MISCELLANEOUS FEELINGS RESPECTING SICILY, ITS MUSIC, ITS RELIGION, AND ITS MODERN POETRY.

Time flies, and friends must part. In closing our Blue Jar, a rosy light seems to come over it, at once beautiful and melancholy; for terminations are farewells, and farewells remind us of evenings, and of the divine lines of the poet:—

Era giÀ l’ ora, che volge ’l desio
A’ naviganti, e intenerisce ’l cuore
Lo dÌ ch’ an detto a’ dolci amici A Dio:
E che lo nuovo peregrin d’ amore
Punge, se ode squilla di lontano,
Che paia ’l giorno pianger che si muore.
’Twas now the hour, when love of home melts through
Men’s hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portray
The moment when they bade sweet friends adieu;
And the new pilgrim now, on his lone way,
Thrills as he hears the distant vesper bell,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day.

Divine, indeed, are those lines of Dante. Why didn’t he write all such, instead of employing two volumes out of three, to show us how much less he cared to be divine than infernal? Was it absolutely necessary for him to have so much black ground for his diamonds?

And another poet who took to the black, or rather the burlesque, side of things, how could he write so beautifully on the same theme, and resist giving us whole poems as tender and confiding, to assist in making the world happy? The stanza respecting the Ave Maria is surely the best in Don Juan:—

Ave Maria! blessed be the hour!
The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft
Have felt the moment in its fullest power
Sink o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft,
And not a breath crept through the rosy air,
And yet the forest leaves seemed stirr’d with prayer.

Not, we beg leave to say, that we are Roman Catholic, either in our creed or our form of worship; though we should be not a little inclined to become such, did the creed contain nothing harsher or less just than the adoration of maternity. We have been taught to be too catholic in the true sense of the word (Universal) to wish for any ultimate form of Christianity, except that which shall drop all the perplexing thorns through which it has grown, and let the odour of its flower be recognised in its spotless force without one infernal embitterment.

But it will be said that there are infernal embitterments even in the sweetest forms of things, whether we will have them or no—massacres in bee-hives, Dantes among the greatest poets, Sicilian Vespers. Think of those, it will be said. Think of the horrible massacre known by the name of the “Sicilian Vespers.” Think of the day in your honeyed, HyblÆan island, when the same hour which

Sinks o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,with not a breath in its rosy air, and with the leaves of its trees moving as if they were lips of adoring silence, was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children; ay, babes at the breast, and mothers innocent as the object of vesper worship. Was there nothing infernal in that? Is there nothing hellish, and of everlasting embitterment in the recollection?

No. And again a loud and happy No, of everlasting sweetness.

The infernal and the everlasting bitter imply the same things. There is nothing infernal that has a limit; therefore there is nothing infernal in nature. Look round, and show it if you can. Nature will have no unlimited pain. The sufferer swoons, or dies, or endures; but the limit comes. Death itself is but the dissolution of compounds that have either been disordered or worn out, and therefore cannot continue pleasantly to co-exist. Horrible was this Sicilian massacre; horrible and mad; one of the wildest reactions against wickedness in human history. The French masters of the island had grown mad with power and debauchery, and the islanders grew mad with revenge. It was the story in little of the French Revolution; not the Revolution of the Three Days, truly deserving the title of Glorious for its Christian forbearance; but the old, untaught, delirious, Robespierre Revolution. Dreadful is it to think of the vesper bell ringing to that soft worship of the mother of Jesus, and then of thousands of daggers, at the signal, leaping out of the bosoms of the worshippers, and plunging into the heart of every foreigner present, man, woman, and child. But there came an end; soon to the body; sooner or later, to the mind. The dead were buried; the French government in the island was expelled, and a better brought in. The evil perished, good came out of it; and myriads of vespers have taken place since then, but not one like that. Yes, myriads of vespers—a vesper every day, ever since—from the year 1282 to this present 1848,—all gentle, all secure from the like misery, all more or less worthy of the beautiful description of the poet. If the massacre called the Sicilian Vespers had been infernal, it would have been going on now! and nature has not made such hellish enormities possible. The only durability to which she tends is a happy one. Her shortest lives (generally speaking) are her least healthy; her greatest longevities are those of healthy serenity. Supposing the earth to be animated (as some have thought it), we cannot conceive it to be unhappy, rolling, as it has done for ages, round the sun, with a swiftness like the blood in the veins of childhood. Eternity of existence is inconceivable on any ground of analogy, except as identical with healthy prevalence; and healthy prevalence, with sensation, is inconceivable apart from sensations of pleasure.

