O FOUNTAIN ARETHUSE
When "Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian
mountains" she had scarcely reached the age at which women begin to dream
of love. She spied the approaching river-god Alpheus and, to preserve
what was dearer to her than life, for she was a nymph of Diana, plunged
heroically into the earth. Alpheus, who had reached the age when men
desire to act, plunged in after her. They flowed along inside the ground
and under the sea, he following her, all the way from Greece to Sicily
and, according to the recognised habit of gods and demi-gods believed to
be dead and buried, they rose again. The place of Arethusa's
resurrection is the island of Ortigia, but, although I have the story
from the fountain head, it all happened so long ago that I have not been
able to ascertain whether Alpheus rose there or at a spot on the mainland
of Sicily nearer Etna where S. Alfio is the patron saint, and although
the "e" in Alpheus takes the stress and the "i" in Alfio does not,
nevertheless, the custode of the spring, who was himself my informant,
may confuse the two names. The difference between the versions is that
between tragedy and comedy. If they, the pursued and her pursuer, rose
in the same place it can hardly be that he did not catch her. If he rose
somewhere else, then she may still preserve her everlasting virginity and
they will neither of them ever reach the age when experience teaches both
men and women to regret. She will be ever flying, he ever pursuing, like
the maiden and the lover on that Grecian Urn which an eminent authority,
baffled in his attempts at identification, thinks was "probably imagined"
by Keats.
I possess a Bible and Prayer-book bound together in one volume which was
given me on leaving Rottingdean by my sincere friend, the master of the
preparatory school there. It contains, just before the First Chapter of
Genesis, a Chronological Map "with remarkable persons and events
collaterally placed." I remember how I used to mitigate the tedium of
divine service by reading to myself that the creation of the world
occupied one of the weeks of the year 4004 B.C.; that Egypt was founded
about 2190 B.C.; that Troy fell about 1180 B.C., seventy years or so
before the birth of King David; and that Homer and Elijah flourished
contemporaneously between 1000 and 900 B.C. My schoolmaster wrote my
name in the book with a suitable inscription and a reference to Psalm
cxix. 105. I turned up the passage and drew the conclusion that he
desired his gift to be a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my paths.
And so it was until other knowledge, the rudiments of which he had
himself endeavoured to impart to me, threw glimmerings across my way and
I passed through a distracted period of inability to distinguish the
signals of danger from those of safety. Much the same thing has happened
to many others and assistance has sometimes been found in compromise and
accommodation. Thus the statement about 4004 B.C., when read by the
light of another statement in the Book, does not seriously conflict with
the teachings of modern science. Until further knowledge shall eclipse
the few feeble lanterns that are now doing their best to illuminate my
course I shall continue to hold the opinion that, as in the sight of Him,
who is the Life of the Universe, a thousand years are but as yesterday,
so in the sight of man, who has been God's image upon earth for more ages
than anyone can tell, six thousand years are but as last week. And I
shall keep my thousands in a condition as elastic as may be necessary to
bear any stretching that future discoveries may put upon them.
It was many thousands of such weeks ago, when Mother Earth was herself in
her infancy, before her baby bones had hardened, that Arethusa first came
to the island she has made her home. She is still coming and can be seen
to-day still rising as fresh as ever. The story of the early days of her
exile was not told by Clio because Clio was only a modern Agamemnon in
history, many a brave muse had flourished before she was thought of. One
of them took for her infinite papyrus the firmament of space, those
heavens which shall one day be rolled together as a scroll, whereon she
inscribed chapters in stars and volumes in constellations. We cannot see
all her works, nor can we read all we see, but we know that she put us
into one of her books. A few paragraphs of that chapter which forms our
planet lie scattered around Siracusa; we recognise her manuscript in the
shape of the Great Harbour, in the depth of the sea, in the height of the
hills, in the strata of the rocks, in the soil, in the vegetation.
