CEFALU

On the northern shore of Sicily, well westward of its midmost point, stands a rock and a town which may be taken for the type of the reconquered lands. These are the rock and the town of Cefalu.

All that coast is a procession of enormous headlands, Gibraltars of their kind thrown out against the seas, Corfano, Pellegrino and a score of others. But among them the rock of Cefalu is pre-eminent in its savage isolation, its defence, its bold challenge and the antiquity of its appeal to man. On the crags of its summit—I know not how high above the harbour, perhaps a thousand feet, perhaps twelve hundred—the first most ancient city, far older than any record, held its secure state; inexpugnable; looking down from its walls upon precipice every way. A few blocks of its enormous monuments remain and a trace of its wall. A little hook of reef, a narrow strand, provided a sufficient refuge and approach from the sea, thence a made path and steps of stone led up the sheer to the inhabited summit.

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This, the first destiny of Cefalu and cause of its settlement, its place as a fortress, was renewed time and again all down its incalculable history, it certainly will reappear when the next phase of confusion and decline shall fall upon civilisation. But with the Roman peace the high town was abandoned and the city stretched along the belt of shore, the sloping foot of the huge crag. The town left the summit and gathered round its little harbour, strung upon either side of the coast track which leads from the Straits of Messina to the last eastern cape of the island by Trapani. There has it since remained, clinging to the sea-fringe of its towering cube of stone, forgetting its first cyclopean foundation above.

All the ebb and flow of the East and the West have passed over it. Greece gave it its headland name. Carthage ruled it: Rome wrested it away. In the height of the Dark Ages—perhaps before the death of Charlemagne—Islam had planted a garrison here and made it an outpost in that sweeping of the Mediterranean whereby the Mohammedan and his Asia so nearly overwhelmed us. The Saracen chieftains, quarrelling among themselves, let in the Norman adventurers, the men from the Cotentin, who had set out to seize these lands a lifetime before the Crusades. It was with them that the recovery of Cefalu by the Christian West began, and from them that Cefalu received the great building and the shrine which is its mark to-day and has dignified it during nearly eight hundred years For it was here that Roger of Sicily, the Norman King, driving landward in a storm, ordered to be set up in his name the church which he had vowed to build in whatever place should harbour him, if he should save his life and come to land. He devoted revenue largely to his vow, and thus it is that there stands in Sicily to-day a cathedral of the North, one of the very earliest to depend upon the pointed arch, large, of one kind: with superb mosaic looking not a lifetime old, but set into its cement before Richard of England sailed by with his square crimson sails to conquer Cyprus and to fail before Jerusalem.

That mosaic is as vivid a witness to history as you could find in all the South, or in any part of the recovered lands. Here is an art that was the glory of the later Empire before the generals revolted and began those disorders of the last Roman armies in which Rome was sacked, Britain lost, Africa cut off for a time and Gaul left derelict under a local commander of auxiliaries. The mosaic, with its eternal quality, remained, the characteristic of those church walls on which the Christian Emperor impressed permanent record. It is the art of Justinian as of Theodosius. It is the sign manual of that restoration of our culture which the genius of Belisarius effected in the West and which Islam came so near to destroying.

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Islam swept over Sicily. Its chaos ruled. It began the massacre of the forests, the desiccation of the soil. The towns decayed, and their crafts. The Norman order and Christendom brought back a spirit not of that climate, but of the North. Yet here, in the most typically Norman of all Sicilian things, the not-Norman, the Byzantine mosaic returns, appearing again above the retreat of the Saracenic flood and set in the frame of that Ogive which means for us rather Chartres, Canterbury and Notre Dame than anything of Byzantium or of Ravenna.

All the apse is filled with it: sombre purples, a few deep reds, and innumerable squares in a sheet of glittering gold. The great subject is Christ in Judgment, the Heroic Face that dominates all the nave from above. He holds in His right hand the Open Book of record, His left is raised for acquittal or sentence. Below this head, with its not mortal proportions, are fixed upon the square space, above the altar, the lesser figures of the twelve apostles; and the whole, I say, seems to be of yesterday, or of our fathers’ time at the most, so living is the surface. Yet it has looked down upon Christian men for more than seven centuries. May the evils of a coming time spare it!

Around that Head and Face, upon either side, following the border of the pointed arch of the roof (the true equilateral of the first Gothic) runs in legible, large, square script, lighter against a darker ground, the noblest motto yet found for the Judge and Redeemer and Brother of mankind. It was the sight of this motto which inspired Sargent to what is, undoubtedly, the highest, by far the highest, monument of his genius—the work in the public library of Boston, showing the fall of the old gods and centred upon such a treatment of the Crucifixion as one would have thought no modern man had it in him to create. But Sargent created it, thus inspired from Cefalu. The motto runs thus:

‘_Factus homo factor hominis factique redemptor_ _Judico corporeus corpora corda Deus._’

An hexameter and a pentameter, with the characteristic internal rhyme of the second. And it means ‘I, having been made Man, and being the Maker of Man, and the Redeemer of what I made, judge in bodily form the bodies and the hearts of man: for I am God.’

But Sargent in his masterpiece changed one word for the sake of his subject—this being not the Christ in Judgment, but the Christ crucified. He changed ‘Judico’ to ‘Redimo’—writing ‘I redeem’ for ‘I judge.’ A transposition was necessary, also, for the sake of the metre, so that the motto to Sargent’s Christ on the Cross at Boston reads:

‘_Factus homo factor hominis factique redemptor_ _Corporeus redimo corpora corda Deus._’

I think his genius to discover, and to be inspired by, such lines was as great as that which produced his painting.

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Such, then, is Cefalu, crammed with the ages. It may be asked whether nothing is left here to mark their passage except this effect of the Norman married with the Imperial mosaic of Constantinople: nothing Saracenic or Greek and Roman?

I saw nothing—save fragments, on a shoulder of the hill, of a castle built there in the Middle Ages and on the bare summit against the sky a few huge boulders of the town before history.

There was not here in Cefalu that desire to fill every bare space with detail, nor that occasional hint at a pinched curve which reveals an Arabian spirit in Palermo, nor any of that perspective of crowded arches round a small, cool court which, in the Benedictine cloister of that town, reminds one oddly of the African palaces oversea. There was no delight in that excessive involution of line, that chipping of surface into fret and cusp which workmen once occupied on Saracenic walls and domes with difficulty forgot when they dealt later with the Christian shrines. In the outer lines of the cathedral, in the body of the building there is only the Northern spirit, with squat towers that might have come from Lisieux or Coutances; and within, there is that tradition of tessellated wall-picturing, a Christ that might have come from the Bosphorous.

It was very strange to observe, against the dark of the choir, a transept capital which, at a distance, seemed Corinthian, but which, close at hand, was a cluster of grotesques: monsters and monkeys. It was strange, under the eyes of such a Face as that which looked down upon us from the eastern roof, to see a baptismal font supported by the fierce leopards of the Dark Ages, the mythology of Anjou and Maine, the things men imagined during the long wars against the heathens of the North Sea, before Europe awoke to the noise and splendour of the Crusades.

Such is Cefalu: the weight of its nave and apse is prodigious above the town and against the Mediterranean. It had, before it left fame and drew apart from the story of Europe, one great memory more. It was here, I am told, that they brought the body of Frederic II., the _Stupor Mundi_, to lie in a place he would have chosen: the man who so nearly made himself an Anti-Christian master of his world: the last of the Emperors to hold, or attempt to hold, the South.

Later they took him on to Palermo, and he lies there now in his porphyry tomb. But Cefalu was nearer to his spirit.