You set forth your business to a crowd of villagers that have collected
around. It is simple enough. You want to speak to Luigi So-and-so. A
good-natured individual, who seems particularly anxious to help,
summarizes affairs by saying:
“The gentleman wants Luigi So-and-so.”
There is evidently some joke in the mere suggestion of such a thing;
they all smile. Then a confused murmur of voices goes up:
“Luigi—Luigi. . . . Now which Luigi does he mean?”
You repeat his surname in a loud voice. It produces no effect, beyond
that of increased hilarity.
“Luigi—Luigi. . . .”
“Perhaps O’Zoccolone?”
“Perhaps O’Seticchio?”
“Or the figlio d’ O’Zibalocchio?”
The good-natured individual volunteers to beat the surrounding district
and bring in all the Luigis he can find. After half an hour they begin
to arrive, one by one. He is not among them. Dismissed with cigars, as
compensation for loss of time.
Meanwhile half the village has gathered around, vastly enjoying the
fun, which it hopes will last till bedtime. You are getting bewildered;
new people flock in from the fields to whom the mysterious joke about
Luigi must be explained.
“Luigi—Luigi,” they begin again. “Now, which of them can he mean?”
“Perhaps O’Marzariello?”
“Or O’Cuccolillo?”
“I never thought of him,” says the good-natured individual. “Here, boy,
run and tell O’Cuccolillo that a foreign gentleman wants to give him a
cigar.”
By the time O’Cuccolillo appears on the scene the crowd has thickened.
You explain the business for the fiftieth time; no—he is Luigi, of
course, but not the right Luigi, which he regrets considerably. Then
the joke is made clear to him, and he laughs again. You have lost all
your nerve, but the villagers are beginning to love you,
“Can it be O’Sciabecchino?”
“Or the figlio d’ O’Chiappino?”
“It might be O’Busciardiello (the liar).”
“He’s dead.”
“So he is. I quite forgot. Well, then it must be the husband of
A’Cicivetta (the flirt).”
“He’s in prison. But how about O’Caccianfierno?”
Suddenly a withered hag croaks authoritatively:
“I know! The gentleman wants OTentillo.”
Chorus of villagers:
“Then why doesn’t he say so?”
O’Tentillo lives far, far away. An hour elapses; at last he comes, full
of bright expectations. No, this is not your Luigi, he is another
Luigi. You are ready to sink into the earth, but there is no escape.
The crowd surges all around, the news having evidently spread to
neighbouring hamlets.
_“_Luigi—Luigi. . . . Let me see. It might be O’Rappo.”
“O’Massassillo, more likely.”
“I have it! It’s O’Spennatiello.”
“I never thought of him,” says a well-known voice. “Here, boy, run and
tell——”
“Or O’Cicereniello.”
“O’Vergeniello.”
“O’Sciabolone. ...”
“Never mind the G—— d—— son of b——,” says a cheery person in excellent
English, who has just arrived on the scene. “See here, I live fifteen
years in Brooklyn; damn fine! ’Ave a glass of wine round my place. Your
Luigi’s in America, sure. And if he isn’t, send him to Hell.”
Sound advice, this.
“What’s his surname, anyhow?” he goes on.
You explain once more.
“Why, there’s the very man you’re looking for. There, standing right in
front of you! He’s Luigi, and that’s his surname right enough. He don’t
know it himself, you bet.”
And he points to the good-natured individual. . . .
These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake
that was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and
then a plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the
uncooked fat of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week
afterwards); another one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks,
claws and feathers. Such deeds are sternly reprobated as savagery;
still, they occur, and nearly always as the result of wagers. I wish I
could couple them with equally heroic achievements in the drinking
line, but, alas! I have only heard of one old man who was wont
habitually to en-gulph twenty-two litres of wine a day; eight are
spoken of as “almost too much” in these degenerate days. . . .
