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HEART OF MAN

BY

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY



COPYRIGHT 1899,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

1899



"Deep in the general heart of man"

--WORDSWORTH





TO THE MEMORY OF

EUGENE MONTGOMERY

MY FRIEND


DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'TWERE TO ME,
  ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT;
IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE
  HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT


February 18, 1899.




PREFACE


OF the papers contained in this volume
"Taormina" was published in the _Century
Magazine_; the others are new. The intention
of the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics,
and religion are the flowering of the same
human spirit, and have their feeding roots in
a common soil, "deep in the general heart of
men."

COLUMBIA COLLEGE,

February 22, 1809.




CONTENTS


TAORMINA

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY

DEMOCRACY

THE RIDE




TAORMINA


I

What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village
to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the
darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the
pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne
up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina.
There is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality of
mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping
upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. At
morning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights above
me. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop
Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek
the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a
thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer
height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined
citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward
its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other
horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old
castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a
hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over these
hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they
darken threateningly, and creep softly down the <DW72>s, and fill the
next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of
Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the
other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face
down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the
cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the
profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which
delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic
moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of
recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the
Sicilian landscape.

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger
anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not
only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come.
When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain
tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there
too,--that which I have always known,--but marvellously transformed and
heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the
offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I
have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of
cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still
tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of
noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure
emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what
has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for
my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of
mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a
near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes
of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All
day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself
has taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats
the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour
before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion is
conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes
the recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of
Etna."

The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is
the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never
known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw
nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the
valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is
not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or
ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like
Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon
Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses,
lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the
clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it
draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends
it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its
face: it is the Sicilian winter.


II

But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this
season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back
the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in
impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casement
and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter,
expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds
spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the
snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages
and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay
the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away.
From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the <DW72> measures more than
twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western
fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so
large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the
distance of the stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed snows,
and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds
innumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain.
How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea and
of the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and I
rejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of
heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud.


III

Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair,
pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of
Taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the
small temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It is
such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever
commanded a more noble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or five
hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each
hand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the
rising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with the
Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the
Cape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front
expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay
and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great
blue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills
the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid
cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the
intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, to
the round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long shoreward
descent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with its
hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further
off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte
Venere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, and
northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range.

A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically
grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the
impression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and
dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but
constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells
unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltation
which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit
of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this
landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its
perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather,
and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the
eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer
features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill of my
station falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and then
becomes the Cape of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea.
Yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance and
strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of Sant' Andrea, and
beside it a cluster of small islands lies nearer inshore. On the other
side, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, the
village of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white
main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands.
The port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where
ancient Naxos stood; and just beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plain
and flows to the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' Andrea,
is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eight
miles away, the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the shore view
with a mass of rock that in former times completely shut off the land
approach hither, there being no passage over it, and none around it
except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. All this ground,
with in several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the Alcantara, and
beyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of Taormina.

The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore and
the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out
into the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, the
site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite
shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between,
possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines of
the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic
tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand
out among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like
oblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If
you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, which
overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the
town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the
plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the
gate toward Messina.

The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine of
Taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are
terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock
permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less
steep <DW72>, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive trees
cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe
the country. It is gray to look at, because of the masses of natural
rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the
terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone.
The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear,
whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and
often extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green to
the scene. This plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man's
height, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. A
closer view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at
my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or run
over the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in the
prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray of
Taormina--this is the scene.

Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage
road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the
northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo
below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly
opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses
above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. The
second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna,
and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern
spur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill)
closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent
of Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way,
leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge
between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with
here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a
sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign
of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands
by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main
road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a
hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge;
one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land,
exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the
castle.

This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor,
how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent
beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This
theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by
great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick
strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour
and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in
position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet
whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the
long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame.
Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The
enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many
thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the
roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I
entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the
round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and
mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the
fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a
mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I
come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces
of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the
ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout