex us. In the first place, we never found anything particularly attractive in the songs attributed to them, not even by Homer; and secondly, we are too much in the secret of their deformity. We know that they were ghastly monsters, bird-harpies with women’s heads, and surrounded with human bones; and the consequence is, we can never find them in the least degree enticing. It is to no purpose that they combine stringed with wind instruments, and a voice crowning all. One of them may call herself Fair-Goddess (Leucothea), and another Fine-voice (Ligeia), and the third Maiden-face (Parthenope). We know all about them, and are not to be taken in. It would require a dream as horrible as Coleridge’s Pains of Sleep to bring our antipathy into any communication with them—to make us walk in our sleep towards their quarter:—

Desire with loathing strangely mix’d,
On wild and hateful objects fix’d;
Fantastic passions, maddening brawl,
And shame and terror over all.

When the modern poets turned the Sirens into mermaids, they vastly improved the breed. A woman, we grant, who is half a fish, is not a desideratum; but she is better than a great human-faced bird hopping about; and besides, the conformation of the creatures being thus altered, we are not so sure they will do us harm, especially as the poets treat them with comparative respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The names above mentioned acquire a double elegance in the adjurations of the Spirit in Comus:—

By Thetis’ tinsel-slipper’d feet,
And the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia’s golden comb,
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks,
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.

These alluring locks come home to us. We have seen such at our elbows, and can hear the comb passing through them.

Spenser increased the number of the Sirens to five, and expressly designated them as mermaids:—

And now they nigh approached to the stead
Whereas those mermaids dwelt. It was a still
And calmy bay, on th’ one side sheltered
With the broad shadow of an hoary hill;
On th’ other side an high rock towered still,
That ’twixt them both a pleasant port they made,
And did like an half theatre fulfil.
There those five sisters had continual trade,
And used to bathe themselves in that deceiptful shade.
—Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 12.

This line is so soft and gently drawn out, and the place so sweet and natural, that when Sirens like these begin to sing, we really feel in danger. We do not wonder that the poet’s hero desired his boatman to

Row easily,
And let him hear some part of their rare melody.

We have kept the most beautiful of the Sicilian mythic stories to conclude with: for such, doubtless, is the Rape of Proserpine. It is full of the most striking contrasts of grandeur and beauty. Both heaven and hell are in it—the freshest vernal airs, with the depths of Tartarus; and the hearts of a mother and daughter beat through all. It is a tale at once of the wildest preternaturalism and the most familiar domestic tenderness. The daughter of Ceres is gathering flowers, with other damsels of her own age, in the Vale of Enna, intent upon nothing but seeing who shall get the finest. Suddenly, in the midst of the violets and jonquils, there is an earthquake: a noise is heard like the coming of a thousand chariots; the earth bursts open; and a rapid, majestic figure appears, like a swarthy Jupiter, who, sweeping by Proserpine, whirls her away with him into his car, and prepares to rush down through another opening. Of all her attendants, the nymph Cyane alone has the courage to bid him stop, and ask him why he dares take away the daughter of Ceres. He makes no answer, but, knitting his brows like thunderbolts, smites the fountain over which she presided with his iron mace, and dashes down through it with his prey. It is the King of Hell himself, tired of celibacy, and resolved to have the fairest creature on earth for his wife.

The cries of Proserpine become fainter as the earth closes over them; but they have been heard by Ceres herself, who comes, with all the speed of a divine being, to see what is the matter. She can discern nothing; the tranquillity of the scene is restored; Cyane has melted away in tears. The goddess seeks everywhere in vain. She travels by day and by night, lit by two flaming pines from Mount Ætna. At length she learns who has got her child; and, by the intervention of Jupiter, Proserpine is allowed to come to earth and see her. The mother and daughter are half drowned in tears, half absorbed in delight, and Jupiter would prevent their separation, but is not able; for Proserpine has eaten of a fatal fruit, compulsory of her continuance with Pluto; and all that can be done, is to stipulate for her being half a year with her mother, on condition of her being a good wife during the other half. Ceres makes a virtue of the necessity, seeing that her daughter is married to the brother of Jove; and Proserpine is content to divide the throne of Tartarus, and walk in gardens of her own, splendid, though subterraneous.

The ancient poets made these gardens consist of all the flowers which she had been accustomed to gather in Sicily; but modern imagination, which (with leave be it said) is still finer than theirs, and sees beauty beyond its ordinary manifestation in the fitness of things, and in the balance of good and evil, has told us, through the inspired medium of Spenser, that the garden was such a garden as might have been expected from “the grandeur of the glooms” in those lower regions:—

There mournful cypress grew in greatest store,
And trees of bitter gall, and ebon sad,
Deep-sleeping poppy, and black hellebore,
Cold coloquintida, and tetra mad,
Mortal samnitis, and cicuta bad,
With which the unjust Athenians made to die
Wise Socrates, who thereof quaffing glad
Pour’d out his life and last philosophy
To the fair Critias, his dearest belamy.
The Garden of ProsÈrpina this hight;
And in the midst thereof a silver seat,
With a thick arbour goodly overdight,
In which she often used from open heat
Herself to shroud, and pleasures to entreat;
Next thereunto did grow a goodly tree,
With branches broad dispread, and body great,
Clothed with leaves, that none the fruit might see,
And loaden all with fruit as thick as it might be.
Their fruit were golden apples, glistering bright.
—Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 7.

Here we see, that Proserpine enjoyed herself in the lower regions, though among flowers of a different kind from those to which she had been accustomed. She became used to the place, and found pleasures even in Tartarus. And reasonably. First, because she needed them; and in the second place, because she knew there was good as well as evil there, and that the evil itself contained good. The hemlock was “bad,” inasmuch as it killed Socrates, but it was good, also, for many a medicinal cup. “Deep-sleeping poppy” was a very kindly fellow, if properly treated; and all the flowers, after their kind, were full of beauty. Flowers cannot help being beautiful. Then there was the Silver Seat and the Golden Tree; and it is manifest, that the summer sun used to come there through some unknown ravine, to say nothing of Wordsworth’s

Calm pleasures and majestic pains.

We do not, to be sure, see what good Tantalus’s eternal thirst could have been to him, or the everlasting wheel to Ixion; but, probably, on coming up to those gentlemen, we should have found they were visions, put there to make us “snatch a fearful joy” at thinking we were not among them in propri personÂ.

And so we take leave of the beautiful ancient fables of Sicily, having found honey for our Jar even in the fields of Pluto.