There were early muses who employed flint implements and arrow-heads for
records, and neglected to clear away the remains of prehistoric meals in
caverns. Others preferred to write their chronicles upon pots, urns and
tombs or to scrawl placid monosyllables upon polygonal walls. But with
all their industry the muses have never been able to keep pace with the
material that has accumulated round the dwellings of men and women. They
have done their best and, when their mother Mnemosyne began to fail and
the business was split up first into three, then four, seven, eight, and
ultimately into nine departments, it was hoped that a better result would
be shown; but they have never had an adequate allowance, and have always
been in financial difficulties, besides which they have disagreed among
themselves, and quarrelling wastes time.
Clio in her matter-of-fact way built a storehouse wherein to preserve her
treasures; her curious, imaginative sisters peeped through the key-hole.
"Dear me!" they said to one another. "What a collection! Do you think
we could get inside and see it properly?"
They waited till Clio went one day with Neptune to pay a visit to the
Ethiopians "who lie in two halves, one half looking on to the Atlantic
and the other on to the Indian Ocean," they induced Vulcan to come and
pick the lock for them and soon they were roaming all over the palace.
"How admirably arranged!" exclaimed one of them.
"It must be nearly exhaustive!" said another.
"Observe the collateral placing of remarkable persons and events," said a
third.
"One could find almost anything one wanted," said a fourth.
"Ah!" they exclaimed; "oh! now if only we could manage to get a little
life into some of these dead bones, how pleased Clio would be!"
They rifled the show-cases and carried off the most attractive details,
each taking whatever pleased her best. They stole from Clio her
transient facts and made them live again as their own by breathing into
them the spirit of eternal truth and re-stating them in folk-lore, in
tradition, in verse, in romance, in melody, in superstition, in outline,
in colour, in modelling, in the movements of the dance; they set them up
in libraries, in concert-rooms, in picture-galleries, in theatres, in
churches, in corridors of sculpture, in the hearts of the people. This
was not what Clio had intended; she was not at all pleased; she
complained that her sisters had meddled, they had robbed her of her chief
possessions and left the remainder in disorder; her collection no longer
corresponded with the catalogue. In attempting to reconstruct she
floundered into such blunders that the saying has come down to us:
Blessed are the people that have no history, for they shall not be
misrepresented.
Strictly speaking, of course, every man has history, such as it is, and
the beatitude was intended to refer only to those whose history has
escaped the attention of the muses as that of Arethusa did for many ages.
We know enough, however, to guess that her exile cannot have been passed
in solitude and, if only we had her Visitors' Book complete, we should
have something that would keep many learned persons busy. We get an
early glimpse of her on her underground journey, passing near enough to
the dread abode of Pluto to overhear some scandal about
That fair field
Of Enna where Proserpine, gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered.
She did not fully understand, but the nymph Cyane, who dwelt in another
fountain up the river Anapo and remembered the affair, gave her full
particulars; she made a mental note of it all and imparted the
information to Ceres, who came weeping and telling her grief as she
wandered the world in search of her lost daughter.
Venus, in one or other of her manifestations, was and is a welcome
visitor; she rises from the sea as constantly as Arethusa falls into it,
and some little time ago gave the nymph, for a keepsake, a portrait of
herself as Venere Anadiomene done in marble. I know enough about
painting not to be afraid to own that I know nothing about it, whereas
with regard to sculpture my ignorance is so unfathomable that I can have
no hesitation in saying what I think about this statue, which is that it
is a pity it has been broken. If only it had its head and its right arm
it would be an entry of which the owner of any visitors' book might well
be proud. It is now in the museum of Ortigia, where there is also a
marble portrait of Cupid as he comes riding into the Great Harbour
mounted on his dolphin's back.
Diana, sailing through the night, seated in her silver chair, comes
regularly to Ortigia. Arethusa always receives her with the respect and
honour due to her Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair. Some centuries
ago she built her a temple with Doric columns and everything handsome
about it; she put inside it a statue of the goddess, and the people
forsook their old deity, whatever she was called, and went to the new
temple worshipping Diana.
