Sicily was a solid and stubborn reality thousands of years before Theocritus struck his pastoral lyre; but its most obvious quality was atmospheric. It was compacted of facts, but they were seen not as a camera sees, but as an artist sees; not in sharp outline and hard actuality, but softened by a flood of light which melts all hard lines in a landscape vibrant and shimmering. Our landscape-painters are now reporting Nature as Theocritus saw her in Sicily; the value of the overtone matching the value of the under-tone, to quote an artist’s phrase, "apply these tones in right proportions," writes Mr. Harrison, "and you will find that the sky painted with the perfectly matched tone will fly away indefinitely, will be bathed in a perfect atmosphere." We who have for a time lost the poetic mood and strayed from the poet’s standpoint paint the undertones with entire fidelity; but we do not paint in the overtones, and the landscape loses the luminous and vibrant quality which comes into it when the sky rains light upon it. We see with the accuracy of the camera; we do not see with the vision of the poet, in which reality is not sacrificed, but subdued to larger uses. We insist on the scientific fact; the poet is intent on the visual fact. The one gives the bare structure of the landscape; the other gives us its color, atmosphere, charm. Here, perhaps, is the real difference between Cape Cod and Sicily. It is not so much a contrast between encircling seas and the sand-ridge and rock-ridge as between the two ways of seeing, the scientific and the poetic.
The difference of soils must also be taken into account. The soil of history on Cape Cod is almost as thin as the physical soil, which is so light and detached that it is blown about by all the winds of heaven. In Sicily, on the other hand, the soil is so much a part of the substance of the island that the sirocco must bring from the shores of Africa the fine particles with which it tortures men. On Cape Cod there are a few colonial traditions, many heroic memories of brave deeds in awful seas, some records of prosperous daring in fishing-ships, and then the advent of the summer colonists; a creditable history, but of so recent date that it has not developed the fructifying power of a rich soil, out of which atmosphere rises like an exhalation. In Sicily, on the other hand, the soil of history is so deep that the spade of the archæeologist has not touched bottom, and even the much-toiling Freeman found four octavo volumes too cramped to tell the whole story, and mercifully stopped at the death of Agathocles.
Since the beginning of history, which means only the brief time since we began to remember events, everybody has gone to Sicily, and most people have stayed there until they were driven on, or driven out, by later comers; and almost everybody has been determined to keep the island for himself, and set about it with an ingenuity and energy of slaughter which make the movement toward universal peace seem pallid and nerveless. It is safe to say that on no bit of ground of equal area has more history been enacted than in Sicily; and when Theocritus was young, Sicily was already venerable with years and experience.
Now, history, using the word as signifying things which have happened, although enacted on the ground, gets into the air, and one often feels it before he knows it. In this volatile and pervasive form it is diffused over the landscape and becomes atmospheric; and atmosphere, it must be remembered, bears the same relation to air that the countenance bears to the face: it reveals and expresses what is behind the physical features. There is hardly a half-mile of Sicily below the upper ridges of Ætna that has not been fought over; and the localities are few which cannot show the prints of the feet of the gods or of the heroes who were their children.
It was a very charming picture on which the curtain was rolled up when history began, but the island was not a theater in which men sat at ease and looked at Persephone in the arms of Pluto; it was an arena in which race followed close upon race, like the waves of the sea, each rising a little higher and gaining a little wider sweep, and each leaving behind not only wreckage, but layers of soil potent in vitality. The island was as full of strange music, of haunting presences, of far-off memories of tragedy, as the island of the Tempest: it bred its Calibans, but it bred also its Prosperos. For the imagination is nourished by rich associations as an artist is fed by a beautiful landscape; and in Sicily men grew up in an invisible world of memories that spread a heroic glamor over desolate places and kept Olympus within view of the mountain pastures where rude shepherds cut their pipes:
"A pipe discoursing through nine mouths I made, full fair to view;
The wax is white thereon, the line of this and that edge true."
The soil of history may be so rich that it nourishes all manner of noxious things side by side with flowers of glorious beauty; this is the price we pay for fertility. A thin soil, on the other hand, sends a few flowers of delicate structure and haunting fragrance into the air, like the arbutus and the witchiana, which express the clean, dry sod of Cape Cod, and are symbolic of the poverty and purity of its history. Thoreau reports that in one place he saw advertised, "Fine sand for sale here," and he ventures the suggestion that "some of the street" had been sifted. And, possibly, with a little tinge of malice after his long fight with winds and shore-drifts, he reports that "in some pictures of Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand." "Nevertheless," he continues, "natives of Provincetown assured me that they could walk in the middle of the road without trouble, even in slippers, for they had learned how to put their feet down and lift them up without taking in any sand." On a soil so light and porous there is a plentiful harvesting of health and substantial comfort, but not much chance of poetry.
In the country of Theocritus there was great chance for poetry; not because anybody was taught anything, but because everybody was born in an atmosphere that was a diffused poetry. If this had not been true, the poet could not have spread a soft mist of poesy over the whole island: no man works that kind of magic unaided; he compounds his potion out of simples culled from the fields round him. Theocritus does not disguise the rudeness of the life he describes; goat-herds and he-goats are not the conventional properties of the poetic stage. The poet was without a touch of the drawing-room consciousness of crude things, though he knew well softness and charm of life in Syracuse under a tyrant who did not "patronize the arts," but was instructed by them. To him the distinction between poetic and unpoetic things was not in the appearance, but in the root. He was not ashamed of Nature as he found her, and he never apologized for her coarseness by avoiding things not fit for refined eyes. His shepherds and goat-herds are often gross and unmannerly, and as stuffed with noisy abuse as Shakespeare’s people in "Richard III." Lacon and Cometas, rival poets of the field, are having a controversy, and this is the manner of their argument:
"LACON
"When learned I from thy practice or thy preaching aught that’s right,
Thou puppet, thou mis-shapen lump of ugliness and spite?