Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare gold
Is like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
As long ago as the Twelfth Century, the brilliant, unfettered mind of the Eighteenth Century was active in Sicily. The Renaissance would have begun earlier, if Europe had been able to comprehend, and then seize the astonishing intellectual development of this little island.
I used to wonder where Wagner drew the impetus, the power, for the sacred music of the close of Parsifal, with its dizzy heights of impassioned vision. Now I know. It was from religious paintings done in gold and gems, by inspired Twelfth Century builders, here in Sicily. He caught fire from a great age of faith.
Goethe, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, knew that this was a land drenched with a kind of power that was passing. He lived here long. And daily he went to write in a lovely garden, called Villa Giulia, and he, too, had hard work to drag himself away. Hence the fable, perhaps, of the Sirens. The Square of the Great Cathedral (partly Moorish) is perhaps the loveliest thing I ever looked upon, save old Venetian Palaces. And it haunts me still, like the Grand Canal of Venice, under some unforgettable light.
The giant-bodied, blond, Norse sea-kings who came were robbers. But that which was Greece and the Orient touched them mightily. They became followers of the Christ, planned Crusades, married princesses of France, and all the time dwelled in a Moorish Court and spoke both the tongues of the East and the West. Here East and West met, then blended. A superstition was shattered.
We visited the graveyard where sleep Roger of Sicily and his descendant, Manfred, of whom Byron wrote, men who helped make the civilization of Europe. Here again I am on the trail of Loti. He declared this graveyard is the loveliest in the world save one—Eyoub—in Stamboul.
It is a long hot journey by rail to cross Sicily in summer. It is a day spent amid pale yellow fields of ripening grain. They shimmered like canary-hued satin. I recalled that it was to raise grain for the Caesars, and forget his long sad years of service in the East, that Pontius Pilate came here to end his days. A French writer makes him say: “Il me fallut ... sous le coup d’une disgrace immeritée....
I was held by the blow of unmerited disgrace. Swallowing my tears, my heart filled with bitterness, I retired to my Sicilian estates, where I should have died of loneliness, if my daughter Pontia had not come to console me. Here I raised grain, the finest in the land. Today life is over. Let the future judge between me and Vitellius.”