These Men Are Still In
The Age Of Platitudes, So Far As Music Is Concerned; An Infantile Aria
Is To Them What Some Foolish Rhymed Proverb Is To The Arabs:
A thing of
God, a portent, a joy for ever.
You may visit the cathedral; there is a fine verde antico column on
either side of the sumptuous main portal. I am weary, just now, of these
structures; the spirit of pagan Lucera - "Lucera dei Pagani" it used to
be called - has descended upon me; I feel inclined to echo Carducci's
"Addio, nume semitico!" One sees so many of these sombre churches,
and they are all alike in their stony elaboration of mysticism and
wrong-headedness; besides, they have been described, over and over
again, by enthusiastic connaisseurs who dwell lovingly upon their
artistic quaintnesses but forget the grovelling herd that reared them,
with the lash at their backs, or the odd type of humanity - the gargoyle
type - that has since grown up under their shadow and influence.
I prefer to return to the sun and stars, to my promenade beside
the castle walls.
But for the absence of trees and hedges, one might take this to be some
English prospect of the drowsy Midland counties - so green it is, so
golden-grey the sky. The sunlight peers down dispersedly through windows
in this firmament of clouded amber, alighting on some mouldering tower,
some patch of ripening corn or distant city - Troia, lapped in Byzantine
slumber, or San Severo famed in war. This in spring. But what days of
glistering summer heat, when the earth is burnt to cinders under a
heavenly dome that glows like a brazier of molten copper! For this
country is the Sahara of Italy.
One is glad, meanwhile, that the castle does not lie in the natal land
of the Hohenstaufen. The interior is quite deserted, to be sure; they
have built half the town of Lucera with its stones, even as Frederick
quarried them out of the early Roman citadel beneath; but it is at least
a harmonious desolation. There are no wire-fenced walks among the ruins,
no feeding-booths and cheap reconstructions of draw-bridges and
police-notices at every corner; no gaudy women scribbling to their
friends in the "Residenzstadt" post cards illustrative of the
"Burgruine," while their husbands perspire over mastodontic beer-jugs.
There is only peace.
These are the delights of Lucera: to sit under those old walls and watch
the gracious cloud-shadows dappling the plain, oblivious of yonder
assemblage of barbers and politicians. As for those who can reconstruct
the vanished glories of such a place - happy they! I find the task
increasingly difficult. One outgrows the youthful age of hero-worship;
next, our really keen edges are so soon worn off by mundane trivialities
and vexations that one is glad to take refuge in simpler pleasures once
more - to return to primitive emotionalism. There are so many Emperors of
past days! And like the old custodian, I have not so much as set eyes on
them.
Yet this Frederick is no dim figure; he looms grandly through the
intervening haze. How well one understands that craving for the East,
nowadays; how modern they were, he and his son the "Sultan of Lucera,"
and their friends and counsellors, who planted this garden of exotic
culture! Was it some afterglow of the luminous world that had sunk below
the horizon, or a pale streak of the coming dawn? And if you now glance
down into this enclosure that once echoed with the song of minstrels
and the soft laughter of women, with the discourse of wits, artists and
philosophers, and the clang of arms - if you look, you will behold
nothing but a green lake, a waving field of grass. No matter. The
ambitions of these men are fairly realized, and every one of us may keep
a body-guard of pagans, an't please him; and a harem likewise - to judge
by the newspapers.
For he took his Orientalism seriously; he had a harem, with eunuchs,
etc., all proper, and was pleased to give an Eastern colour to his
entertainments. Matthew Paris relates how Frederick's brother-in-law,
returning from the Holy Land, rested awhile at his Italian court, and
saw, among other diversions, "duas puellas Saracenicas formosas, quae in
pavimenti planitie binis globis insisterent, volutisque globis huo
illucque ferrentur canentes, cymbala manibus collidentes, corporaque
secundum modules motantes atque flectentes." I wish I had been there. . . .
I walked to the castle yesterday evening on the chance of seeing an
eclipse of the moon which never came, having taken place at quite
another hour. A cloudless night, dripping with moisture, the electric
lights of distant Foggia gleaming in the plain. There are brick-kilns at
the foot of the incline, and from some pools in the neighbourhood issued
a loud croaking of frogs, while the pallid smoke of the furnaces,
pressed down by the evening dew, trailed earthward in a long twisted
wreath, like a dragon crawling sulkily to his den. But on the north side
one could hear the nightingales singing in the gardens below. The dark
mass of Mount Gargano rose up clearly in the moonlight, and I began to
sketch out some itinerary of my wanderings on that soil. There was Sant'
Angelo, the archangel's abode; and the forest region; and Lesina with
its lake; and Vieste the remote, the end of all things. . . .
Then my thoughts wandered to the Hohenstaufen and the conspiracy whereby
their fate was avenged. The romantic figures of Manfred and Conradin;
their relentless enemy Charles; Costanza, her brow crowned with a poetic
nimbus (that melted, towards the end, into an aureole of bigotry);
Frangipani, huge in villainy; the princess Beatrix, tottering from the
dungeon where she had been confined for nearly twenty years; her
deliverer Roger de Lauria, without whose resourcefulness and audacity it
might have gone ill with Aragon; Popes and Palaso-logus - brilliant
colour effects; the king of England and Saint Louis of France; in the
background, dimly discernible, the colossal shades of Frederick and
Innocent, looked in deadly embrace; and the whole congress of figures
enlivened and interpenetrated as by some electric fluid - the personality
of John of Procida.
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