“All dead—and health to you!” he replied, shaking his white head
dolefully.
And no grandchildren?
“All Americans (emigrants).”
He spoke in dreamy fashion of years long ago when he, too, had
travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes,
and to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his
mind; he remembered only our men.
“_Che bella gioventù—che bella gioventù!_” (“a sturdy brood”), he kept
on repeating. “And lately,” he added, “America has been discovered.” He
toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.
Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant _in fabula_ whom we
all know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose
talk and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing
save the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying
tasks and rewards. None save a Cincinnatus or Garibaldi can be ennobled
by the spade. In spleenful moments, it seems to me that the most
depraved of city-dwellers has flashes of enthusiasm and self-abnegation
never experienced by this shifty, retrogressive and ungenerous brood,
which lives like the beasts of the field and has learnt all too much of
their logic. But they have a beast-virtue hereabouts which compels
respect—contentment in adversity. In this point they resemble the
Russian peasantry. And yet, who can pity the
moujik? His cheeks are altogether too round, and his morals too
superbly bestial; he has clearly been created to sing and starve by
turns. But the Italian peasant who speaks in the tongue of Homer and
Virgil and Boccaccio is easily invested with a halo of martyrdom; it is
delightful to sympathize with men who combine the manners of Louis
Quatorze with the profiles of Augustus or Plato, and who still recall,
in many of their traits, the pristine life of Odyssean days. Thus, they
wear to-day the identical “clouted leggings of oxhide, against the
scratches of the thorns” which old Laertes bound about his legs on the
upland farm in Ithaka. They call them “galandrine.”
On occasions of drought or flood there is not a word of complaint. I
have known these field-faring men and women for thirty years, and have
yet to hear a single one of them grumble at the weather. It is not
indifference; it is true philosophy—acquiescence in the inevitable. The
grievances of cultivators of lemons and wholesale agriculturalists,
whose speculations are often ruined by a single stroke of the human pen
in the shape of new regulations or tariffs, are a different thing;
_their_ curses are loud and long. But the bean-growers, dependent
chiefly on wind and weather, only speak of God’s will. They have the
same forgiveness for the shortcomings of nature as for a wayward child.
And no wonder they are distrustful. Ages of oppression and misrule have
passed over their heads; sun and rain, with all their caprice, have
been kinder friends to them than their earthly masters. Some day,
presumably, the government will wake up to the fact that Italy is not
an industrial country, and that its farmers might profitably be taken
into account again.
But a change is upon the land. Types like this old man are becoming
extinct; for the patriarchal system of Coriolanus, the glory of
southern Italy, is breaking up.
This is not the fault of conscription which, though it destroys old
dialects, beliefs and customs, widens the horizon by bringing fresh
ideas into the family, and generally sound ones. It does even more; it
teaches the conscripts to read and write, so that it is no longer as
dangerous to have dealings with a man who possesses these
accomplishments as in the days when they were the prerogative of
_avvocati_ and other questionable characters. A countryman, nowadays,
may read and write and yet be honest.
What is shattering family life is the speculative spirit born of
emigration. A continual coming and going; two-thirds of the adolescent
and adult male population are at this moment in Argentina or the United
States—some as far afield as New
Zealand. Men who formerly reckoned in sous now talk of thousands of
francs; parental authority over boys is relaxed, and the girls, ever
quick to grasp the advantages of money, lose all discipline and
steadiness.
“My sons won’t touch a spade,” said a peasant to me; “and when I thrash
them, they complain to the police. They simply gamble and drink,
waiting their turn to sail. If I were to tell you the beatings _we_
used to get, sir, you wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t believe me, not
if I took my oath, you wouldn’t! I can feel them still—speaking with
respect—here!”
These emigrants generally stay away three or four years at a stretch,
and then return, spend their money, and go out again to make more.
Others remain for longer periods, coming back with huge incomes—twenty
to a hundred francs a day. Such examples produce the same effect as
those of the few lucky winners in the State lottery; every one talks of
them, and forgets the large number of less fortunate speculators.
Meanwhile the land suffers. The carob-tree is an instance. This
beautiful and almost eternal growth, the “hope of the southern
Apennines” as Professor Savastano calls it, whose pods constitute an
important article of commerce and whose thick-clustering leaves yield a
cool shelter, comparable to that of a rocky cave, in the noonday heat,
used to cover large tracts of south Italy. Indifferent to the scorching
rays of the sun, flourishing on the stoniest declivities, and
sustaining the soil in a marvellous manner, it was planted wherever
nothing else would grow—a distant but sure profit. Nowadays carobs are
only cut down. Although their produce rises in value every year, not
one is planted; nobody has time to wait for the fruit.[1]
[1] There are a few laudable exceptions, such as Prince Belmonte, who
has covered large stretches of bad land with this tree. (See Consular
Reports, Italy, No. 431.) But he is not a peasant!
