Cape Cod lies at the other end of the world from Sicily not only in
distance, but in the look of it, the lay of it, the way of it. It is so
far off that it offers a base from which one may get a fresh view of
Theocritus.
There are very pleasant villages on the Cape, in the wide shade of
ancient elms, set deep in the old-time New England quiet. For there was
a time before the arrival of the Syrians, the Armenians, and the
automobile, when New England was in a meditative mood. But Cape Cod is
really a ridge of sand with a backbone of soil, rashly thrust into the
Atlantic, and as fluent and volatile, so to speak, as one of those far
Western rivers that are shifting currents sublimely indifferent to
private ownership. The Cape does not lack stability, but it shifts its
lines with easy disregard of charts and boundaries, and remains stable
only at its center; it is always fraying at the edges. It lies, too, on
the western edge of the ocean stream, where the forces of land and sea
are often at war and the palette of colors is limited. The sirocco does
not sift fine sand through every crevice and fill the heart of man with
murderous impulses; but the east wind diffuses a kind of elemental
depression.
Sicily, on the other hand, is high-built on rocky foundations, and is
the wide-spreading reach of a great volcano sloping broadly and
leisurely to the sea. It is often shaken at its center, but the sea does
not take from nor add to its substance at will. It lies in the very
heart of a sea of such ravishing color that by sheer fecundity of
beauty it has given birth to a vast fellowship of gods and divinely
fashioned creatures; its slopes are white with billowy masses of almond
blossoms in that earlier spring which is late winter on Cape Cod; while
gray-green, gnarled, and twisted olive-trees bear witness to the
passionate moods of the Mediterranean, mother of poetry, comedy, and
tragedy, often asleep in a dream of beauty in which the shadowy figures
of the oldest time move, often as violent as the North Atlantic when
March torments it with furious moods. For the Mediterranean is as
seductive, beguiling, and uncertain of temper as Cleopatra, as radiant
as Hera, as voluptuous as Aphrodite. Put in terms of color, it is as
different from the sea round Cape Cod as a picture by Sorolla is
different from a picture by Mauve.
Theocritus is interested in the magic of the island rather than in the
mystery of the many-sounding sea, and to him the familiar look of things
is never edged like a photograph; it is as solid and real as a report of
the Department of Agriculture, but a mist of poetry is spread over it,
in which, as in a Whistler nocturne, many details harmonize in a
landscape at once actual and visionary. There is no example in
literature of the unison of sight and vision more subtly and elusively
harmonious than the report of Sicily in the _Idylls_. In its occupations
the island was as prosaic as Cape Cod, and lacked the far-reaching
consciousness of the great world which is the possession of every
populated sand-bar in the Western world; but it was enveloped in an
atmosphere in which the edges of things were lost in a sense of their
rootage in poetic relations, and of interrelations so elusive and
immaterial that a delicate but persistent charm exhaled from them.
Sicily was a solid and stubborn reality thousands of years before
Theocritus struck his pastoral lyre; but its most obvious quality was
atmospheric. It was compacted of facts, but they were seen not as a
camera sees, but as an artist sees; not in sharp outline and hard
actuality, but softened by a flood of light which melts all hard lines
in a landscape vibrant and shimmering. Our landscape-painters are now
reporting Nature as Theocritus saw her in Sicily; the value of the
overtone matching the value of the under-tone, to quote an artist's
phrase, "apply these tones in right proportions," writes Mr. Harrison,
"and you will find that the sky painted with the perfectly matched tone
will fly away indefinitely, will be bathed in a perfect atmosphere." We
who have for a time lost the poetic mood and strayed from the poet's
standpoint paint the undertones with entire fidelity; but we do not
paint in the overtones, and the landscape loses the luminous and vibrant
quality which comes into it when the sky rains light upon it. We see
with the accuracy of the camera; we do not see with the vision of the
poet, in which reality is not sacrificed, but subdued to larger uses. We
insist on the scientific fact; the poet is intent on the visual fact.
