Educated Sicilians have not a high opinion of the marionettes; it is sometimes difficult to induce them to talk on the subject. They say the marionettes are for the lower orders and accuse them of being responsible for many of the quarrels we read about in the newspapers. The people become so fascinated by the glamour of the romance in which they live night after night that they imitate in private life the chivalrous behaviour of the warriors they see fighting in the little theatres, and thus what may begin as a playful reminiscence of something in last night’s performance occasionally leads to a too accurate imitation of one of last night’s combats and perhaps ends in a fatal wound. This being like the accounts in English papers about boys becoming hooligans or running off to sea as stowaways in consequence of reading trashy literature, my desire to attend a performance of marionettes was increased, but I did not want to go alone for, in the event of a row, with knives, among the audience it would be better to be accompanied by a native.

I was in Palermo where I knew a few students, whose education was of course still incomplete, but they were cold on the subject and said that if they came with me we should probably be turned out for laughing. That was not what I wanted. It ought to have been possible to do something with the waiter or the porter, or even with the barber whom I met on the stairs and in the passages of the hotel when he came in the morning to shave the commercial travellers; but they all made difficulties—either they did not get away from their work till too late, or it was not a place for an Englishman or it was not safe. At home, of course, one does not go to the theatre with the waiter, but when in Sicily, though one does not perhaps do altogether as the Sicilians, one does not do as one does in England. I know a Palermitan barber with whom I should be proud to be seen walking in the Via Macqueda any day—that is, any day when his Sunday clothes were not in pawn—and there used to be a conduttore at my hotel who took me round to many of the sights in the town and who was a person of such distinguished manners that when with him I felt as though walking with a Knight-Templar in disguise—a disguise that had to be completed by my buying him a straw hat, otherwise he would have given us away by wearing his cap with “Albergo So-and-so” written all round it. These are the people who really know about the marionettes, for whenever they get an evening off they go. It seemed, however, that I had met with a conspiracy of obstruction. Palermo was treating me as a good woman treats her husband when he wants to do something of which she disapproves—there was no explanation or arguing; what I wanted was quietly made impossible. So I replied by treating Palermo as a good man treats his wife under such circumstances—I pretended to like it and waited till I could woo some less difficult city.

Catania provided what I wanted. There I knew a professor interested in folk-lore and kindred subjects to whom I confided my troubles. He laughed at me for my failures, assured me there was no danger and offered to take me. It was a Sunday evening. On arriving at the teatrino, he spoke to an attendant who showed us in by a side entrance and gave us the best places in the house, that is, we were near the only open window. The seating arrangements would have been condemned by the County Council; there were rows of benches across the floor and no passages, so that the people had to walk on the seats to get to their places; two galleries ran round the house very close together, an ordinary man could not have stood upright in the lower one, and it was difficult to move in the upper one in which we were, because the arches supporting the roof nearly blocked it in three places on each side. Presently a man came round and collected our money, twenty centimes each, the seats on the ground being fifteen.

There were four boys sitting on the stage, two at each side of the curtain, as they used to sit in Shakespeare’s theatre. Like the rest of the audience, these boys were of the class they call Facchini, that is, porters, coachmen, shop assistants, shoeblacks, water-sellers, and so on. It sometimes happens when travelling in Sicily that one has to spend half an hour, half a day, or it may be more, in company with one of these men. He is usually a delightful person, dignified, kind, courteous, full of fun and extremely friendly without being obtrusive. During conversation one may perhaps ask him whether he can read and write; he will probably reply that at school he was taught both. Presently one may ask him to read an advertisement, or to write down an address; he will probably reply that the light is bad, or that he is occupied with the luggage or the horses. The fact is that reading and writing are to him very much what the classics and the higher mathematics are to many an English gentleman—the subjects were included in his youthful studies, but as they have never been of the slightest use to him in earning his bread, he has forgotten all he ever learnt of them, and does not care to say so. The Sicilian, however, no matter how uneducated he may be, has an appetite for romance which must be gratified and, as it would give him some trouble to brush up his early accomplishments and stay at home reading Pulci and Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto, he prefers to follow the story of Carlo Magno and his paladins and the wars against the Saracens in the teatrino. Besides, no Sicilian man ever stays at home to do anything except to eat and sleep, and those are things he does out of doors as often as not; the houses are for the women, the men live in the street. It is as though in England the cab-drivers, railway porters and shop-boys were to spend evening after evening, month after month, looking on at a dramatized version of the Arcadia or The Faerie Queene.

Presently the curtain went up and disclosed two flaring gas-jets, each with a small screen in front of it about halfway down the stage; these were the footlights, and behind them was a back cloth representing a hall with a vista of columns. In the rather confined space between the footlights and the back cloth there came on a knight in armour. He stood motionless, supporting his forehead with his right fist, the back of his hand being outward.