Gone long ago are the bad Sicilian Vespers; but the good Sicilian Vespers, the beautiful Sicilian music, the beautiful Sicilian poetry, these remain; and, as if in sweet scorn of the catastrophe, they are particularly famous for their gentleness. To be told that a Sicilian air is about to be sung, is to be prepared to hear something especially sweet and soft. Every Protestant as well as Roman Catholic lover of music knows the Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn; and is a Catholic, if not a Roman worshipper, while he sings it. Fancy it rising at a distance out of the white-sailed boat in the darkling blue waters, when the sun has just gone down, and the rock on the woody promontory above the chapel, whose bell gave the notice, is touched with rose-colour. Nay, fancy you forget all this, and think only of the honest simple mariners singing this hymn, at the moment when their wives and children are repeating the spirit of it on shore, and all Italy is doing the same:

O sanctissima, O purissima,
Dulcis Virgo Maria!
Mater amata, intemerata,
Ora pro nobis!

O most holy, O most spotless,
Mary, Virgin glorious!
Mother dearest, maiden clearest—
Oh, we pray thee, pray for us.

The sweetest of English poets could not resist echoing this kind of evening music in a strain of his own; but though he did it in the course of an invocation, it is rather a description than a prayer. It is, however, very Sicilian:—

(Observe the various yet bell-like intonation of that last verse, and the analogous feeling in the repetition of the rhyme.)

And at evening evermore,
In a chapel on the shore,
Shall the chanters, sad and saintly,
Yellow tapers burning faintly,
Doleful masses chant for thee,
Miserere, Domine!

Hark! the cadence dies away
On the yellow moonlight sea:
The boatmen rest their oars, and say,
Miserere, Domine!

The tapers are yellow in the chapel, and the moonlight yellow out of doors—one of those sympathies of colour which are often finer than contrast.

Coleridge was so fond of sweet sounds, that he makes one of the characters in this play exclaim,—

If the bad spirit retain’d his angel’s voice,
Hell scarce were hell.

The Pagans of old were of the same opinion, for they made Pluto break his inexorable laws at the sound of the harp of Orpheus, his eyes, in spite of themselves, being forced to shed “iron tears,” as Milton finely calls them. The notes, as the poet says,

Drew iron tears down Pluto’s cheek,
And made Hell grant what Love did seek.

“The grim king of the ghosts” would not have shed them if he could have helped it. So Moschus, in his Elegy on the Death of Bion, expresses his opinion that if his deceased friend would sing a pastoral to the Queen of Pluto, “something Sicilian” as he emphatically calls it (S???????? t?), she could not have the heart to deny his return to earth. One should like to know the hymns which the Pagans actually sung to Proserpina and her mother Ceres, and how far they coincided, perhaps in some instances were identical, with strains now sung in the Catholic churches. Some of the oldest chants are supposed to be of Greek origin; and indeed it would be marvellous if all the ancient music had been swept away, considering how many ceremonies, vestments, odours, processions, churches themselves, and, to say the truth, opinions, were retained by the new creed from the old—wisely in many instances, most curiously in all. Very naturally, too; for the knees are the same knees with which all human beings kneel, Pagan or Christian; and the sky is the same to which they look up, whether inhabited by saints or goddesses. Nor is there anything “blasphemous” (as zealous Protestants are too quick to assert) in the Roman Catholic tendency to use the same kind of language towards the one, as was held and hymned towards the other; for blasphemy signifies what is injurious to the character of the divinity, and nothing is injurious to it except the attribution of injustice and cruelty. If theological opinions, of whatever creed, offended in nothing worse than an excess of zeal towards the beauty of the maternal character, or in behalf of the supposition that the spirits of the good and pious interested themselves in our welfare, the human heart would be little disposed to quarrel with them, in times even more enlightened than the present. There is a couplet extant in Italy, remarkable for being both Italian and Latin. It might have been addressed by a Pagan of the Lower Roman Empire, to the goddess Proserpina, when she was the guardian angel of Sicily, or to the Virgin Mary, by a modern Roman Catholic; and we find nothing horrible in this. On the contrary, it seems to fuse the two eras gently and tenderly together, by the same affecting link of human want and natural devotion. This is the couplet:—