The one gives the bare structure of the landscape; the other gives us
its color, atmosphere, charm. Here, perhaps, is the real difference
between Cape Cod and Sicily. It is not so much a contrast between
encircling seas and the sand-ridge and rock-ridge as between the two
ways of seeing, the scientific and the poetic.
The difference of soils must also be taken into account. The soil of
history on Cape Cod is almost as thin as the physical soil, which is so
light and detached that it is blown about by all the winds of heaven. In
Sicily, on the other hand, the soil is so much a part of the substance
of the island that the sirocco must bring from the shores of Africa the
fine particles with which it tortures men. On Cape Cod there are a few
colonial traditions, many heroic memories of brave deeds in awful seas,
some records of prosperous daring in fishing-ships, and then the advent
of the summer colonists; a creditable history, but of so recent date
that it has not developed the fructifying power of a rich soil, out of
which atmosphere rises like an exhalation. In Sicily, on the other hand,
the soil of history is so deep that the spade of the archæeologist has
not touched bottom, and even the much-toiling Freeman found four octavo
volumes too cramped to tell the whole story, and mercifully stopped at
the death of Agathocles.
Since the beginning of history, which means only the brief time since we
began to remember events, everybody has gone to Sicily, and most people
have stayed there until they were driven on, or driven out, by later
comers; and almost everybody has been determined to keep the island for
himself, and set about it with an ingenuity and energy of slaughter
which make the movement toward universal peace seem pallid and
nerveless. It is safe to say that on no bit of ground of equal area has
more history been enacted than in Sicily; and when Theocritus was young,
Sicily was already venerable with years and experience.
Now, history, using the word as signifying things which have happened,
although enacted on the ground, gets into the air, and one often feels
it before he knows it. In this volatile and pervasive form it is
diffused over the landscape and becomes atmospheric; and atmosphere, it
must be remembered, bears the same relation to air that the countenance
bears to the face: it reveals and expresses what is behind the physical
features. There is hardly a half-mile of Sicily below the upper ridges
of Ætna that has not been fought over; and the localities are few which
cannot show the prints of the feet of the gods or of the heroes who were
their children.
It was a very charming picture on which the curtain was rolled up when
history began, but the island was not a theater in which men sat at
ease and looked at Persephone in the arms of Pluto; it was an arena in
which race followed close upon race, like the waves of the sea, each
rising a little higher and gaining a little wider sweep, and each
leaving behind not only wreckage, but layers of soil potent in vitality.
The island was as full of strange music, of haunting presences, of
far-off memories of tragedy, as the island of the _Tempest_: it bred its
_Calibans_, but it bred also its _Prosperos_. For the imagination is
nourished by rich associations as an artist is fed by a beautiful
landscape; and in Sicily men grew up in an invisible world of memories
that spread a heroic glamor over desolate places and kept Olympus within
view of the mountain pastures where rude shepherds cut their pipes:
"A pipe discoursing through nine mouths I made, full fair to view;
The wax is white thereon, the line of this and that edge true."
The soil of history may be so rich that it nourishes all manner of
noxious things side by side with flowers of glorious beauty; this is the
price we pay for fertility. A thin soil, on the other hand, sends a few
flowers of delicate structure and haunting fragrance into the air, like
the arbutus and the witchiana, which express the clean, dry sod of Cape
Cod, and are symbolic of the poverty and purity of its history. Thoreau
reports that in one place he saw advertised, "Fine sand for sale here,"
and he ventures the suggestion that "some of the street" had been
sifted. And, possibly, with a little tinge of malice after his long
fight with winds and shore-drifts, he reports that "in some pictures of
Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the
ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand."
"Nevertheless," he continues, "natives of Provincetown assured me that
they could walk in the middle of the road without trouble, even in
slippers, for they had learned how to put their feet down and lift them
up without taking in any sand." On a soil so light and porous there is a
plentiful harvesting of health and substantial comfort, but not much
chance of poetry.