Mice, says Movers, were sacrificially eaten by the Babylonians. Here,
as in England, they are cooked into a paste and given to children, to
cure a certain complaint. To take away the dread of the sea from young
boys, they mix into their food small fishes which have been devoured by
larger ones and taken from their stomachs—the underlying idea being
that these half-digested fry are thoroughly familiar with the storms
and perils of the deep, and will communicate these virtues to the boys
who eat them. It is the same principle as that of giving chamois blood
to the goat-boys of the Alps, to strengthen their nerves against
giddiness—pure sympathetic magic, of which there is this, at least, to
be said, that “its fundamental conception is identical with that of
modern science—a faith in the order or uniformity of nature.”
I have also met persons who claim to have been cured of rachitic
troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But
only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from
those foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are
taken as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the
discomfort caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a
certain kind of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them _in loco
infantis._ These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally
destroyed after performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for
curing the scrofulous tendencies of other children. Swallows’ hearts
are also used for another purpose; so is the blood of tortoises—for
strengthening the backs of children (the tortoise being a _hard_
animal). So is that of snakes, who are held up by head and tail and
pricked with needles; the greater their pain, the more beneficial their
blood, which is soaked up with cotton-wool and applied as a liniment
for swollen glands. In fact, nearly every animal has been discovered to
possess some medicinal property.
But of the charm of such creatures the people know nothing. How
different from the days of old! These legendary and gracious beasts,
that inspired poets and artists and glyptic engravers—these things of
beauty have now descended into the realm of mere usefulness, into the
pharmacopoeia.
The debasement is quite intelligible, when one remembers what
accumulated miseries these provinces have undergone. Memories of
refinement were starved out of the inhabitants by centuries of misrule,
when nothing was of interest or of value save what helped to fill the
belly. The work of bestialization was carried on by the despotism of
Spanish Viceroys and Bourbons. They, the Spaniards, fostered and
perhaps imported the Camorra, that monster of many heads which has
established itself in nearly every town of the south. Of the
deterioration in taste coincident with this period, I lately came
across this little bit of evidence, curious and conclusive:—In 1558 a
number of the country-folk were captured in one of the usual Corsair
raids; they were afterwards ransomed, and among the Christian names of
the women I note: Livia, Fiula, Cassandra, Aurelia, Lucrezia, Verginia,
Medea, Violanta, Galizia, Vittoria, Diamanta, etc. Where were these
full-sounding noble names two centuries
later—where are they nowadays? Do they not testify to a state of
culture superior to that of the present time, when Maria, Lucia, and
about four others of the most obvious catholic saints exhaust the list
of all female Christian names hereabouts?
All this is changing once more; a higher standard of comfort is being
evolved, though relics of this former state of insecurity may still be
found; such as the absence, even in houses of good families, of clocks
and watches, and convenient storage for clothes and domestic utensils;
their habits of living in penury and of buying their daily food by
farthings, as though one never knew what the next day might bring;
their dread of going out of doors by night (they have a proverb which
runs, _di notte, non parlar forte; di giorno, guardati attorno],_ their
lack of humour. For humour is essentially a product of ease, and nobody
can be at ease in unquiet times. That is why so few poets are humorous;
their restlessly querulous nature has the same effect on their outlook
as an insecure environment.
But it will be long ere these superstitions are eradicated. The magic
of south Italy deserves to be well studied, for the country is a
cauldron of demonology wherein Oriental beliefs—imported direct from
Egypt, the classic home of witchcraft—commingled with those of the
West. A foreigner is at an unfortunate disadvantage; if he asks
questions, he will only get answers dictated by suspicion or a
deliberate desire to mislead—prudent answers; whoso accepts these
explanations in good faith, might produce a wondrous contribution to
ethnology.
Wise women and wizards abound, but they are not to be compared with
that _santa_ near Naples whom I used to visit in the nineties, and who
was so successful in the magics that the Bishop of Pozzuoli, among
hundreds of other clients, was wont to drive up to her door once a week
for a consultation. These mostly occupy themselves with the manufacture
of charms for gaining lucky lottery numbers, and for deluding fond
women who wish to change their lovers.
The lore of herbs is not much studied. For bruises, a slice of the
Opuntia is applied, or the cooling parietaria (known as “pareta” or
“paretone”); the camomile and other common remedies are in vogue; the
virtues of the male fern, the rue, sabina and (home-made) ergot of rye
are well known but not employed to the extent they are in Russia, where
a large progeny is a disaster. There is a certain respect for the
legitimate unborn, and even in cases of illegitimacy some neighbouring
foundling hospital, the house of the Madonna, is much more convenient.