In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.
In sudden storms, and when the billows blind,
Thee I invoke, star sweet to human kind!

When we spoke, in a former chapter, of the beautiful Sicilian story of Proserpina, we forgot (a very ungrateful piece of forgetfulness) to add, that one of the loveliest tributes ever paid to it by genius, is the Ratto di Proserpina—Winter’s opera so called. There is every charm of the subject in it,—the awfulness of the greater gods, the genial maternity of Ceres, the tender memory of her daughter, the cordial re-assurances given her by Mercury, the golden-age dances of the shepherds. What smile of encouragement ever surpassed that of the strain on the words Cerere tornerÀ, in the divine trio, Mi lasci, O madre amata? What passionate mixture of delight and melancholy, the world-famous duet of Vaghi colli? Why does not some publisher make an Elegant Extracts of such music from composers that will survive all fashion, and have comments written upon them, like those on poets? What would we not give to see such an edition of the finest airs of all the great inventive melodists, the Pergoleses and Paisiellos and their satellites, and all the inventive harmonists too, the Bachs, Corellis, and Beethovens, each with variorum notes from the best critics, and loving indications of the beauties of particular passages? Publications of this kind are yet wanting, to the honour, and glory, and thorough household companionship of the art of music: and it is a pity somebody does not take the opportunity of setting about them, when there are critics, both in and out of the profession, qualified to do them justice.[17]

We cannot close our Jar better than with a taste of “the modern Theocritus,” Giovanni Meli, who deserves his title, and whose very name, as we said before, signifies honey. Meli is honey, both in modern Sicilian and in ancient Greek; and the poet may be a descendant of the Greek possessors of the island; nay (to carry the fancy out), possibly of Theocritus himself! Who is to prove, on the beautiful negative principle, that he was not?

Meli was an abbate at Palermo, a doctor of medicine, public professor of chemistry in the University there, and member of several academies. So are his titles set forth in the edition of his poems in seven volumes, which we have had the pleasure, since these chapters were first written, of picking up at a book-stall in Holborn. They are not very pastoral-sounding titles; yet the more knowledge the better, even for the shepherd; and the shepherd-poet turns it all to account, just as chemistry itself improves the field and the flowers. One of the friends whom Theocritus himself has immortalised, was a physician. We have it on the authority of a gentleman who knew the Abbate Meli, that he was as good a man as he was a charming poet. He seemed to live only (he says) to do good and to give pleasure: and he was as much beloved by the poor, as his company was in request among the prosperous. To say that Meli was to be of the party, was to give an evening assembly of friends its highest zest. His virtues were anything but narrow. He was temperate, but not ascetic. He balked no genial inspiration; was a modern Anacreon as well as Theocritus; evinced a liberal turn of mind in every respect, without offence; and could write hymns full of natural piety, as well as drinking and love songs. He was also a deeply read man, and a solid thinker. One of his longest poems is a banter upon the various assumptions of philosophy respecting the system of the world. Heartily do we wish it were in our power to give as good an account of the poems as of their titles; but though they have a glossary for the benefit of “the Italians,” we cannot yet boast such a knowledge of them as qualifies us to say much in evidence, beyond their general merits. These we can discern well enough, like glimmerings of nymphs and flocks among the trees; and very like Theocritus indeed is his genius; very true to nature and to manners, impulsive in its style, not afraid of colloquialisms and homely traits, but with an air of grace over all, and the right happy aroma of the subtle and the suggestive. The moment you open his first eclogue, you meet with a picture truly Theocritan. A herdsman asks a shepherdess if she has seen a cow of his which is missing, and he thus accosts her:—