In the country of Theocritus there was great chance for poetry; not
because anybody was taught anything, but because everybody was born in
an atmosphere that was a diffused poetry. If this had not been true, the
poet could not have spread a soft mist of poesy over the whole island:
no man works that kind of magic unaided; he compounds his potion out of
simples culled from the fields round him. Theocritus does not disguise
the rudeness of the life he describes; goat-herds and he-goats are not
the conventional properties of the poetic stage. The poet was without a
touch of the drawing-room consciousness of crude things, though he knew
well softness and charm of life in Syracuse under a tyrant who did not
"patronize the arts," but was instructed by them. To him the distinction
between poetic and unpoetic things was not in the appearance, but in the
root. He was not ashamed of Nature as he found her, and he never
apologized for her coarseness by avoiding things not fit for refined
eyes. His shepherds and goat-herds are often gross and unmannerly, and
as stuffed with noisy abuse as Shakespeare's people in "Richard III."
Lacon and Cometas, rival poets of the field, are having a controversy,
and this is the manner of their argument:
"LACON
"When learned I from thy practice or thy preaching aught that's right,
Thou puppet, thou mis-shapen lump of ugliness and spite?
"COMETAS
"When? When I beat thee, wailing sore; your goats looked on with glee,
And bleated; and were dealt with e'en as I had dealt with thee."
And then, without a pause, the landscape shines through the noisy talk:
"Nay, here are oaks and galingale: the hum of housing bees
Makes the place pleasant, and the birds are piping in the trees,
And here are two cold streamlets; here deeper shadows fall
Than yon place owns, and look what cones drop from the pine tree tall."
Thoreau, to press the analogy from painting a little further, lays the
undertones on with a firm hand: "It is a wild, rank place and there is
no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and
whatever the sea casts up,--a vast _morgue_, where famished dogs may
range in packs, and cows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide
leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up
upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each
tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. There is
naked Nature,--inhumanely sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling
at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray."
It certainly is naked Nature with a vengeance, and it was hardly fair to
take her portrait in that condition. Theocritus would have shown us
Acteon surprising Artemis, not naked, but nude; and there is all the
difference between nakedness and nudity that yawns between a Greek
statue and a Pompeiian fresco indiscreetly preserved in the museum at
Naples. Theocritus shows Nature nude, but not naked; and it is worth
noting that the difference between the two lies in the presence or
absence of consciousness. In Greek mythology, nudity passes without note
or comment; the moment it begins to be noted and commented upon it
becomes nakedness.
Theocritus sees Nature nude, as did all the Greek poets, but he does
not surprise her when she is naked. He paints the undertones faithfully,
but he always lays on the overtones, and so spreads the effulgence of
the sky-stream over the undertones, and the picture becomes vibrant and
luminous. The fact is never slurred or ignored; it gets full value, but
not as a solitary and detached thing untouched by light, unmodified by
the landscape. Is there a more charming impression of a landscape bathed
in atmosphere, exhaling poetry, breathing in the very presence of
divinity, than this, in Calverley's translation:
"I ceased. He, smiling sweetly as before,
Gave me the staff, 'the Muses''
And leftward sloped toward Pyxa. We the while
Bent us to Phrasydene's, Eucritus and I,
And baby-faced Amyntas: there we lay
Half-buried in a couch of fragrant reed
And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we?
A wealth of elm and poplar shook o'erhead;
Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on
From the Nymphs' grot, and in the somber boughs
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.
Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away
The tree frog's note was heard; the crested lark
Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan;
And o'er the fountain hung the gilded bee.
All of rich summer smacked, of autumn all:
Pears at our feet, and apples at our side
Rolled in luxuriance; branches on the ground
Sprawled, overweighted with damsons; while we brushed
From the cask's head the crust of four long years.
Say, ye who dwell upon Parnassian peaks,
Nymphs of Castalia, did old Chiron e'er
Set before Hercules a cup so brave
In Pholus' cavern--did as nectarous draughts
Cause that Anapian shepherd, in whose hand
Rocks were as pebbles, Polypheme the strong,
Featly to foot it o'er the cottage lawns:--
As, ladies, ye bid flow that day for us
All by Demeter's shrine at harvest-home?
