Henry Festing Jones

“ Pasquino is like Love, he is not Time’s fool. Never having been born, he can never die, and never to die is to be immortal. Accordingly, whenever a comic servant is wanted, whether as a messenger from a castle which is being stormed by Samson, or to assist a Grand Turk or a drunkard of no definite period, or to accompany a paladin on a journey, be put into prison with him and help him to escape, or merely on behalf of the proprietor of the show to invite the people to to-morrow’s performance, Pasquino is always there, with his dialect and his comic relief, to undertake the job. ”

“ But Peppino said that in some respects Donizetti was a better man than Dante; he was smoother and better tempered, “and many things like this.” Peppino had been brought up, like every Italian, to worship Dante, but when he went to London and mastered the English language, when he began to read our literature and to think for himself, then he saw that Dante was “un falso idolo.” Every nation gets the poet she deserves and Italy has her faults; but what, asked Peppino, what has Italy done to deserve her dreary Dante? ”

“ Peppino received the proposition without enthusiasm, saying she was her own mistress and I could do as I liked.
“But first,” he said, “there shall be a contraddanza; did you know what is contraddanza? All right, I shall tell you. A dancing man shall be crying to the people to do and they shall do, but if to don’t know, better to don’t dance or would come confusion; better to see and to expect.”
“All right, Peppino,” I said. “I don’t know enough about it; I will look on and wait, and when it is over I shall ask Brancaccia to dance a waltz with me.” ”

“ When the angel carried up to heaven the soul of Guido Santo, did he never fight another battle? The young men of your island hardly think so; their thoughts and actions are still coloured by the magnificent language and the chivalrous exploits of Christian and Turk. As long as there is an imaginative shoeblack in the Quattro Canti working for pennies by day, so long will those pennies be paid for the story to be told by night in the marionette theatre. Often will Angelica recover her ring, and as often be robbed of it again ”

“ Three or four miles inland from Trapani, at the north-west corner of Sicily, rises a precipitous solitary mountain, nearly 2500 feet high, with a town on the top. A motor bus makes a circuit of the mountain, taking one up to the town in about an hour. It proceeds inland, past the church of the Annunziata, the famous shrine of the Madonna di Trapani, and the ascent soon begins. As one looks back towards the sea, Trapani gradually assumes the form that gave it its Greek name of Drepanum, for it juts out towards the island of Levanzo like a sickle “with the sea roaring all round it.” ”

“ All the children of artists can do as well as she, but no one can really act who has not suffered. He himself used to act quite as well as Lola, but had not appeared on the stage for a long while—not since he had been at school. He could do better now.
“When I see the others acting,” he said, “I am not moved, it is like reading an index. But when I see Giovanni, it is all different, it is like reading a romance and it makes me cry.”
He found fault with some of the plays for not being worthy of the actor. ”

“ Sicilians always want to speak English, especially those of the lower orders who invariably consider it as a master-key that will open every door leading to wealth. Sometimes what they say is, of course, nothing more than otiose compliment; sometimes they are merely introducing the subject of their want of money in an artistic manner in the hope of anything from a soldo to a promise to take them into service as valet, courier, coachman, or whatever it may be—a sort of shaking of Fortune’s bag to see what will come out. ”

“ What was Giovanni doing at supper? Is Giovanni only an actor when on the stage and when everything he says and does has been thought out? Is he a great actor by virtue of producing the illusion of being a Lola? And is Lola not really an actress at all, because she has not prepared what she is doing and is not even trying to produce any illusion? What is acting? And what is realism? ”

“ Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for no Sicilian objects to noise.
This is what I gathered: Angelica had come from far Cathay with the express intention of sowing discord among the paladins by inducing them to fall in love with her, and at the present moment Sacripante and the Duca d’Avilla were her victims. These two knights met in a wood, raised their vizors and talked matters over; there was to be a fight about it, of course, but the preliminaries were to be conducted in a friendly spirit—like a test case in Chancery. ”

“ The people, however, look upon it less as a work of art than as the representation of a divinity who lives for them as surely as Venus lived for the Romans, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Astarte for the Phœnicians, and as surely as other goddesses have lived here for other peoples. Cofano, looking across to Mount Eryx, saw the earliest appear on some prehistoric morning when man, born of a woman and living by the fruits of the earth, fashioned his first image of the Giver of Life and Increase, vivified it with the spirit of his faith and offered before it the homage of his praise and gratitude. ”

“ And then, again, in Catania a glimpse of the hand of an operator or of some one standing in the wings offended at once as a blot on the performance. But looking at the small figures at Trapani one accepted them almost immediately as men and women, and forgot all about absolute size, so that when the hand of an operator appeared and it was larger than the head of a marionette, it seemed to belong to another world, while a real man standing in the wings could not be seen above his knees, and it required a mental effort to connect his boots and trousers in any way with the performance. ”

“ An Englishman may be a mass of prejudices, but I confess I did not like the idea of hob-nobbing with a would-be parricide and determined that Rosario should not drive me any more; if I wanted a carriage, Carmelo should get leave of his padrone and take me.
Next morning, while I was having my coffee, there was a sound of passing music; I recognized it as belonging to a funeral, and asked Peppino if he knew who was dead. Several people were dead and he did not know which this was, unless it was old Baldassare; it must be either a married woman or a grown-up man. ”

“ For a long time they met with no response, but when they were nearing Cofano, every sailor heard a voice, as though coming from the picture and declaring that the Madonna desired to be landed on the neighbouring coast. Whereupon they bound themselves by a vow that if they reached land in safety they would build a sanctuary then and there in memory of their miraculous preservation. ”