O Pasturedda, di li trizzi ad unna,
Chi fai pinnata di la manu manca,
Pri’ un t’ appighiari ssa facciuzza biunna.

“O shepherdess with the waving locks, who make a penthouse over your eyes with your left hand, for fear of embrowning your pretty face,” &c.

Meli was poor, till, doubtless, he thought himself rich on receiving a small pension from the late King Ferdinand; for which (says the author of an interesting article on the “Dialects and Literature of Southern Italy,” in the British Quarterly Review) “the poet expressed his gratitude in respectful, but not adulatory terms.”

The dialect of Sicily is remarkable for preferring close sounds to broad ones. It converts the Tuscan l’s into d’s, and its e’s and o’s into i’s and u’s. Thus, “bella” becomes bedda; “padre,” patri; “mare,” mari; “sono,” sunnu; “colorito,” culuritu, &c. This is reversing the state of things in the days of Theocritus, when the Dorian inhabitants of Sicily were accused of doing nothing when they spoke but “yawn” and “gabble.”[18] But it is attributed to the Arabs, when they were masters of the island. It has, probably, been injurious to the cause of music, and hindered the Sicilians from producing as many fine composers as their Neapolitan neighbours. Thus much, lest the reader should start at the strange, though pretty, look of Meli’s Italian, the poet having wisely chosen to speak in the tongue of those, from whose natures and homes he copied.

The reader will see at once this leading difference between the Italian language and the Sicilian form of it, in the following opening stanzas of one of Meli’s canzonets, accompanied by a Tuscan version from the pen of Professor Rosini:—

So, in the beginning of Eclogue the Second, a countryman, who seems fatigued, accosts another who is sitting at his door, and asks him whether his dogs are gentle, and he may venture to come in. The good householder begs him to stand a minute or two on the rock-stone, and he will call the dogs off. “Come here, Scamper,” says he, “thumping the ground there with your tail. Quiet, Wasp, quiet! Down, Lion! Now you can come in, and rest yourself; and I hope you’ll stop and take something. I have a new cheese at your service, and a piping hot loaf, just out of the oven, made of capital bread,” &c.

The graphic animation of this exordium, particularly the passage we have marked in Italics, is quite in the spirit of Theocritus. But we are obliged to stop short in it for want of understanding the next sentence.

Theocritus could satirize a king. In the following passage in his Winter Idyll, Meli is perhaps covertly sticking his sly pen into a monk. A good old grand-sire is proposing to have what we should now call a Christmas dinner; and he consults his family as to what shall be the principal dish—what meat he shall kill:—