Phoenician traders came and did business with Arethusa, some of it not
very straight business; for Ctesius, the king of the place, had a
woman-servant, very tall and comely, who was from their own country; they
cajoled her in ways that no woman can resist and, partly by means of "a
necklace of gold with amber beads strung among it," induced her to go
away with them one evening, and she took with her out of the palace three
cups and the king's son, a child just able to run about. She may have
thought of taking the boy because she had herself been kidnapped from
Sidon, brought to Ortigia and sold to Ctesius. Before they had been a
week on the voyage, Diana struck the woman dead and the traders threw her
body overboard to the seals and fishes. We should never have known her
tragic end but for the fact that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman
jealous for the honour of her sex. The boy was afterwards sold to
Laertes, the father of Ulysses, in whose service he put on immortality as
the swineherd Eumaeus. {294}
Early Greeks also did business with Arethusa and left with her vases,
gold rings, glass beads, ivory combs and other objects which she still
preserves in her museum. Later on, in quite modern days, about the time
that Rome was being founded, less than eight centuries before Christ,
other Greeks came from Corinth, turned out the Sikels and established a
colony of their own in Ortigia.
After this Arethusa was no longer among those who have no history in any
sense of the word. The records become less scanty, even voluminous, and
they are more legible. The books are full of the great names of her
visitors and of those native to her island. We read of the Tyrants, of
AEschylus and Pindar, of Theocritus and Archimedes; of the great siege
when the Athenians failed to take the city; of Cicero coming to view the
locality when preparing his speeches against Verres; of the five parts
into which ancient Siracusa was divided, namely, Ortigia, on the island,
and those four others with the beautiful names on the mainland,
Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis, Epipolae, the memory of whose former
splendour still trembles among their ruins.
I do not know whether Ptolemy Philadelphos actually visited the nymph,
but I have read somewhere that the papyrus which now grows where she
rises was originally a present from him. It does not look so healthy as
that which grows in the Fontana Cyane up the river Anapo across the
harbour, and which he also sent to her.
About three hundred years after the statue of Venus was made, S. Paul,
being on his way to Rome, was shipwrecked at Malta, where he remained
three months. He sailed away in the _Castor and Pollux_ of Alexandria,
landed at Siracusa and tarried there three days. We know what S. Paul
must have thought of Diana from the account of what happened at Ephesus,
where the goddess was also worshipped; it is probable that he was among
those who disbelieved in the eternal virginity of Arethusa, and he surely
must have disapproved of the frequent visits of Venus and Cupid. In time
the people of Ortigia professed themselves converted to his views and
made a change, but they made it in a half-hearted way; for instead of
pulling down the heathen temple, so that not one stone should be left
upon another, they allowed the Doric columns to remain and merely filled
up the intercolumniations with building material and baptised it into the
Christian faith with a coat of whitewash and a new name. In other
respects they went on very much as before.
Saracens visited the nymph, and Normans; Egyptians, Germans, Goths,
Spaniards, Frenchmen, Albanians all came and all bequeathed some record
of their coming. Many of them left their autographs written one over the
other upon the forms and features of the ancestors of those who still
have their dwelling in her island.
Lord Nelson on his way to the Nile, where the papyrus came from, sailed
into the Great Harbour with his fleet and did business with the nymph.
He wrote to Sir William and Lady Hamilton:
Thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered; and surely,
having watered at the fountain of Arethusa we must have victory.
What a picture these words call up of Arethusa welcoming Nelson's jolly
tars! They are coming in their pinnaces and filling their barrels and
kegs with the waters of the sacred spring and, as they row back across
the harbour to the ships, one can almost hear them singing of "Tom
Bowling," "Black-eyed Susan" and "The Roast Beef of Old England."
