CASA ROSA, _May_ 28.
Oh, this misery of being dumb, incoherent, unintelligible, foolish,
inarticulate in a foreign land, for lack of words! It is unwise, I fear,
to have at the outset too high an ideal either in grammar or accent. As
our gondola passed one of the hotels this afternoon, we paused long
enough to hear an intrepid lady converse with an Italian who carried a
mandolin and had apparently come to give a music lesson to her husband.
She seemed to be from the Middle West of America, but I am not disposed
to insist upon this point, nor to make any particular State in the Union
blush for her crudities of speech. She translated immediately everything
that she said into her own tongue, as if the hearer might, between French
and English, possibly understand something.
“_Elle nay pars easy_—he ain’t here,” she remarked, oblivious of gender.
“_Elle retoorneray ah seas oors et dammi_—he’ll be back sure by half-past
six. _Bone swar_, I should say _Bony naughty_—Good-night to you, and I
won’t let him forget to show up to-morrer.”
This was neither so ingenious nor so felicitous as the language-expedient
of the man who wished to leave some luggage at a railway station in Rome,
and knowing nothing of any foreign tongue but a few Latin phrases, mostly
of an obituary character, pointed several times to his effects, saying,
“_Requiescat in pace_,” and then, pointing again to himself, uttered the
one pregnant word “_Resurgam_.” This at any rate had the merit of
tickling his own sense of humour, if it availed nothing with the railway
porters, and if any one remarks that he has read the tale in some ancient
“Farmers’ Almanack,” I shall only retort that it is still worth
repeating.
My little red book on the “Study of Italian Made Easy for the Traveller”
is always in my pocket, but it is extraordinary how little use it is to
me. The critics need not assert that individuality is dying out in the
human race and that we are all more or less alike. If we were, we should
find our daily practical wants met by such little books. Mine gives me a
sentence requesting the laundress to return the clothes three days hence,
at midnight, at cock-crow, or at the full of the moon, but nowhere can
the new arrival find the phrase for the next night or the day after
to-morrow. The book implores the washerwoman to use plenty of starch,
but the new arrival wishes scarcely any, or only the frills dipped.
Before going to the dressmaker’s yesterday, I spent five minutes learning
the Italian for the expression “This blouse bags; it sits in wrinkles
between the shoulders.” As this was the only criticism given in the
little book, I imagined that Italian dressmakers erred in this special
direction. What was my discomfiture to find that my blouse was much too
small and refused to meet. I could only use gestures for the
dressmaker’s enlightenment, but in order not to waste my recently gained
knowledge, I tried to tell a melodramatic tale of a friend of mine whose
blouse bagged and sat in wrinkles between the shoulders. It was not
successful, because I was obliged to substitute the past for the present
tense of the verb.
Somebody says that if we learn the irregular verbs of a language first,
all will be well. I think by the use of considerable mental agility one
can generally avoid them altogether, although it materially reduces one’s
vocabulary; but at all events there is no way of learning them thoroughly
save by marrying a native. A native, particularly after marriage, uses
the irregular verbs with great freedom, and one acquires a familiarity
with them never gained in the formal instruction of a teacher. This
method of education may be considered radical, and in cases where one is
already married, illegal and bigamous, but on the whole it is not
attended with any more difficulty than the immersing of one’s self in a
study day after day and month after month learning the irregular verbs
from a grammar.
My rule in studying a language is to seize upon some salient point, or
one generally overlooked by foreigners, or some very subtle one known
only to the scholar, and devote myself to its mastery. A little
knowledge here blinds the hearer to much ignorance elsewhere. In
Italian, for example, the polite way of addressing one’s equal is to
speak in the third person singular, using _Ella_ (she) as the pronoun.
“_Come sta Ella_?” (How are you? but literally “How is she?”)
I pay great attention to this detail, and make opportunities to meet our
_padrona_ on the staircase and say “How is she?” to her. I can never
escape the feeling that I am inquiring for the health of an absent
person; moreover, I could not understand her symptoms if she should
recount them, and I have no language in which to describe my own
symptoms, which, so far as I have observed, is the only reason we ever
ask anybody else how he feels.
To remember on the instant whether one is addressing equals, superiors,
or inferiors, and to marshal hastily the proper pronoun, adds a new
terror to conversation, so that I find myself constantly searching my
memory to decide whether it shall be:
_Scusate_ or _Scusi_, _Avanti_ or _Passi_, _A rivederci_ or _Addio_, _Che
cosa dite_? or _Che coma dice_? _Quanto domandate_? or _Quanto domanda_?