It is nothing short of a social revolution, depopulating the country of
its most laborious elements. 788,000 emigrants left in one year alone
(1906); in the province of Basilicata the exodus exceeds the birthrate.
I do not know the percentage of those who depart never to return, but
it must be considerable; the land is full of chronic grass-widows.
Things will doubtless right themselves in due course; it stands to
reason that in this acute transitional stage the demoralizing effects
of the new system should be more apparent than its inevitable benefits.
Already these are not unseen; houses are springing up round villages,
and the emigrants return
home with a disrespect for many of their country’s institutions which,
under the circumstances, is neither deplorable nor unjustifiable. A
large family of boy-children, once a dire calamity, is now the soundest
of investments. Soon after their arrival in America they begin sending
home rations of money to their parents; the old farm prospers once
more, the daughters receive decent dowries. I know farmers who receive
over three pounds a month from their sons in America—all under military
age.
“We work, yes,” they will then tell you, “but we also smoke our pipe.”
Previous to this wholesale emigration, things had come to such a pass
that the landed proprietor could procure a labourer at a franc a day,
out of which he had to feed and clothe himself; it was little short of
slavery. The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are
impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own
terms for work to be done, wages being trebled. A new type of peasant
is being evolved, independent of family, fatherland or traditions—with
a sure haven of refuge across the water when life at home becomes
intolerable.
Yes; a change is at hand.
And another of those things which emigration and the new order of
affairs are surely destroying is that ancient anthropomorphic way of
looking at nature, with its expressive turns of speech. A small boy,
whom I watched gathering figs last year, informed me that the fig-tree
was _innamorato delle pietre e cisterne—_enamoured of stones and
cisterns; meaning, that its roots are searchingly destructive to
masonry and display a fabulous intuition for the proximity of water. He
also told me, what was news to me, that there are more than two or
three varieties of figs. Will you have his list of them? Here it is:
There is the _fico arnese,_ the smallest of all, and the _fico
santillo,_ both of which are best when dried; the _fico vollombola,_
which is never dried, because it only makes the spring fruit; the _fico
molegnano,_ which ripens as late as the end of October and must be
eaten fresh; the _fico coretorto (“_ wry-heart”—from its shape), which
has the most leathery skin of all and is often destroyed by grubs after
rain; the _fico troiano;_ the _fico arzano;_ and the _fico vescovo,_
which appears when all the others are over, and is eaten in February
(this may be the kind referred to in Stamer’s “Dolce Napoli” as
deriving from Sorrento, where the first tree of its kind was discovered
growing out of the garden wall of the bishop’s palace, whence the
name). All these are _neri—_black.
Now for the white kinds. The _fico paradiso_ has a tender skin, but is
easily spoilt by rain and requires a ridiculous amount of sun to dry
it; the _fico vottato_ is also better fresh; the _fico pez-zottolo_ is
often attacked by grubs, but grows to a large size every two or three
years; the _fico pascarello_ is good up till Christmas; the _fico
natalino;_ lastly, the _fico ——_, whose name I will not record, though
it would be an admirable illustration of that same anthropomorphic turn
of mind. The _santillo_ and _arnese,_ he added, are the varieties which
are cut into two and laid lengthwise upon each other and so dried
(Query: Is not this the “duplex ficus” of Horace?).
“Of course there are other kinds,” he said, “but I don’t remember them
just now.” When I asked whether he could tell these different fig-trees
apart by the leaves and stems alone and without the fruit, he said that
each kind, even in winter, retained its peculiar “faccia” (face), but
that some varieties are more easy to distinguish than others. I
enquired into the mysteries of caprification, and learned that
artificial ripening by means of a drop of oil is practised with some of
them, chiefly the _santillo, vollombola, pascarello_ and _natalino._
Then he gave me an account of the prices for the different qualities
and seasons which would have astonished a grocer.
All of which proves how easy it is to misjudge of folks who, although
they do not know that Paris is the capital of France, yet possess a
training adapted to their present needs. They are specialists for
things of the grain-giving earth; it is a pleasure to watch them
grafting vines and olives and lemons with the precision of a trained
horticulturist. They talk of “governing” _(governare}_ their soil; it
is the word they use in respect to a child.
Now figs are neither white nor black, but such is the terminology.
Stones are white or black; prepared olives are white or black; wine is
white or black. Are they become colour-blind because impregnated, from
earliest infancy, with a perennial blaze of rainbow
hues—colour-blinded, in fact; or from negligence, attention to this
matter not bringing with it any material advantage? Excepting that
sign-language which is profoundly interesting from an artistic and
ethnological point of view—why does not some scholar bring old Iorio’s
“Mimica degli Antichi” up to date?—few things are more worthy of
investigation than the colour-sense of these people. Of blue they have
not the faintest conception, probably because there are so few blue
solids in nature; Max Mueller holds the idea of blue to be quite
a modern acquisition on the part of the human race. So a cloudless sky
is declared to be “quite white.” I once asked a lad as to the colour of
the sea which, at the moment, was of the most brilliant sapphire hue.