Ora È lu tempu,
Ch’unu di li domestici animali
Mora pri nui; ma mi dirriti: quali?
Lu voi, la vacca, l’asinu, la crapa
SÙ stati sempri a parti tuttu l’annu
Di li nostri travagghi; e na gran parti
Duvemu an iddi di li nostri beni;
Vi pari, chi sarria riconoscenza
Digna di nui, na tali ricompenza?
Ma lu porcu? lu porcu È statu chiddu,
Chi a li travagghi d’ autri ed a li nostri
E statu un ozziusu spettaturi;
Anzi abbusannu di li nostri curi;
Mai s’ È dignatu scotiri lu ciancu
Da lu fangusu lettu, a proprii pedi
Aspittannu lu cibbu, e cu arroganza
Nui sgrida di l’ insolita tardanza.
Chistu, chi nun conusci di la vita,
Chi li suli vantaggi, e all’ autri lassa
Li vuccuni chiÙ amari, comu tutti
Fussimu nati pri li soi piaciri;
Chi immersu tra la vili sua pigrizzia
Stirannusi da l’ unu e l’ autru latu
Di li suduri d’ autru s’ È ingrassatu;
Si: chistu mora, e ingrassi a nui: lu porcu,
Lu vili, lu putruni—
Si: l’ ingrassatu a costu d’ autru, mora.
Lettu giÀ lu prucessu; e proferuta,
Fra lu comuni applausu e la gioja,
La fatali sintenza; attapanciatu,
Strascinatu, attacatu, stramazzatu
FÙ lu porcu a l’ istanti; un gran cuteddu
Sprofundannusi dintra di la gula,
Ci ricerca lu cori, e ci disciogghi
Lu gruppu di la vita: orrendi grida,
Gemiti strepitusi, aria ed oricchi
Sfardanu e a li vicini, e a li luntani,
Ed anchi fannu sentiri a li stiddi
La grata nova di lu gran maceddu.
Saziu giÀ di la straggi lu cuteddu
Apri niscennu, spaziusa strata
A lu sangu, ed a l’ anima purcina;
L’ unu cadennu dintra lu tineddu,
Prometti sangunazzi; e l’ autra scappa,
E si disperdi in aria tra li venti,
O com’ È fama, passa ad abitari
Dintru lu corpu di un riccuni avaru,
GiacchÌ nun potti in terra ritruvari
ChiÙ vili e schiufusu munnizzaru.

“The bull, cow, donkey, and goat have all shared in the labours of the year, and assisted to keep us; so that to slaughter one of those would hardly be grateful. But the pig! What think you of the pig? He has been nothing but a lazy spectator—a fellow living on those labours; nay, an abuser of the care we take to keep him; for he scorns to stir from his muddy bed, expects his food to be laid at his feet, and even has the arrogance to cry out against us if we are not in a hurry. Nothing of life knows he but its luxuries; he leaves all his cares to us, as if we were born for nothing else but to heap him with enjoyments. Plunged in the vilest indolence, he contents himself with turning from one side to the other, and growing fat with the sweat of our brows. Oh, he must die by all means, and fatten us in our turn. The hog—the vile wretch—the poltroon—the corpulent selfish rascal—Death to him!

“No sooner said than done. The sentence is carried by acclamation. The pig is grappled with, dragged along, tied and bound, slain utterly, through and through. The huge knife, profoundly plunged into that gullet of his, goes to his heart amid horrid shrieks and dinning lamentations, which bear the news of the great deed to friends afar off, and to the very stars in heaven. Blood and soul, in a flood ample as the way made for them, follow the withdrawing blade,—l’ anima purcina, the spirit of pork; the blood into a hogshead, promising black puddings; the soul, either into the passing winds, or, as others think, into the body of some greedy chuff of a millionaire, that vilest and most repulsive of muck-worms.”

Meli’s first volume consists entirely of bucolics; the second of odes, sonnets, and canzonets; the third chiefly of verses in the manner of Berni, of satires, and dithyrambics; the fourth is occupied with a long Bernesque poem, called the Fairy Galanta, seemingly full of national as well as critical matters; the fifth and sixth with another on Don Quixote; and the seventh with elegies and fables. By this the reader may judge of the diversity of his genius, and its tendency to the sprightly; with which, however, a fund of thinking is always mixed up. He was evidently forced to conceal a great deal of deep thought and indignant sympathy in the garb of a jester. He did this, however, so well, expressed so much horror at the French revolution, and showed himself such a friend of all who had anything good in them, that in a country notorious for its arbitrary government, he was in favour with the court and aristocracy; and the circumstance, upon the whole, does them credit. Princes in Sicily are as common as country squires in England; but they have beautiful titles, and it is pleasant to read the list of his subscribers. Among them, here and there, is the name of an Englishman ludicrously set forth. Thus we have Sua Altezza Reale, &c., to wit:—

But we shall never have done playing this beautiful tune of a nomenclature.