Beside whose corn-stacks may I oft again
Plant my broad fan: while she stands by and smiles,
Poppies and corn-sheaves on each laden arm."
Here is the landscape seen with a poet's eye, and the color and shining
quality of a landscape, it must be remembered, are in the exquisitely
sensitive eye that sees, not in the structure and substance upon which
it rests. The painter and poet create nature as really as they create
art, for in every clear sight of the world we are not passive receivers
of impressions, but partners in that creative work which makes nature as
contemporaneous as the morning newspaper.
It is true, Sicily was poetic in its very structure while Cape Cod is
poetic only in oases, bits of old New England shade and tracery of elms,
the peace of ancient sincerity and content honestly housed, the changing
color of marshes in whose channels the tides are singing or mute; but
the Sicily of Theocritus was seen by the poetic eye. In every complete
vision of a landscape what is behind the eye is as important as what
lies before it, and behind the eyes that looked at Sicily in the third
century, B.C., there were not only the memories of many generations, but
there was also a faith in visible and invisible creatures which peopled
the world with divinities. The text of Theocritus is starred with the
names of gods and goddesses, of heroes and poets: it is like a rich
tapestry, on the surface of which history has been woven in beautiful
colors; the flat surface dissolves in a vast distance, and the dull warp
and woof glows with moving life.
The _Idylls_ are saturated with religion, and as devoid of piety as a
Bernard Shaw play. Gods and men differ only in their power, not at all
in their character. What we call morals were as conspicuously absent
from Olympus as from Sicily. In both places life and the world are taken
in their obvious intention; there was no attempt, apart from the
philosophers, who are always an inquisitive folk, to discover either the
mind or the heart of things. In the Greek Bible, which Homer composed
and recited to crowds of people on festive occasions, the fear of the
gods and their vengeance are set forth in a text of unsurpassed force
and vitality of imagination; but no god in his most dissolute mood
betrays any moral consciousness, and no man repents of sins. That things
often go wrong was as obvious then as now, but there was no sense of
sin. There were Greeks who prayed, but none who put dust on his head and
beat his breast and cried, "Woe unto me, a sinner!" There were disasters
by land and sea, but no newspaper spread them out in shrieking type, and
by skillful omission and selection of topics wore the semblance of an
official report of a madhouse; there were diseases and deaths, but
patent-medicine advertisements had not saturated the common mind with
ominous symptoms; old age was present with its monitions of change and
decay:
"Age o'ertakes us all;
Our tempers first; then on o'er cheek and chin,
Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time.
Up and go somewhere, ere thy limbs are sere."
Theocritus came late in the classical age, and the shadows had deepened
since Homer's time. The torches on the tombs were inverted, the imagery
of immortality was faint and dim; but the natural world was still
naturally seen, and, if age was coming down the road, the brave man went
bravely forward to meet the shadow.
It was different on Cape Cod. Even Thoreau, who had escaped from the
morasses of theology into the woods and accomplished the reversion to
paganism in the shortest possible manner, never lost the habit of
moralizing, which is a survival of the deep-going consciousness of sin.
Describing the operations of a sloop dragging for anchors and chains, he
gives his text those neat, hard touches of fancy which he had at
command even in his most uncompromising, semi-scientific moments: "To
hunt to-day in pleasant weather for anchors which had been lost,--the
sunken faith and hope of mariners, to which they trusted in vain; now,
perchance it is the rusty one of some old pirate ship or Norman
fisherman, whose cable parted here two hundred years ago, and now the
best bower anchor of a Canton or California ship which has gone about
her business."
And then he drops into the depths of the moral subconsciousness from
which the clear, clean waters of Walden Pond could not wash him: "If the
roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty
flukes of hope deceived and parted chain-cables of faith might again be
windlassed aboard! enough to sink the finder's craft, or stock new
navies to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn with anchors,
some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by
the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, to
which where is the other end?... So, if we had diving bells adapted to
the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached,
as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding
ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost;
rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find."