_Dove andate_? or _Dove va_? _Come vi chiamate_? or _Come si chiama_?
and so forth and so forth until one’s mind seems to be arranged in
tabulated columns, with special N.B.’s to use the infinitive in talking
to the gondolier.
Finding the hours of time rather puzzling as recorded in the “Study of
Italian Made Easy,” I devoted twenty-four hours to learning how to say
the time from one o’clock at noon to midnight, or thirteen to
twenty-three o’clock. My soul revolted at the task, for a foreign tongue
abounds in these malicious little refinements of speech, invented, I
suppose, to prevent strangers from making too free with it on short
acquaintance. I found later on that my labour had been useless, and that
evidently the Italians themselves have no longer the leisure for these
little eccentricities of language and suffer them to pass from common
use. If the Latin races would only meet in convention and agree to
bestow the comfortable neuter gender on inanimate objects and
commodities, how popular they might make themselves with the
English-speaking nations; but having begun to “enrich” their language,
and make it more “subtle” by these perplexities, centuries ago, they will
no doubt continue them until the end of time.
If one has been a devoted patron of the opera or student of music, one
has an Italian vocabulary to begin with. This, if accompanied by the
proper gestures (for it is vain to speak without liberal movements, of
the hands, shoulders, and eyebrows), this, I maintain, will deceive all
the English-speaking persons who may be seated near your table in a
foreign café.
The very first evening after our arrival, Jack Copley asked Salemina and
me to dine with him at the best restaurant in Venice. Jack Copley is a
well of nonsense undefiled, and he, like ourselves, had been in Italy
only a few hours. He called for us in his gondola, and in the row across
from the Giudecca we amused ourselves by calling to mind the various
Italian words or phrases with which we were familiar. They were mostly
titles of arias or songs, but Jack insisted, notwithstanding Salemina’s
protestations, that, properly interlarded with names of famous Italians,
he could maintain a brilliant conversation with me at table, to the envy
and amazement of our neighbours. The following paragraph, then, was our
stock in trade, and Jack’s volubility and ingenuity in its use kept
Salemina quite helpless with laughter:—
_Guarda che bianca luna_—_Il tempo passato_—_Lascia ch’ io pianga_—_Dolce
far niente_—_Batti batti nel Masetto_—_Da
capo_—_Ritardando_—_Andante_—_Piano_—_Adagio_—_Spaghetti_—_Macaroni_—
_Polenta_—_Non è ver_—_Ah, non giunge_—_Si la
stanchezza_—_Bravo_—_Lento_—_Presto_—_Scherzo_—_Dormi pura_—_La ci darem
la mano_—_Celeste Aïda_—_Spirito gentil_—_Voi che sapete_—_Crispino e la
Comare_—_Pietà,
Signore_—_Tintoretto_—_Boccaccio_—_Garibaldi_—_Mazzini_—_Beatrice
Cenci_—_Gordigiani_—_Santa Lucia_—_Il mio
tesoro_—_Margherita_—_Umberto_—_Vittoria Colonna_—_Tutti
frutti_—_Botticelli_—_Una furtiva lagrima_.
No one who has not the privilege of Jack Copley’s acquaintance could
believe with what effect he used these unrelated words and sentences. I
could only assist, and lead him to ever higher flights of fancy.
We perceive with pleasure that our mother tongue presents equal
difficulties to Italian manufacturers and men of affairs. The so-called
mineral water we use at table is specially still and dead, and we think
it may have been compared to its disadvantage with other more sparkling
beverages, since every bottle bears a printed label announcing, “To
Distrust of the mineral waters too foaming, since that they do invariable
spread the Stomach.”
We learn also by studying another bottle that “The Wermouth is a white
wine slightly bitter, and parfumed with who leso me aromatic herbs.”
_Who leso me_ we printed in italics in our own minds, giving the phrase a
pure Italian accent until we discovered that it was the somewhat familiar
adjective “wholesome.”
In one of the smaller galleries we were given the usual pasteboard fans
bearing explanations of the frescoes:—
ROOM I. _In the middle_. The sin of our fathers.
_On every side_. The ovens of Babylony. Möise saved from the water.
ROOM II. _In the middle_. Möise who sprung the water.
_On every side_. The luminous column in the dessert and the ardent wood.
ROOM III. _In the middle_. Elia transported in the heaven.
_On every side_. Eliseus dispansing brods.
ROOM IV. The wood carvings are by Anonymous. The tapestry shows the
multiplications of brods and fishs.