It is a true monk’s expedient; it avoids the risk of criminal
prosecution; the only difference being that the Mother of God, and not
the natural mother of the infant, becomes responsible for its prompt
and almost inevitable destruction.[3]
[3] The scandals that occasionally arise in connection with that
saintly institution, the Foundling Hospital at Naples, are enough to
make humanity shudder. Of 856 children living under its motherly care
during 1895, 853 “died” in the course of that one year—only three
survived; a wholesale massacre. These 853 murdered children were
carried forward in the books as still living, and the institution,
which has a yearly revenue of over 600,000 francs, was debited with
their maintenance, while 42 doctors (instead of the prescribed number
of 19) continued to draw salaries for their services to these
innocents that had meanwhile been starved and tortured to death. The
official report on these horrors ends with the words: “There is no
reason to think that these facts are peculiar to the year 1895.”
That the moon stands in sympathetic relations with living vegetation is
a fixed article of faith among the peasantry. They will prune their
plants only when the satellite is waxing—_al sottile della luna,_ as
they say. Altogether, the moon plays a considerable part in their lore,
as might be expected in a country where she used to be worshipped under
so many forms. The dusky markings on her surface are explained by
saying that the moon used to be a woman and a baker of bread, her face
gleaming with the reflection of the oven, but one day she annoyed her
mother, who took up the brush they use for sweeping away the ashes, and
smirched her face. . . .
Whoever reviews the religious observances of these people as a whole
will find them a jumble of contradictions and incongruities, lightly
held and as lightly dismissed. Theirs is the attitude of mind of little
children—of those, I mean, who have been so saturated with Bible
stories and fairy tales that they cease to care whether a thing be true
or false, if it only amuses for the moment. That is what makes them an
ideal prey for the quack physician. They will believe anything so long
as it is strange and complicated; a straightforward doctor is not
listened to; they want that mystery-making “priest-physician”
concerning whom a French writer—I forget his name—has wisely
discoursed. I once recommended a young woman who was bleeding at the
nose to try the homely remedy of a cold key. I thought she would have
died of laughing! The expedient was too absurdly simple to be
efficacious.
The attitude of the clergy in regard to popular superstitions is the
same here as elsewhere. They are too wise to believe them, and too
shrewd to discourage the belief in others; these things can be turned
to account for keeping the people at
a conveniently low level of intelligence. For the rest, these priests
are mostly good fellows of the live-and-let-live type, who would rather
cultivate their own potatoes than quarrel about vestments or the
Trinity. Violently acquisitive, of course, like most southerners. I
know a parish priest, a son of poor parents, who, by dint of sheer
energy, has amassed a fortune of half a million francs. He cannot
endure idleness in any shape, and a fine mediæval scene may be
witnessed when he suddenly appears round the corner and catches his
workmen wasting their time and his money—
“Ha, loafers, rogues, villains, vermin and sons of _bastardi cornuti!_
If God had not given me these garments and thereby closed my lips to
all evil-speaking (seizing his cassock and displaying half a yard of
purple stocking)—wouldn’t I just tell you, spawn of adulterous
assassins, what I think of you!”
But under the new regime these priests are becoming mere decorative
survivals, that look well enough in the landscape, but are not taken
seriously save in their match-making and money-lending capacities.
The intense realism of their religion is what still keeps it alive for
the poor in spirit. Their saints and devils are on the same familiar
footing towards mankind as were the old gods of Greece. Children do not
know the meaning of “Inferno”; they call it “casa del diavolo” (the
devil’s house); and if they are naughty, the mother says, “La Madonna
strilla”—the Madonna will scold. Here is a legend of Saint Peter,
interesting for its realism and because it has been grafted upon a very
ancient _motif:—_
The apostle Peter was a dissatisfied sort of man, who was always
grumbling about things in general and suggesting improvements in the
world-scheme. He thought himself cleverer even than “N. S. G. C.” One
day they were walking together in an olive orchard, and Peter said:
“Just look at the trouble and time it takes to collect all those
miserable little olives. Let’s have them the size of melons.”