“ Any two of these arts cover some ground in common where they can meet, unite and give birth to another distinct art related to both as a child is related to its parents, and inheriting qualities from both. It is to these happy marriages that we owe drama—the offspring of literature and painting; song—the offspring of literature and music; and dance—the offspring of music and painting. This gives us altogether six creative arts. ”

“ They say the marionettes are for the lower orders and accuse them of being responsible for many of the quarrels we read about in the newspapers. The people become so fascinated by the glamour of the romance in which they live night after night that they imitate in private life the chivalrous behaviour of the warriors they see fighting in the little theatres, and thus what may begin as a playful reminiscence of something in last night’s performance occasionally leads to a too accurate imitation of one of last night’s combats and perhaps ends in a fatal wound. ”

“ The road took us inland and round the foot of Mount Eryx, through Paparella and the other villages where some of the wealthy Trapanese have their summer villas, and after a most lovely drive of three hours, we arrived at Custonaci. The village is on a low rocky cliff which rises not from the sea but from an extensive plain. Standing on the cliff one looks over the plain with Monte San Giuliano closing the view on the left and on the right the mountain promontory of Cofano, a great, isolated, solemn, grey rock, full of caves, sprinkled with green and splashed with raw sienna ”

“ Now the Marsala was very good and, according to Vanni, could be put upon the market at a very low price, but I foresaw difficulties. Knowing that he had sung in opera in Naples, Palermo, Malta and many other places, I asked if he liked music. He said he adored it. Music, he declared, was the most precious gift of God to man—more precious even than poetry. He had his box at the opera and always occupied it during the season. And he enjoyed music of all kinds, not only the modern operas of Mascagni, Puccini and so on, but also the old music of Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini. ”

“ In Sicily the marionettes who tell the story of the Paladins do not lay themselves out to be of a mechanism so ingenious that they shall appear to be alive; such illusion as they do produce, like the incompetent illustration to Shakespeare which Lamb preferred, is insufficient to cripple the imagination of the audience who are the more intimately touched by the romance of the story and by the voice of the speaker. ”

“ I did the same to him; he took up the bottle, flourished it in the air, sprinkling every one of us with wine, and then flung it away empty over our heads, so that it crashed down on the pavement and the pieces skated across the piazza, bang up against the opposite house. Thus we baptized our friendship and in a fresh bottle drank to its eternal continuance. He then became Carlo Magno again and declared that I was padrone of the theatre, and that if I did not come every night to see him act, and to supper afterwards, there would be an eruption of Mount Etna and he would never speak to me again. ”

“ I said that if there was to be any good fortune for me I should like it to take the form of curing the cold which, for my sins, I had caught that morning as I came out of the sanctuary. The guard who believed in the moth—after returning my compliment about the cooking by saying I must be wrong to talk about my sins, for he was sure I had never committed any—said that as to the kind of luck the moth would bring, Fortune would not submit to dictation, the most I could do to control her would be to look out farfalla notturna in the book and put a few soldi on the number in the next lottery. ”

“ Both Samson and the giant were as mistaken as they were powerful, but Samson, by virtue of his weakness, was the stronger man, for, while the giant’s brutality aroused our hatred, Samson’s nobility compelled our love. ”

“ Custonaci, however, one of the villages of the comune, did not spring up in this way and is of older date than the others.
The peculiar charm of the mountain cannot be fully realized unless one visits it at all seasons and in all weathers. I have been there in the winter; the summit was hidden in a cloud which, as we drove up into it, obscured the view and chilled the marrow. It was before the days of the motor, when a horse bus did the journey by a shorter route in about three hours. I was on the box with the coachman who gave me a spare cloak with a hood to keep me dry and warm. ”

“ The arrival of the professor led Peppino into giving me a great deal of information about the evil eye in which he swore he did not believe. It was all rather indefinite and contradictory, partly, no doubt, because those who believe in it most firmly are the analfabeti and unaccustomed to express themselves clearly.
The prevailing idea seems to be that an evil influence proceeds from the eye of the jettatore who is not necessarily a bad person, at least he need not be desirous of hurting any one. ”

“ Pipino lost himself while out hunting one day, took refuge in the cottage, saw Berta, did not recognize his lawful, wedded wife and fell in love with her over again. Carlo Magno was born in due course in the cottage, and his second name was given to him, not for the prosaic reason that it means the Great, but because it is the name of the river. The bastards afterwards murder their father, which is a warning to any bridegroom among the audience to be careful not to mistake another lady for his bride upon the wedding night. And thus Romance becomes the handmaid of Morality. ”

“ Why was I so indulgent towards Carmelo and so implacable to Rosario? It seems as though an Englishman may also be a mass of contradictions. It is true that parricide is perhaps the most repulsive form that murder can take, but I do not think this had anything to do with it, for ordinary murder is sufficiently repulsive. ”

“ Then man, seeing that virtue had gone out of the work of his hands, fashioned a new one, scarcely different in form, and breathed into it the breath of a new faith, scarcely different from the old. Again his faith carried with it into its stagnant prison the germs of its own decay. ”

“ But every one knows that horses have had names, both in romance and real life, from the days of Pegasus to our own. Mario calls his horses Gaspare, after one of the Three Kings, and Totò, which is a form of Salvatore. They were so called before he bought them, or he would have named them Baiardo and Brigliadoro. Having no sword, he calls his whip la Durlindana. He assured me that the barber whom he employs calls all his razors by the names of the swords of the paladins, and that the shoe-blacks give similar names to their brushes. ”