He pondered awhile and then said:
“Pare come fosse un colore morto” (a sort of dead colour).
Green is a little better known, but still chiefly connected with things
not out of doors, as a green handkerchief. The reason may be that this
tint is too common in nature to be taken note of. Or perhaps because
their chain of association between green and grass is periodically
broken up—our fields are always verdant, but theirs turn brown in
summer. Trees they sometimes call yellow, as do some ancient writers;
but more generally “half-black” or “tree-colour.” A beech in full leaf
has been described to me as black. _“Rosso”_ does not mean red, but
rather dun or dingy; earth is _rosso._ When our red is to be signified,
they will use the word “turco,” which came in with the well-known
dye-stuff of which the Turks once monopolized the secret. Thus there
are “Turkish” apples and “Turkish” potatoes. But “turco” may also mean
black—in accordance with the tradition that the Turks, the Saracens,
were a black race. Snakes, generally greyish-brown in these parts, are
described as either white or black; an eagle-owl is half-black; a
kestrel _un quasi bianco._ The mixed colours of cloths or silks are
either beautiful or ugly, and there’s an end of it. It is curious to
compare this state of affairs with that existing in the days of Homer,
who was, as it were, feeling his way in a new region, and the propriety
of whose colour epithets is better understood when one sees things on
the spot. Of course I am only speaking of the humble peasant whose
blindness, for the rest, is not incurable.
One might enlarge the argument and deduce his odd insensibility to
delicate scents from the fact that he thrives in an atmosphere
saturated with violent odours of all kinds; his dullness in regard to
finer shades of sound—from the shrieks of squalling babies and other
domestic explosions in which he lives from the cradle to the grave.
That is why these people have no “nerves”; terrific bursts of din, such
as the pandemonium of Piedigrotta, stimulate them in the same way that
others might be stimulated by a quartette of Brahms. And if they who
are so concerned about the massacre of small birds in this country
would devote their energies to the invention of a noiseless and yet
cheap powder, their efforts would at last have some prospects of
success. For it is not so much the joy of killing, as the pleasurable
noise of the gun, which creates these local sportsmen; as the sagacious
“Ultramontain” observed long ago. “Le napolitain est passionné pour la
chasse,” he says, “parce que les coups de fusil flattent son
oreille.”[2] This ingenuous love of noise may be connected, in some
way, with their rapid nervous discharges.
[2] I have looked him up in Jos. Blanc’s “Bibliographic.” His name was
C. Haller.
I doubt whether intermediate convulsions have left much purity of Greek
blood in south Italy, although emotional travellers, fresh from the
north, are for ever discovering “classic Hellenic profiles” among the
people. There is certainly a scarce type which, for want of a better
hypothesis, might be called Greek: of delicate build and below the
average height, small-eared and straight-nosed, with curly hair that
varies from blonde to what Italians call _castagno chiaro._ It differs
not only from the robuster and yet fairer northern breed, but also from
the darker surrounding races. But so many contradictory theories have
lately been promulgated on this head, that I prefer to stop short at
the preliminary question—did a Hellenic type ever exist? No more,
probably, than that charming race which the artists of Japan have
invented for our delectation.
Strains of Greek blood can be traced with certainty by their track of
folklore and poetry and song, such as still echoes among the vales of
Sparta and along the Bosphorus. Greek words are rather rare here, and
those that one hears—such as _sciusciello, caruso, crisommele,_
etc.—have long ago been garnered by scholars like De Grandis, Moltedo,
and Salvatore Mele. So Naples is far more Hellenic in dialect, lore,
song and gesture than these regions, which are still rich in pure
latinisms of speech, such as surgere (to arise); scitare (excitare—to
arouse); è (est—yes); fetare (foetare); trasete (transitus—passage of
quails); titillare (to tickle); craje (cras—to-morrow); pastena (a
plantation of young vines; Ulpian has “pastinum instituere”). A woman
is called “muliera,” a girl “figliola,” and children speak of their
fathers as “tata” (see Martial, epig. I, 101). Only yesterday I added a
beautiful latinism to my collection, when an old woman, in whose
cottage I sometimes repose, remarked to me, “Non avete virtù oggi”—you
are not _up to the mark_ to-day. The real, antique virtue! I ought to
have embraced her. No wonder I have no “virtue” just now. This savage
Vulturnian wind—did it not sap the Roman virtue at Cannae?
All those relics of older civilizations are disappearing under the
standardizing influence of conscription, emigration and national
schooling.
And soon enough the _Contranome-_system will become a thing of the
past. I shall be sorry to see it go, though it has often driven me
nearly crazy.