I was not aware that any English writer had achieved the distinction of stamping his name upon a Sicilian street, or even—quainter, if lesser glory—upon a Sicilian inn. Yet at Calatafimi, a little town so obscure (despite its heroic Garibaldi memories) that it had not yet reached the picture-postcard stage, a town five miles from a railway station, up one of the steepest and stoniest roads of the island, I lodged at the Albergo Samuele Butler, and walked through the Via Samuele Butler. Yes, this peculiar immortality was reserved in a Catholic land for our British iconoclast. It was the Communal Council that resolved that the street leading from the Nuovo Mercato towards Segesta should “honour a great man’s memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation.” But the change in the name of the inn, which is in another street, must have been due to the personal initiative of the proprietors, in commemoration of their distinguished client. Meantime “the friendly English nation” cares even less about Samuel Butler of “Erewhon” than about Samuel Butler of “Hudibras,” if indeed it distinguishes one from the other.

Thus the super-subtle satirist, understanded not of the British people, paradoxical in death as in life, has left his highest reputation in the hearts of Sicilian peasants. The recluse of Clifford’s Inn, the stoic and cynic of civilisation, was hail fellow well met with the cottagers of Calatafimi.

It was only natural that the pundits of Trapani should welcome with complacent acquiescence the theory of “The Authoress of the Odyssey,” which was received in England with such raised eyebrows; for did not Butler locate the adventures of Ulysses as a voyage round Sicily, and identify Trapani as the place where the lady writer composed the Odyssey? Butler won equal gratitude in Italy by his exhumation and glorification of the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he identified with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. But these learned lucubrations of his would not have sufficed to enthrone Butler in the hearts of the simple. That was the reward of his Bohemian bonhomie. “He always remembered all about everybody,” says his friend, Mr. Festing Jones, “and asked how the potatoes were doing this year, and whether the grandchildren were growing up into fine boys and girls, and never forgot to inquire after the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York.”

“He called me la bella Maria,” the septuagenarian landlady of the Albergo Samuele Butler told me, as she showed me the photograph he had given her—the portrait of the melancholy tired thinker, whom she survives with undiminished vitality and fire. He was done in a group, too, with her and her husband, and altogether appeared to have found a rest from the torture of thought and the bitterness of “The Way of All Flesh” in these primitive personalities.

And here again I had occasion to note the absurdity of chronology, the first century and the fortieth lodging under the same roof—for Butler was at least as far ahead of the twentieth century as his hostess was behind it. Pleasant it is to think that there is a possible human community between epochs so sundered.

Spring after spring came Butler to the inn that now bears his name, and having followed unconsciously in his footsteps, and slept in his very bed, I wonder how he could have found life tolerable there. The Admirable Crichton of his day, novelist and poet, musician and painter, scientist and theologian, art critic and sheep farmer, and perhaps the subtlest wit since Swift, Samuel Butler seems to have reduced his personal demands upon the universe to a smaller minimum than Stevenson in his most admired moments. And that not from poverty, for his resources in later life were adequate, but from sheer love of “plain living and high thinking.” The walls of his bedroom in the formerly yclept Albergo Centrale are whitewashed, the ceiling is of logs, the washstand of iron, and even if the water-jug is a lovely Greek vase with two handles, and the pail a beautiful green basin, this is only because Sicily supplies no poorer form of these articles. The bed is of planks on iron trestles. The Albergo itself, with its primitive sanitation, is in keeping with its best room. For Sicily it is, perhaps, a Grand Hotel, embracing as it does an entire flat of three bedrooms on the second floor (a cobbler occupies the ground floor, and the mystery of the first floor I never penetrated). This three-roomed hotel is shut off from the rest of the house by a massive portal. On the first night there appeared to be even a dining-room, but morning revealed this as a mere ante-chamber, windowless, and depending for its light upon the bedroom doors being open. On the second night even this substitute for a dining-room vanished, owing to the advent of another traveller, and the ante-room became a bedroom, so that I had to make my entrances and exits through the new lodger’s pseudo-chamber. The landlady also passed through it on her morning visit to me, which was made without any regard for my morning tub. “È permesso?” she asked gaily, as she sailed in. This was her ordinary formula—first to come in, and then to ask if she might.

When I opened my door I had a curious double picture impressed upon my memory: the shirted backs of two young men dressing, each in his room; the one in the bedroom proper was seen in a pale morning light, the occupant of the windowless ante-room was vividly Rembrandtesque under his necessary lamp. Each was singing cheerily to himself as he made his toilette.

Nor was the food superior to the accommodation. Butter was unobtainable during my stay, and breakfast consisted of dry bread, washed down by great bowls of coffee. Fish was not, and the meat had better not have been. I must admit that the dry bread was served with an air that made it seem wedding-cake. “Pane!” la bella Maria would exclaim ecstatically, dumping the coarse, scarce edible loaf on the table with a suggestion of Diana triumphant in the chase. “CaffÈ!” was another hallelujah, as of a Swiss Family Robinson discovering delectable potions. And “Latte!” bore all the jubilation of a cow specially captured and despoiled for the first time in human history of the treasure of its dugs. Maria’s manner of waiting revitalised the common objects of the breakfast table, made them a fairy-tale again; under her magic gestures every piece of sugar grew enchanted and every spoon an adventure. And Butler’s tastes were of the simplest, even in Clifford’s Inn, where, out of consideration for his old laundress, he made his own breakfast before she turned up. All the same, the attraction of Calatafimi for Butler is difficult to explain. It is one of the dingiest Sicilian towns, littered with poultry, goats, children, and refuse, though, of course, you are soon out of it and amid the scenery of Theocritus. But the view from Butler’s own balcony—often a paramount consideration for a writer—was not remarkably stimulating; hemmed in by the opposite houses, though rising into hills and a ruined castle.

Nor was he a student of the campaign of the Thousand, Homeric as was the battle of Calatafimi. It may be that he found the spot more secluded than a seaport like Trapani for pursuing his topographical investigations into the wanderings of the woman-made Ulysses; or it may be that he found unceasing rapture in the contemplation of the aforesaid temple of Segesta that dominates the landscape from its headland, albeit a closer contemplation of its noble columns costs a five-mile walk and climb. Here Goethe came and philosophised on the passing show of human glory, and here, too, Butler may have loved to muse.

In a fine sonnet on Immortality, published in the AthenÆum a few months before mortality claimed him, Butler expressed his belief that the only after-life for the dead lay in the hearts of the living, and only upon their lips could those meet whom the centuries had parted.

“We shall not even know that we have met,

Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again

Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.”