I have myself seen the German Emperor visiting Arethusa. His yacht, the
_Hohenzollern_, was in the Great Harbour, and one afternoon I watched his
suite being put ashore in little boats, like Nelson's sailors, only there
was no singing, and presently he came in a little boat and they all drove
away in carriages to the Cappuccini, where I read in the _Giornale di
Sicilia_ that they inspected the latomia and took tea. They passed quite
close to me and, although I had never seen His Majesty before, I was bold
enough to raise my hat to him; he observed my salute and most affably
returned it. I thought him looking extremely well.
The Kaiser landed at the Passeggiata Aretusa, a promenade that runs under
shady trees between the Great Harbour and the cliff on which the city is
built. It leads south to a garden, and further progress appears to be
blocked by a buttress of the cliff; but the buttress is pierced by a
tunnel, through which a path leads to another garden lying in an
enclosure protected from the harbour by a wall which encircles it; the
wall slopes down and on the top of it runs a path up which one can walk
and so enter the town without returning through the tunnel.
In this enclosure is the famous Fontana Aretusa, but there is nothing
about it that reminds one of the fountains of the Crystal Palace or of
Versailles. One first catches sight of a pond and then of a spring
bubbling into it with irresistible volubility at the north end; at the
south end the water tumbles out into the harbour through a hole in the
sea wall. The surface of the pond is below the level of the passeggiata
and probably the bed of it is below the level of the water in the
harbour, so that, as Cicero observed, it is the wall that keeps out the
waves and if the hole had been pierced lower the pond would be submerged
by the sea. On the sides of the cliff and on the wall grow plants with
aromatic leaves and flowers, and one can walk round the pond and watch
the fish which are, or ought to be, the descendants of those which Cicero
saw, as they swim about among the roots of Ptolemy's papyrus. The water
is not now used for washing, but I suspect that the Sidonian woman who
stole the little Eumaeus was so using it, for she was washing near the
ship of her countrymen when they got into conversation with her, and
their ship would be moored in the Great Harbour, close by the fountain.
I drank of this water, following the example of all visitors and of many
of the inhabitants who believe it to produce a beneficial effect upon the
digestion. It may have been good enough for Nelson, and I trust that the
digestions of his sailors derived benefit from it--anyhow, they had
victory at the battle of the Nile--but for a modern Londoner, accustomed
to do business with the Metropolitan Water Board, it is too salt, which
is perhaps why the papyrus here looks less flourishing than that up the
Anapo. The water tastes as though Arethusa had been the heroine of
another story besides the one with the uncertain ending about
Alpheus--one with Neptune as the villain and an ending tragic enough to
justify S. Paul in his attitude towards the nymph. Some who adopt this
view suppose that Neptune's designs were forwarded by an earthquake
which, they think, must have occurred since Nelson's time, because he
speaks as though he gave his sailors the water of the spring; but that is
not enough to date the disturbance. It is some distance from Greece to
Sicily, and along all those miles, during all those ages, there may have
been many earthquakes, any one of which would have served Neptune's turn;
some may have been before S. Paul's time, some before Eumaeus was born,
some in still earlier days. If the earthquake had already been, Nelson
must have observed the brackishness of the spring and he would then have
preferred to take his water from the usual fresh source which supplied
the inhabitants of his day, and, in speaking of "having watered at the
fountain of Arethusa," he would be trusting to Lady Hamilton's
familiarity with that figure which permits the part to be put for the
whole.
I have visited Arethusa many times. Once, on a calm evening in early
summer, Diana was high up in the sky, shining over the harbour; although,
like others, she may not have been sure which was her temple and which
was Minerva's, she could not help wondering whether anything was ever
going to be done about openly restoring them both to their ancient
worship. She was, however, comforting herself in the meantime with the
reflection that neither she nor Minerva had much to complain of, inasmuch
as it was clear that if it were not for the support of those Doric
columns the modern Church would not stand as it does, and after all, she
thought, "What's in a name?" Down below in the passeggiata, officers and
young men were strolling about, listening to a pot-pourri of _Faust_.
