Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily, and the brigands kept their word and gave him half.

I was at Taormina in 1883—it was a quiet place then with only two small inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now—and I was reading in Goethe’s diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the sea and planned Nausikaa, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more than sixty lines. I am only a Wahrheit man myself, and have no Dichtung in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left broken-hearted at each place where he stayed.

A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and he walked into a brook he did not see: hence Del mar Tirreno. And one day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence Rock of Ages. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.

Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off.

Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the Odyssey, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji Baba was to Morier—a character of whom he could narrate all manner of tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they first thought of planting colonies there.

For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.—as Herodotos avers, ii. 53—and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the Pope.

There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic maklûbah, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then, and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.

Apart from its great cone, Etna has always given me the notion of a big Bath Bun, the little cones being the lollipops. It covers more than four hundred square miles—twice the whole extent of Dartmoor—and it is only two miles high. It looks best at long distances, where the lower part is hidden and the cone stands out: the best view I ever had of it, was from a steamer going from Brindisi to Malta. With little more than a third of the height, Vesuvius made more show. But it is sad to see Vesuvius now, after the eruption of 1906: the cone fell in, and that has deprived the mountain of its former grace. Volcanoes have these ups and downs. I always wish I could have seen the rise of Monte Nuovo on the other side of the bay. It is 450 feet in height, and rose up from level ground in the course of a few hours.

We have an extinct volcano here, only half a mile from this house. One sees geologists going round there now and then with their little bags and hammers and going off with specimens. An eminent geologist came lecturing here in 1906, and he spoke of volcanoes breaking out again after long periods of calm, such outbreaks being usually most violent. One of the listeners was much disturbed at hearing this, and thought it hardly worth his while to go on putting in potatoes near such a dangerous place. So he inquired when that hillock were a-likely to be bustin’ forth. With the spaciousness of a true geologist, the lecturer replied, “In the science of geology a period of thirty thousand years is relatively....” The man went on with his potatoes.

Though living on the edge of a volcano, I do not worry about eruptions, but only about earthquakes. I can remember two earthquakes in England—I felt the shock in 1884 but slept through it in 1868—and I have seen what earthquakes do abroad (especially at Chios in 1881) and I do not want a heavy earthquake here. In these valleys it would be overwhelming. The hillsides are strewn with granite rocks that have weathered away till they have nearly lost their hold upon the ground—some actually are Logans and go seesaw—and a smart shock would send them racing down into the valleys below. Sometimes I see a rabbit start a stone off down a hill; and, when the stone comes bouncing by, I picture what would happen if the stone weighed ten or fifteen tons, and hundreds of such stones were coming like an avalanche.