“Is he crying?” I inquired.

“No,” replied the professor, “he is meditating; if he were crying the back of his hand would be against his face.”

He then dropped his fist and delivered a soliloquy, no doubt embodying the result of his meditation, after which he was joined by his twin brother. They conversed at length of battles and the King of Athens, of Adrianopoli and the Grand Turk, of princesses and of journeys by sea and land. The act of speaking induced a curious nervous complaint, useful because it showed which was the speaker; not only did he move his head and his right arm in a very natural and Sicilian manner, but he was constantly on the point of losing his balance, and only saved himself from falling by swinging one leg from the hip forwards or backwards as the case required. The listening knight stood firm till he had to speak, and then he was attacked by the complaint and the other became still.

At first I was puzzled as to the actual size of the figures and, starting with the idea that marionettes are always small, assumed that these were about three feet high; but, as the novelty wore off, I compared them with the audience and especially with the boys sitting in the corners and with various assistants of whom occasional glimpses could be caught at the wings; sometimes the hand of an operator appeared below the scenery and gave a hint, and gradually I came to the conclusion that the puppets could not be much smaller than life, if at all.

The operators must have been standing on a platform behind the back scene; the figures were able to pass one another, but never came forward more than a step or two, the footlights being in the way, and no doubt the operators could not reach further forward than they did. Each figure was worked by two iron rods, one to his head and one to his right hand, and several strings to which after a few minutes I paid no attention; perhaps their very obviousness saved them from notice. Any attempt to conceal them would have been a mistake, for what is the use of announcing a performance by marionettes and then pretending there is no mechanism? Besides, if one cannot accept a few conventions one had better stay away from the theatre altogether.

At the conclusion of the interview the knights followed one another off; and the buoyancy of their walk must be seen to be believed. The students have seen it and believe it so thoroughly that, when they meet one another in the Quattro Canti, they not unfrequently adopt it to the amusement of the bystanders. But the students make the mistake of slightly overdoing it. The marionettes often take a step or two quite naturally, and this, while adding to the absurdity (which cannot be the intention of the operator), also shows what is possible and makes one think that with a little extra trouble they might be made to walk always as smoothly as they move their heads and arms. It might, however, be necessary for them to have more strings, and this would make them more difficult to manipulate. In Sicily the marionettes who tell the story of the Paladins do not lay themselves out to be of a mechanism so ingenious that they shall appear to be alive; such illusion as they do produce, like the incompetent illustration to Shakespeare which Lamb preferred, is insufficient to cripple the imagination of the audience who are the more intimately touched by the romance of the story and by the voice of the speaker.

The back cloth was raised and we had before us a tranquil sea with two little islands sleeping under a sunset sky. Michele entered; he was a very splendid fellow in golden armour with draperies of purple and scarlet and white, and in his helmet a plume that nearly trailed on the ground. No playbill was provided, but none was wanted for Michele, he could not have been taken for anything but an operatic tenor of noble birth about to proceed against the Saracens. He first meditated and then soliloquized as he paced the sandy shore. The Princess of Bizerta in a flowing robe, covered with spangles, though not actually in sight, was not far off, imparting her griefs to the unsympathetic ocean. Spying the paladin, she strolled in his direction and spoke to him, but it was not an assignation; Michele, indeed, was obviously distressed at having his soliloquy interrupted; nevertheless, being a knight and a gentleman, he could but reply politely, and so they got into conversation. She told him who she was, which would not have been necessary if they had ever met before, then she told him of her unhappy plight, namely, that she was in the custody of an Arabian giant, and then she implored his assistance.

Michele was as unsympathetic as the ocean, his mind being full of Saracens; but before he had time to invent a plausible lie, the giant entered very suddenly. Physically he was not a particularly gigantic giant, being but three or four inches taller than Michele. If he had been much more, his head, which like that of all stage giants was undeveloped at the back, would have been hidden by the clouds that hung from the sky. His inches, however, were enough, for, in romance, height is given to a giant to symbolize power, and provided he is perceptibly taller than the hero, the audience accept him as a giant and a bully and one, moreover, who is, as a rule, nearing the end of his wicked career. Accordingly, when, in a voice of thunder, he demanded of Michele an immediate explanation—wanted to know how he dared address the princess—we all felt that he was putting himself in the wrong and that a catastrophe was imminent. Giants, that is, unscrupulous people in power, are too fond of assuming this attitude of unprovoked hostility and overbearing insolence, but they assume it once too often. Had he remembered Adam and Eve and the apple it might have occurred to him to inquire whether in the present case also the lady had not begun it. Giants, however, are for the most part unintelligent, not to say downright stupid people, and seldom have the sense to know how to use their power wisely—think of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, think of Polyphemus and Ulysses, think of the Inquisition and Galileo.

