THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE
“God’s three chief gifts, Man’s bread and oil and wine.”
No doubt the usual things that happen to travellers happened to Jane and
Peripatetica at Enna-Castrogiovanni, and on their way to it. Things
annoying and amusing, tiresome or delightful, but they have no memory of
these things, all lesser matters having been swallowed up in the final
satisfaction of their quest.
Memory is an artist who works in mosaic, and all the fantastic jumble
and contrast of the experiences of travel she heaps pell-mell together
in her bag. Bits of sights but half seen, but half understood; vague
memories of other things seen before and seemingly but slightly related
to these new impressions, mere faint associations but partly realised,
along with keen emotions and strong pleasures; all tumbled in together
and rubbing corners with petty vexations, small inconveniences,
practical details. Memory gathers them all without discrimination and
carries them along with her, a most unsatisfactory-looking mess at first
sight, out of which it would seem nothing much could be made. But give
her time. While one’s attention is occupied with other matters she is
busy—sorting, arranging, rejecting here, adding there. Recollections
that bulked large at first she often files down to a mere point; much
that appeared but dull rubbish with no colour she finds valuable when
pushed into the background, because its neutral tones serve to bring out
more clearly the outlines of the design. Dark bits are skilfully
employed for the sake of the contrast, and to intensify the warm tones
of richer fragments. The shadowy associations give body and modelling to
impressions otherwise flat and ineffective. All at once the picture is
seen; a complete delineation of an episode, taking form and warmth, and
vivid life; and over the whole she spreads the magic bloom of distance,
which transforms the crude materials, hides the joinings of the mosaic,
and makes of it a treasure of the soul.
Something of this sort she did for Castrogiovanni. ’Tis but an
impressionist picture. They only see, looking back to it, two great,
divine shadows breathing such passion and pain, such essential,
heart-stirring loveliness that the eye hardly observes the wreathed
border about the picture, a border which serves merely as a frame for
those two significant figures revived from the dreams of primitive man.
Here is an incident taken from the unimportant frame of the picture....
Jane and Peripatetica are in the train. It seems quaint to be finding
one’s way to the “Plutonian Shore” in a little puffing, racketting
Sicilian train. To be properly in the picture they should have been
included in a band of pilgrim shepherds piping in the hills as they
wander upward to the great shrine of Demeter, to give thanks for the
increase of their flocks, to offer her white curds, and goat cheeses,
and the snowy wool of washed fleeces. Pilgrims who are weeks upon the
road; climbing higher and higher each day through the steady sunshine,
and sleeping at night under the large stars, with the little olive-wood
fire, that cooked the evening meal, winking and smouldering beside them
in the dewy darkness. Resting here and there at the Greek farms, where
new pilgrims are waiting to add themselves to the pious band.
Jane, who consults her Theocritus oftener in Sicily than her
Baedeker—for she says she finds that Theocritus has on the whole a
better literary style—is the one who suggests this idyllic alternative.
“Just listen to him!” she cries. “This would be travel really worth
while recording. He is telling of just such a journey, and of the pause
at one of the hill farms:
“‘So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the
house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet
tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewed on the ground. Many
poplars and elm trees were waving over our heads, and not far off the
running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs warbled to us;
in the shimmering grass the sunburnt grasshoppers were busy with their
talk, and from afar the owl cried softly out of the tangled thorns of
the blackberry. The larks were singing and the hedge birds, and the
turtle dove moaned; the bees flew round and round the fountains,
murmuring softly. The scent of late summer and the fall of the year was
everywhere; the pears fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in
number rolled down at our sides, and the young plum trees bent to the
earth with the weight of their fruit.
“‘The wax, four years old, was loosed from the heads of the wine jars.
O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I
pray you, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before
Hercules, in the stony cave of Phulus? Was it nectar like this that made
that mighty shepherd on Anapus’ shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks
upon Ulysses’ ships, dance among his sheep-folds? A cup like this ye
poured out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over the
threshing floor. May it be mine once more to dig my big winnowing-fan
through her heaps of corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding
poppies and handfuls of corn in her two hands!’”
* * * * *
Instead of being accompanied on their arcadian journey by Eucritus and
the fair Amyntichus, they have as companions in the little carriage of
the Regie Ferrovia the two dark foreigners from Syracuse, upon whose
nationality they have speculated at idle moments. They prove to be
Poles. Two gentlemen from Cracow, escaped for a moment from its snows to
make a little “giro” in the Sicilian sunshine.
