II

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.”

It is strange to me, who lived—as chronology would say—in the same age

as Butler, and in the same London, and only a minute’s walk from him, to

think that I should yet never have met him save on the lips of the

peasants of Calatafimi, lips that spoke only Sicilian.