And then this giant made the mistake of losing his temper, and the further mistake of showing that he had lost it, and when giants do this, it means that they know they are in the wrong and don’t care. He insulted Michele most grossly, and the knight very properly drew his sword and went for him, and a terrible battle ensued throughout which realism was thrown to the waves. The combatants rose off the ground so high that Michele’s head and the giant’s head and shoulders were frequently lost in the clouds; and they clanked down again upon the sandy shore two or three feet in front of where they had stood—or behind, just as it happened; and their swords banged against their breast-plates and shields, proving that they were real metal and not merely tinsel; and they twirled round and round like beef on a roasting-jack, until at last Michele dealt the inevitable blow and the giant fell dead on the sand with a thud that jolted the coast, shook the islands, rippled across the sunset sky and restored animation to the lifeless form of the princess.

While the battle raged she had been standing by, unmoved, blankly glaring at the audience; and yet she must have known as well as we did that it was all about her. The probability is that her operator had temporarily moored her to a convenient peg in the back of the clouds while he worked the giant, and that at the conclusion of the duel he was free to return to her. She first looked round and then swooped hurriedly across the stage, three inches from the ground; before quite touching her protector, however, she swung halfway back again, then a little forwards, and finally, coming to anchor at a suitable distance, raised her two hands and, as though offering him a tray of refreshments, said—

“Grazie.”

He, pursuing his policy of frigid politeness, bowed in acknowledgment and followed her off the stage, leaving the corpse of the giant lying near the sea.

The back cloth was intentionally too long, so that the bottom was crumpled into folds which did well enough for little waves breaking on the shore. These waves now began to be agitated, and gradually rose gustily and advanced until they had covered the dead giant. It was a very good effect and avoided the banality of removing the body in sight of the audience; it looked as though the wind had risen and the depths had swallowed him. And this, as I afterwards was told, is what happens to the giant’s body in the story.

When the back cloth went up for the next scene the corpse was gone, and we were in The House of the Poor Man where Michele came to take refuge—from what I did not clearly understand, but if from the Princess of Bizerta he would have been better advised had he sought some other sanctuary; for no sooner had he performed his usual meditation and soliloquy and got himself to sit down on The Poor Man’s chair, where he instantly fell asleep with his head resting on his hand, than Her Highness entered and, addressing the audience confidentially, said that she loved him and intended to take this opportunity of giving him a kiss. She was, however, on the other side of the stage and had first to get to him, which she did so like a bird with a broken wing that he woke up before she reached him. She evidently did not consider that this added to her difficulties, but something else did.

A dispute had been simmering in the gallery just opposite where we sat, and now began to boil over, and threatened to swamp the play as the waves had submerged the Arabian giant. I thought perhaps we ought to leave, though it would have been impossible to pass out quickly, but the professor again assured me there was no danger; the management are accustomed to disturbances and know how to deal with them. So I sat still, and the proprietor came on the stage and stood in front of the gas-jets. He joined his hands as though in prayer and begged us to be quiet, saying that it was a complicated story and would require all our attention, that Michele would die on Wednesday, and he hoped we should not cause the speaker to die of starvation before that day by preventing him from earning his bread. The appearance of the proprietor among his puppets confirmed me in the conclusion I had arrived at as to their size; he may have been a small man, but he was about the size of the giant. He must have been a strong man, for, with all their armour, the figures must be very heavy.

The proprietor’s appeal went to all our hearts; silence was restored and the princess repeated to the warrior what we already knew—that she loved him and desired to kiss him. Something of the kind was exactly what poor Michele had been dreading. He turned to her and, almost choking with despair, said, “Misericordia,” not meaning to be hostile, but that the killing of her giant had already delayed him, and if he were to allow himself to yield to her blandishments he would be too late for the Saracens. No doubt he also had a vow. But when a lady has made up her mind on a matter of this kind, to thwart her is to invite disaster—think of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. Not that Michele thought of them, nor would it have influenced him if he had, for he was a paladin and incapable of fear; but he had the instincts of a gentleman, so, in spite of his anxiety to be off to the wars, he rose as well as he could, which was unsteadily, and staggered towards the princess who made every effort to meet him. In time they drew close enough to fall into one another’s arms, and the curtain descended as they were accomplishing not a passionate but a quite creditable embrace.

Then there was a scene between three kings with golden crowns who conversed at length of battles and the King of Athens, of Adrianopoli and the Grand Turk, of princesses and of journeys by sea and land. These were the things they spoke about as they stood together in the hall that had served for the first scene with a vista of columns behind, and when they had done they followed one another off. Then we also followed one another out of the theatre, not because of the Saracens, nor because we had any vow, nor because we feared a repetition of the uproar, nor even because of the coming-on disposition of the Princess of Bizerta, but because one open window was not enough.