Conversation develops around Ætna—of all places! Peripatetica catches
sight of it, as the train rounds a curve, sees it suddenly looming
against the sky, a glittering cone of silver swimming upon a base of
misty hyacinth-blue. By a gesture she calls everyone’s attention to this
new and charming pose of that ever spectacular mountain.
Jane glances up from her book and signifies a condescending approval,
but the sight has a most startling and electrifying effect upon the
Poles. They miss, in their enthusiasm, flinging themselves from the
carriage window merely by a hair’s breadth, and crying, “Ætna! Ætna!”
with passionate satisfaction, not only solemnly clasp hands with one
another, but also grasp and shake the limply astonished hands of Jane
and Peripatetica. Transpires that the foreigners have been three weeks
in Sicily without once having caught a glimpse of the ever present, ever
dominant mountain, since, with sulky coquetry, whenever they were within
sight it promptly hid in veils of mist, and now they are bound for
Cracow, via Palermo, facing uneasily the confession at home of having
been to the play and missed seeing the star.
They hang from the window in eager endeavour to cram all lost
opportunities into one, and rend the heavens with lamentations when the
carriage comes to rest immediately opposite a tiny station whose solid
minuteness is sufficient to blot from sight all that distant majesty.
“It is like life,” the taller foreigner wails, sinking back baffled from
an attempt to pierce the obdurate masonry with a yearning eye. “One
little ugly emotion close by can shut out from one’s sight all the
loftiest beauties of existence!”
This fine generalization gathers acuity from the fact that a sharp turn
soon after leaving the station piles up elevations that quickly rob them
of their long-sought opportunity, but for the rest of the time that the
paths of the four lie together the Poles insist upon attributing to the
direct intervention of Jane and Peripatetica the wiping of this blot
from their travelling ’scutcheon—an attitude which Jane and Peripatetica
find both soothing and refreshing, and they affect a large familiarity
and possessiveness with the Volcano, which the Poles bear with polite
and grateful respect; the more so, no doubt, as the two seekers
possess—as Americans—a novelty almost more startling and intense than
Ætna. The gentlemen from Cracow have never met Americans until now, and
make no attempt to disguise the exhilaration of so unwonted a
spectacle—confessing that in their turn they too have been speculating
upon the racial identity of “the foreign ladies,” whose nationality they
were unable to guess. They are consumed with an inexhaustible curiosity
to get the “natives’” point of view, and exchange secret glances of
surprise and pleasure at the exhibition of human intelligence in a
people so remote from Cracow. When the necessary change of train
detaches them from their eager investigations Peripatetica is still
futilely engaged in her persistent endeavour to combat in the European
mind its strange delusion as to the real relations of the sexes in her
own land.
... “No; the American man in no respect resembles the Sicilian donkey
... no; he does not ordinarily spend his life toiling humbly under the
intolerable loads laid upon him by his imperious mate.... No; he is not
a dull unintelligent drudge wholly unworthy of the radiant beings who
permit him to surround them with an incredible luxury.... No; the
American woman is not his intellectual superior. In everything of real
practical importance _he_ is immensely the superior.... No; he isn’t
this.... No; he isn’t that.... He isn’t any one of the things the
European thinks he is and—good bye!”
The mountains all this while have been peaking up; mounting, climbing,
rolling more wildly, and at last two of them soar splendidly, sweep up
close on to three thousand feet into the sky ... Castrogiovanni and
Calascibetta, and the train drops Jane and Peripatetica at their feet.
Memory has cast out, or has pushed into the background, the long weary
jolting up to the wild little wind-swept town; makes no record of the
hotel or the fellow tourists; has jotted down a certain straight wild
beauty in the inhabitants, who have eagle-like Saracen profiles, but
grey Norman eyes. Has left well in the foreground a dark castle, and a
cluster of half-ruined towers. All else of modern details she has
rejected, except a great wash of blue, a vast vista of tumbling broken
landscape, huge and stern, for she has been busy with a picture of the
past; building up an imagination of vanished gods moving about their
mighty affairs, playing out Olympian dramas in this lofty land. Here is
the very centre of the God’s-land, the “umbilicus Siciliæ,” the Key of
Sicily, Enna “the inexpugnable,” the strongest natural fortress in the
world, which no one ever took except by treachery; which the Saracens
besieged in vain for thirty-one years, and when they finally got it,
through a treason, the Normans in their turn could not dislodge them
until all Sicily had been theirs for a quarter of a century, and then
only through another betrayal. In the great slave war Eunus, the serf,
held it against the whole power of Rome for two years until he too was
betrayed.