Their cheeks were shaved smooth to show the modelling and their
moustaches gave evidence of hours of toil and even suffering; they met
their friends and gesticulated with them, smoking cigarettes and being
polite to everyone. Mothers and elder sisters in cool white dresses sat
under the trees, and little parties of children darted away from them,
hand in hand, returning after breathless excursions. I took a seat among
it all and, as the King of Thule, in honour of his lady, was drinking for
the last time out of his golden cup, a young voice over my shoulder
demanded two soldi. I turned and thought I recognised the speaker;
surely he must have left his dolphin in the Great Harbour where the
Phoenician traders used to moor their ships, and put on his sailor suit
at the Custom House.
"Very well, Cupid," I replied, "I don't mind giving you two soldi, but
why do you ask as though you were entitled to them? And why do you wear
that red tam-o'-shanter? And how old are you, if you please?"
He said he was seven and the cap was his uniform; he was collecting the
pennies for the chairs. So I gave him two soldi and another for himself
and saw him scamper happily away and join a knot of brother Cupids who
were playing together round a lamp-post. He showed them the soldo I had
given him for himself and the meeting became as ebullient and full of
excitement as the Arethusa herself.
He reappeared while Siebel, with the voice of a clarinet, was beginning
to tell the flowers what they were to say to Margherita. This time he
brought a foreign penny and wanted to know why they had refused to take
it at the marionette theatre. I looked at it and said:
"If you want to know about this coin, mount your dolphin again and direct
his course to distant Argentina, the people of that country will tell you
all about it and will give you its full value. You will have a
delightful voyage and, if I were not such a bad sailor, I believe I
should ask you to take me with you."
It seemed, however, that his dolphin was tired and I was to give him ten
centimes down and done with it. He was such a jolly little fellow that
just for the pleasure of seeing him smile again I gave him the soldi in
exchange for his coin and he danced away in delight.
Margherita in prison was crazily recalling the strains of the waltz she
had heard--Ah, what ages ago it seemed!--when she was yet a happy girl,
as pure as Arethusa in Hellas, and through the waltz I heard the young
voice again over my shoulder. He was asking me to give him bronze for an
Italian nickel piece of twenty centesimi. It was a bad one. I told him
so and accused him of attempting to utter counterfeit coin. He laid his
two hands on his breast, raised his elbows, threw back his head with
conscious innocence and swore on the honour of his mother that the coin
was good. He did it so well--so beautifully--that for a moment I was
tempted to wonder whether he might perhaps be speaking the truth, but I
glanced again at his coin and recovered myself.
"Now look here, Cupid," I said, "I don't want to breathe a syllable
against the honour of your mother, but you know better than anyone that
when a woman loses her head you are generally to blame. This is your
doing"--and I took out of my pocket and showed him a post-card I had
bought that morning in the Via Roma with a reproduction of the Venere
Anadiomene. "And men also have lost their heads because of you. I am
not the only one who has heard about the Duca di Bronte and Lady
Hamilton. Look round at these beautiful ladies and at these brave
officers and young men--do they not bear upon their forms and features
the signatures of Arethusa's foreign visitors? You ought to be able to
decipher that palimpsest, if anyone can, for it was you who taught them
to write; Ortigia would never have seen them if it had not been for you.
And why are they sitting under the trees and walking about in the
moonlight, do you suppose?"
He replied that they had come out to listen to the music and he wished
there were more of them because then he would get more pennies.
"What!" I exclaimed; "people who do not even recognise a modulation to
the dominant when they hear one come out to listen to music! You know
better than that. They have not come out because of Gounod, they have
come because of you. It is always the same old story. It was your fault
that Alpheus chased Arethusa out of Greece and that Proserpine was
carried off from Enna. It was you who suggested to those Phoenician
traders that the nurse of the little Eumaeus would be good company for
them, and you who made her consent to go. This music, of which I should
have heard more this evening but for your frequent interruptions, you
were at the bottom of it all. And it is because you are always hanging
about the theatre that those wretched puppets are so constantly going mad
for love of one another."