The tone is light, almost trifling, when one takes into account the
imagery and the idea, and the subconsciousness is wearing thin; but it
is still there.
Thoreau's individual consciousness was a very faint reflection of an
ancestral consciousness of the presence of sin, and of moral obligations
of an intensity almost inconceivable in these degenerate days. There was
a time in a Cape Cod community when corporal punishment was inflicted
on all residents who denied the Scriptures, and all persons who stood
outside the meeting-house during the time of divine service were set in
the stocks. The way of righteousness was not a straight and narrow path,
but a macadamized thoroughfare, and woe to the man who ventured on a
by-path! One is not surprised to learn that "hysteric fits" were very
common, and that congregations were often thrown into the utmost
confusion; for the preaching was far from quieting. "Some think sinning
ends with this life," said a well-known preacher, "but it is a mistake.
The creature is held under an everlasting law; the damned increase in
sin in hell. Possibly, the mention of this may please thee. But,
remember, there shall be no pleasant sins there; no eating, drinking,
singing, dancing; wanton dalliance, and drinking stolen waters; but
damned sins, bitter, hellish sins; sins exasperated by torments; cursing
God, spite, rage, and blasphemy. The guilt of all thy sins shall be laid
upon thy soul, and be made so many heaps of fuel.... He damns sinners
heaps upon heaps."
It is not surprising to learn that as a result of such preaching the
hearers were several times greatly alarmed, and "on one occasion a
comparatively innocent young man was frightened nearly out of his wits."
One wonders in what precise sense the word "comparatively" was used; it
is certain that those who had this sense of the sinfulness of things
driven into them were too thoroughly frightened to see the world with
the poet's eye.
In Sicily nobody was concerned for the safety of his soul; nobody was
aware that he had a soul to be saved. Thoughtful people knew that
certain things gave offense to the gods; that you must not flaunt your
prosperity after the fashion of some American millionaires, who have
discovered in recent years that there is a basis of fact for the Greek
feeling that it is wise to hold great possessions modestly; that
certain family and state relations are sacred, and that the fate of
Œdipus was a warning: but nobody was making observations of his own
frame of mind; there were no thermometers to take the spiritual
temperature.
In his representative capacity as poet, Theocritus, speaking for his
people, might have said with Gautier, "I am a man for whom the visible
world exists." It is as impossible to cut the visible world loose from
the invisible as to see the solid stretch of earth without seeing the
light that streams upon it and makes the landscape; but Gautier came as
near doing the impossible as any man could, and the goat-herds and
pipe-players of Theocritus measurably approached this instable position.
On Cape Cod, it is true, they looked "up and not down," but it is also
true that they "looked in and not out"; in Sicily they looked neither up
nor down, but straight ahead. The inevitable shadows fell across the
fields whence the distracted Demeter sought Persephone, and Enceladus,
uneasily bearing the weight of Ætna, poured out the vials of his wrath
on thriving vineyards and on almond orchards white as with sea-foam; but
the haunting sense of disaster in some other world beyond the dip of the
sea was absent. If the hope of living with the gods was faint and far,
and the forms of vanished heroes were vague and dim, the fear of
retribution beyond the gate of death was a mere blurring of the
landscape by a mist that came and went.
The two workmen whose talk Theocritus overhears and reports in the
_Tenth Idyll_ are not discussing the welfare of their souls; they are
not even awake to the hard conditions of labor, and take no thought
about shorter hours and higher wages: they are interested chiefly in
Bombyca, "lean, dusk, a gypsy,"
" ...twinkling dice thy feet,
Poppies thy lips, thy ways none knows how sweet!"
And they lighten the hard task of the reaper of the stubborn corn in
this fashion:
"O rich in fruit and corn-blade: be this field
Tilled well, Demeter, and fair fruitage yield!
"Bind the sheaves, reapers: lest one, passing, say--
'A fig for these, they're never worth their pay!'