Broken and wild as is the land it is still cultivated; the olive still
climbs up to where the clouds come down, but where are the magnificent
forests, the wonder and joy of antiquity? Where the brooks and streams
and lakes, whose dropping waters sang all through the records of the
elder world? Where are those fields so blessed by Demeter that they
offered to the hands of men illimitable floods of golden grain? Where
are the vines that wreathed the mountains’ brows with green and purple
grapes, as if it had been the brow of Dionysius the wine god? Where,
too, are the meadows so thick with flowers that for the richness of the
perfume the hounds could not hold the scent of the game? Meadows where
the bees wantoned in such honeyed delight that the air vibrated with
their murmuring as with the vibrating of multitudinous harp strings?...
Listen to the story, which, when it was told was only a prophecy and a
warning, but a warning never heeded.
Erysicthon cuts down the grove sacred to Demeter. A grove so thick “that
an arrow could hardly pass through; its pines and fruit trees and tall
poplars within, and the water like pale gold running through the
conduits.” One of the poplars receives the first stroke, and Demeter,
hearing the ringing of the axe, appears, stern and awful, hooded and
veiled, and carrying poppies in her hand. To the ravager of her groves
she threatens a divine curse of an everlasting thirst, of an insatiable,
unsatisfied hunger, and the workmen, awed, depart, leaving the axes
sticking in the trees, but Erysicthon drives them to their task again
with blows, and soon the grove is levelled, and the heat of the day
enters where once all was sweet shade. Erysicthon laughs at the futile
curse of the goddess; he has had his will and nothing has happened. The
water still runs and he can slake his drought, but the water escapes as
he stoops for it, sinking into the earth before his eyes, leaving upon
his lips only choking dust. No one can safely ignore the warnings of the
gods, and he wanders, whipped by intolerable longings, and dies
dreadfully, raving of his own folly.
Neither Greeks, Romans, Saracens, nor Norman heed this parable, told
ages and ages before the meaning of the loss of forests was understood.
All over the land the clothing of oaks, chestnuts, and pines was
stripped from the hills, and slowly but surely the curse of Demeter has
turned it into a place of thirst. To-day less than five per cent of the
whole island contains timber, and these high lands, these “fields which
in the days of the Greeks returned one hundred times the amount of seed
sowed, now yield but seven-fold, and only one-ninth of all the land is
productive.” This is the story of the ravaging of Enna, once the true
garden of Paradise, and now a rocky waste burned to the bone.
* * * * *
[Illustration: “ÆTNA, THE SALIENT FACT OF SICILY”]
Always from the very earliest records the goddess of the harvest was
worshipped in this place. Long before the coming of the Greeks the
Siculians had here a shrine to Gaia, the Earth Mother, from whose brown
breast man sucked his life and food. And the Siculians had traditions of
the Sikels making pilgrimages to Enna to give thanks to a goddess
representing some principle of fertility, by whose power the earth was
made blessed to its children. Very vague and shadowy are the traditions
of the worship of this Bread-giver. There are hints of a great cave with
a rude dark figure within, this idol having, curiously, a head roughly
resembling the head of a horse, where the people timidly laid their
offerings of the first fruits of their primitive culture. This figure is
heard of later at Eleusis, to which the Greeks transpose the image and
the worship, but the myth, so sympathetic to the Greek nature, becomes
refined and spiritualized; takes on many new plays of thought and
colour, and when the great temple of Demeter is built here the story has
cleared and defined itself, and is hung about with the garlands of a
thousand gracious imaginings.
Our Lady of Bread—daughter herself of Zeus, the overarching sky—has one
child, Persephone, the spirit of Spring, that dear vernal impulse which
rejuvenates all the world and “puts a spirit of life in everything”;
that is forever sweetly renewing hope of happiness. Persephone’s
playmates are the maiden goddesses, Pallas and Artemis, and also those
light spirits of the fields, the water and the air—the nymphs, the
oreads, and the oceanides—but she is not without duties and labours too,
for “Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was
working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to be
in vain. In it she marked out with her needle the houses of the gods and
the series of the elements, showing by what law nature, the parent of
all, settled the strife of ancient times.... The lighter elements are
borne aloft; the air grows bright with heat; the sea flows; the earth
hangs in its place. And there were divers colours in it; she illuminated
the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the water, and
heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and under her skilful hand
the threads with their inwrought lustre swell up in counterfeit of the
waves; you might think the sea wind caused them to creep over the rocks
and sands. She put in the fire zones, marking with a red ground the
midmost zone possessed by burning heat; on either side lay the two zones
proper for human life, and at the extremes she drew the twin zones of
numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with the lines of perpetual
frost. She works in, too, the sacred places of Dis and the Manes so
fatal to her. And an omen of her doom was not wanting, for as she
worked, as if with foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with
a sudden burst of tears. And now in the utmost border of the tissue she
had begun to wind in the wavy line of the Ocean that goes round about
all, but the door sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the goddesses
coming; the unfinished work drops from her hands and a ruddy blush
lights her clear and snow-white face.”...