The most agreeable specimen of Meli remains to be given. It is done to our hand by the reviewer before mentioned; and is done so well, that we are spared the difficulty of attempting it after him. We therefore give it in his own prose version. It luckily happens to be one that furnishes direct comparison with Meli’s prototype, and with the Latin and English followers of that original. Most readers of Pope will recollect a passage in which he describes a coquettish girl, who attracts her lover’s attention while pretending not to do so. But see how the natural thoughts originally suggested by Theocritus are subjected to the artificial manner. The principal idea you have, is not of the things, but of the words, and of their classical construction:—

Strephon. Me gentle Delia beckons from the plain,
Then, hid in shades, eludes her eager swain;
But feigns a laugh, to see me search around,
And by that laugh the willing fair is found.
Daphnis. The sprightly Sylvia trips along the green:
She runs, but hopes she does not run unseen:
While a kind glance at her pursuer flies,
How much at variance are her feet and eyes!
—Pope’s Pastorals.

Very epigrammatic that, and as unlike pastoral as the ball-rooms could desire! It was a horrible spoiling of Virgil:—

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.
—Eclog. iii. v. 64.

Thus translated by Dryden:—

My Phillis me with pelted apples plies;
Then tripping to the woods the wanton hies,
And wishes to be seen before she flies.

The Latin poet, too, in the flight of the damsel, added a charming idea to the one suggested by Theocritus; if, indeed, the Greek did not give the first hint of it himself—

????e? ?a? a???s? t?? a?p???? ? ??e???sta,
??? a??a? pa???e??ta, ?a? ?d? t? p?pp????de?.
—Idyll v., v. 88.

Literally, “Clearista pelts the goatherd with apples, as he goes by with his goats, and then hums something sweet.”

The goatherd here does not seem to stop. It is not certain that he and the damsel are acquainted; though he wishes to imply that she loves him. In case they are intimate, we are to suppose that she intends him to imagine her saying something very pleasant, though he is too far off to hear it; but in the other case, Virgil probably understood her to pretend that she had not pelted the apples at all; for which reason she falls to humming a tune, with an air of innocent indifference.

Be this as it may, nobody will deny the truly natural and Theocritan style in which the modern Sicilian has enlarged upon the old suggestion.

“Meli,” says the reviewer, “introduces a group of fishing-girls, chattering and joking, and telling of their loves, in the absence of their parents. Their very names, Pidda, Lidda, and Ridda, sound congenial to their condition. To an invitation to go and romp on the sands, Lidda prudishly replies that she is afraid of meeting some rude swain. Ridda also tells a story of having seen a fisherman concealed behind the rocks, who addresses her in an amorous song, which frightened her out of her senses. But Pidda, who is the eldest of the three, loses patience at this affected simplicity, and exclaims—

Eh via—muzzica cc stu jiditeddu;
E vaja franca, ca nni canuscemu;
Avemu tutti lu ’nnamurateddu.

Literally,—‘Come, poor innocents, bite my little finger; but let that pass; we know each other, and that each of us has her sweetheart.’

“Lidda, at last, casts off her shyness, and sings the following pretty ditty—

Quannu a Culicchia jeu vogghiu parrari,
Ca spissu spissu mi veni lu sfilu,
A la finestra mi mettu a filari;
Quann’ iddu passa, poi rumpu lu filu;
Cadi lu fusu; ed eu mettu a gridari,
‘Gnuri, pri caritÀ proitimilu.’
Iddu lu pigghia; mi metti a guardari;
Jeu mi nni vaju suppilu suppilu.

“When I wish to speak to my sweetheart, which occurs pretty often, I seat myself at the window to spin; and when he is passing underneath, I manage to break the thread; the spindle falls (out of the window), and I cry out, dolefully, ‘Oh, friend, be so kind as to pick it up for me!’ He does so, and looks at me, when I feel out of my wits for joy.”