"Let the mown swathes look northward, ye who mow,
Or westward--for the ears grow fattest so.
"Avoid a noon-tide nap, ye threshing men:
The chaff flies thickest from the corn-ears then.
"Wake when the lark wakes; when he slumbers close
Your work, ye reapers: and at noontide doze.
"Boys, the frogs' life for me! They need not him
Who fills the flagon, for in drink they swim.
"Better boil herbs, thou toiler after gain,
Than, splitting cummin, split thy hand in twain."
In Sicily no reckoning of the waste of life had been kept, and armies
and fleets had been spent as freely in the tumultuous centuries of
conquest as if, in the over-abundance of life, these losses need not be
entered in the book of account. Theocritus distils this sense of
fertility from the air, and the leaves of the _Idylls_ are fairly astir
with it. The central myth of the island has a meaning quite beyond the
reach of accident; poetic as it is, its symbolism seems almost
scientific. Under skies so full of the light which, in a real sense,
creates the landscape, encircled by a sea which was fecund of gods and
goddesses, Sicily was the teeming mother of flower-strewn fields and
trees heavy with fruit, trunks and boughs made firm by winds as the
fruit grew mellow in the sun. Demeter moved through harvest-fields and
across the grassy slopes where herds are fed, a smiling goddess,
"Poppies and corn-sheaves on each laden arm."
Forgetfulness of the ills of life, dreams of Olympian beauty and
tempered energy in the fields--are not these the secrets of the fair
world which survives in the _Idylls_?
The corn and wine were food for the gods who gave them as truly as for
the men who plucked the ripened grain and pressed the fragrant grape. If
there was a sense of awe in the presence of the gods, there was no sense
of moral separation, no yawning chasm of unworthiness. The gods obeyed
their impulses not less readily than the men and women they had created;
both had eaten of the fruit of the tree of life, but neither had eaten
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Anybody might happen upon Pan
in some deeply shadowed place, and the danger of surprising Diana at her
bath was not wholly imaginary. Religion was largely the sense of being
neighbor to the gods; they were more prosperous than men and had more
power, but they were different only in degree, and one might be on easy
terms with them. They were created by the poetic mind, and they repaid
it a thousand-fold with the consciousness of a world haunted by near,
familiar, and radiant divinity. The heresy which shattered the unity of
life by dividing it between the religious and the secular had not come
to confuse the souls of the good and put a full half of life in the
hands of sinners; religion was as natural as sunlight and as easy as
breathing.
There was little philosophy and less science in Sicily as Theocritus
reports it. The devastating passion for knowledge had not brought
self-consciousness in like a tide, nor had the desire to know about
things taken the place of knowledge of the things themselves. The beauty
of the world was a matter of experience, not of formal observation, and
was seen directly as artists see a landscape before they bring technical
skill to reproduce it. So far as the men and women who work and sing and
make love in the _Idylls_ were concerned, the age was delightfully
unintellectual and, therefore, normally poetic. The vocabulary of names
for things was made up of descriptive rather than analytical words, and
things were seen in wholes rather than in parts.
From this point of view religion was as universal and all-enfolding as
air, and the gods were as concrete and tangible as trees and rocks and
stars. They were companionable with all sorts and conditions of men, and
if one wished to represent them, he used symbols and images of divinely
fashioned men and women, not philosophical ideas or scientific formulæ.
In this respect the Roman Catholic Church has been both a wise teacher
and a tender guardian of lonely and sorrowful humanity. Homer was not a
formal theologian, but the harvest of the seed of thought he sowed is
not even now fully gathered. He peopled the whole world of imagination.
Christianity is not only concrete but historic, and some day, when the
way of abstraction has been abandoned for that way of vital knowledge,
which is the path of the prophets, the saints, and the artists, it will
again set the imagination aflame. Meantime Theocritus is a charming
companion for those who hunger and thirst for beauty, and who long from
time to time to hang up the trumpet of the reformer, and give themselves
up to the song of the sea and the simple music of the shepherd's pipe.