Leaving her needle in the many-coloured web, she wanders down the
mountain side to Lake Pergusa, then lying like a blue jewel in enamelled
meads, but ever since that tragic day dark and sulphurous, as with fumes
of hell.
This is the story of the ravishment, as told in the great Homeric Hymn
that was sung in honour of the Mother of Corn.
“I begin the song of Demeter. The song of Demeter and her daughter
Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away as she played apart from her
mother with the deep-bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers
in a meadow of soft grass—roses and the crocus and the fair violets and
flags and hyacinths, and above all the strange flower of the narcissus,
which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the
first time to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A hundred
heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the sky and the earth
and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent thereof. She
stretched forth her hands to take the flower; thereupon the earth opened
and the King of the great nation of the Dead sprang out with his
immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and bore her away weeping
on his golden chariot. She uttered a shrill cry, calling upon Zeus; but
neither man nor god heard her voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow
where she played; except Hecate only, sitting as ever in her cave, half
veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts, she, and the
Sun also, heard her.
“So long as Persephone could still see the earth and the sky and the sea
with the great waves moving, and the beams of the sun, and still thought
to see again her mother, and the race of the ever-living gods, so long
hope soothed her in the midst of her grief. The peaks of the hills and
the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the Mother heard it. A sharp
pain seized her at the heart; she plucked the veil from her hair, and
cast down the blue hood from her shoulders, and fled forth like a bird,
seeking her daughter over dry land and sea.
“Nine days she wandered up and down upon the earth, having blazing
torches in her hands, and in her great sorrow she refused to taste of
ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her face. But
when the tenth morning came Hecate met her, having a light in her hands.
But Hecate had heard the voice only, and had seen no one, and could not
tell Demeter who had borne the girl away. And Demeter said not a word,
but fled away swiftly with Hecate, having the blazing torches in her
hands, till they came to the Sun, the watchman of Gods and men; and the
goddess questioned him, and the Sun told her the whole story.”...
What a picture the Greek singer makes of the melancholy earth calling
for comfort to the moon! for Hecate was not Artemis, but a vaguer,
vaster principle of the night; an impersonalized shadow of the Huntress,
as Hertha was the shadow, formless and tremendous, of Demeter. Hecate
was a pale luminous force, “half veiled with a shining veil, and
thinking delicate thoughts,” and ten days later, having rounded to the
full, the bereaved mother meets her “bearing a light in her hands,”
though the night is nearing morning, and moon and earth turn together
toward the coming sun.
The Homeric Hymn tells much of the wandering and grieving mother; of her
disguises; of her nursing of the sick child Demophoon, whose own mother
snatched him back from the immortality which the goddess was ensuring by
passing him through the fire—as many a loving and timid mother since has
held her son back from the fires that confer immortality. The Hymn tells
of her teaching of Triptolemus of the winged feet, instructing him in
Eleusinian mysteries—“those mysteries which no tongue may speak. Only
blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as
the lot of other men!”
But Jane and Peripatetica loved more the story of the ending of her
vigil, when Hermes descended into Hell in his chariot.
“And Persephone ascended into it, and Hermes took the reins in his hands
and drove out through the infernal halls; and they two passed quickly
over the ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor
of the rivers, and the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the
shore resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before the
door of the temple where her mother was, who, seeing her, ran out
quickly to meet her, like a Mænad coming down a mountain side dusky with
woods.”
So these two saw Persephone come home; saw the spring return to the
earth in the high places of the gods. Saw the land, even though no
longer a paradise, yet—despite Erysicthon’s foolish waste of the sacred
trees—saw it “laden with leaves and flowers and the waving corn,” and,
having seen it, they passed on through Sicily satisfied.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Decoration]