He pouted and said I was making myself disagreeable and that there had
been plenty to praise him.
I replied: "Yes; you swallow the praise, but you won't listen to the
blame."
He said that as for the praise or the blame it was nothing to him one way
or the other. He was too much interested in the future of the race to
care about any of those old stories--they bored him--and, please,
wouldn't I leave off preaching and give him four soldi?
I replied: "You have immortal youth without the troublesome necessity of
periodically dying and rising again; on that stage of the world where we
mortals, untrained amateurs, improvise the drama of our lives, you have
always been behind the scenes, inspiring and stage-managing more history
and more poetry than has ever been written; without you Clio would never
have built herself a treasure-house or, if she had made one, her sisters
would have found in it nothing worth stealing; it is you who direct the
modulation from the old generation to the young; it is your voice that is
heard every Easter behind the bells and the music of the Gloria. And now
you ask for riches! No wonder we complain that you are unreasonable.
Can you not be satisfied and, in looking after the future of the race,
put a little more variety into its history and its poetry? Why do you so
often begin a story as comedy and end it as tragedy? It is unworthy of
you to play fast and loose with us; great poets do not do so. But there!
you are too young to know what conscience is, and I am afraid you are too
old to learn."
He replied that he was not accustomed to be talked to in this way and did
not know what I meant by it.
I said: "Very well, I will leave off preaching, and perhaps you will
allow me to conclude with a piece of advice that ought to be acceptable
to one whose ambition it is to become a millionaire. You cannot have
forgotten where you put your mother's head. Now, be a sensible boy for
once, run away and find it, take it to Dr. Orsi up there in the museum
and he will give you plenty of soldi for it--more than you can count, and
no questions asked about honour."
He laughed and said I seemed to take a good deal of interest in the
personal appearance of his mother who, he thought, could be trusted to
look after herself, and that so long as a woman's heart was in the right
place it did not much matter what she did with her head. Besides, even
if he were to find the head, he knew nothing about business and a
scientific man in a museum would be sure to get the better of him.
There is no resisting Cupid, so I let him think he had got the better of
me, gave him four soldi and added his coin to my collection of similar
pieces, while he frisked away back to his friends boasting of his
success, as Cupid will. He had not quite done with me, however, he came
once more to see whether I should be likely to give him a cigarette, but
a rough man caught him, told him not to worry the gentry, boxed his ears
for him and drove him from me.
Fancy boxing the ears of a young Greek god off a dolphin's back within
sound of the Fontana Aretusa!
And yet, perhaps the rough man was right. I have sometimes thought since
that it cannot have been really Cupid who came to me that evening; I must
have been wasting my time and money, as others have done before, upon
some false god, false as his counterfeit coin, one of those who go up and
down the world seeking whom they may despoil. Well, let it be so. One
does not keep an account of the hours and minutes one spends in a country
where the existence of time is scarcely recognised, and as for the
money--of all the multitudes of men who have been fooled by Commerce in
the guise of Love only a few have had the luck to escape with a total
loss not exceeding four-pence half-penny.
THE END
NOTES.
{60} This table--
--is much merrier than usual this evening.
Enrico! I drink to the health of your sister.
{61a} This table is not dirty, it is clean.
Enrico! Eat, and do not pay attention to them.
{61b} The animal
Will not do it any harm.
{61c} Now that I have eaten I am no longer fasting;
I drink to the health of Enrico, who is a poet.
{61d} I also, if I may make so bold, wish to drink the health of Enrico
who desires to hear me sing; for a year I have not seen you, O, my dear
brother! Come to-day and I will sing you _Otello_.
{62} To-day I feel inclined to eat a fig;
I drink to the health of Signor Enrico.
{183} Best wishes for your festa. Thanks for the intellectual evening
and for the coffee. Greetings--no more, for fear of making our friend
Antonio jealous.
Your most devoted Enrico.
{294} _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, by Samuel Butler.