“Very well. Have your way, friend Peter! But something awkward is bound
to happen. It always does, you know, with those improvements of yours.”
And, sure enough, one of these enormous olives fell from the tree
straight on the saint’s head, and ruined his new hat.
“I told you so,” said N. S. G. C.
I remember a woman explaining to me that the saints in Heaven took
their food exactly as we do, and at the same hours.
“The same food?” I asked. “Does the Madonna really eat
beans?”
“Beans? Not likely! But fried fish, and beefsteaks of veal.” I tried to
picture the scene, but the effort was too much for my hereditary
Puritan leanings. Unable to rise to these heights of realism, I was
rated a pagan for my ill-timed spirituality.
_Madame est servie. . . ._
IX
MOVING SOUTHWARDS
The train conveying me to Taranto was to halt for the night at the
second station beyond Venosa—at Spinazzola. Aware of this fact, I had
enquired about the place and received assuring reports as to its hotel
accommodation. But the fates were against me. On my arrival in the late
evening I learnt that the hotels were all closed long ago, the
townsfolk having gone to bed “with the chickens”; it was suggested that
I had better stay at the station, where the manageress of the
restaurant kept certain sleeping quarters specially provided for
travellers in my predicament.
Presently the gentle dame lighted a dim lantern and led me across what
seemed to be a marsh (it was raining) to the door of a hut which was to
be my resting-place. At the entrance she paused, and after informing me
that a band of musicians had taken all the beds save one which was at
my disposal if I were good enough to pay her half a franc, she placed
the lantern in my hand and stumbled back into the darkness.
I stepped into a low chamber, the beds of which were smothered under a
profusion of miscellaneous wraps. The air was warm—the place exhaled an
indescribable _esprit de corps._ Groping further, I reached another
apartment, vaulted and still lower than the last, an old-fashioned
cow-stable, possibly, converted into a bedroom. One glance sufficed me:
the couch was plainly not to be trusted. Thankful to be out of the rain
at least, I lit a pipe and prepared to pass the weary hours till 4 a.m.
It was not long ere I discovered that there was another bed in this
den, opposite my own; and judging by certain undulatory and saltatory
movements within, it was occupied. Presently the head of a youth
emerged, with closed eyes and flushed features. He indulged in a series
of groans and spasmodic kicks, that subsided once more, only to
recommence. A flute projected from under his pillow.
“This poor young man,” I thought, “is plainly in bad case. On account
of illness, he has been left behind by the rest of the
band, who have gone to Spinazzola to play at some marriage festival. He
is feverish, or possibly subject to fits—to choriasis or who knows what
disorder of the nervous system. A cruel trick, to leave a suffering
youngster alone in this foul hovel.” I misliked his symptoms—that
anguished complexion and delirious intermittent trembling, and began to
run over the scanty stock of household remedies contained in my bag,
wondering which of them might apply to his complaint. There was court
plaster and boot polish, quinine, corrosive sublimate and Worcester
sauce (detestable stuff, but indispensable hereabouts).
Just as I had decided in favour of the last-named, he gave a more than
usually vigorous jerk, sat up in bed and, opening his eyes, remarked:
“Those fleas!”
This, then, was the malady. I enquired why he had not joined his
companions.
He was tired, he said; tired of life in general, and of flute-playing
in particular. Tired, moreover, of certain animals; and with a
tiger-like spring he leapt out of bed.
Once thoroughly awake, he proved an amiable talker, though oppressed
with an incurable melancholy which no amount of tobacco and Venosa wine
could dispel. In gravely boyish fashion he told me of his life and
ambitions. He had passed a high standard at school, but—what would
you?—every post was crowded. He liked music, and would gladly take it
up as a profession, if anything could be learnt with a band such as
his; he was sick, utterly sick, of everything. Above all things, he
wished to travel. Visions of America floated before his mind—where was
the money to come from? Besides, there was the military service looming
close at hand; and then, a widowed mother at home—the inevitable
mother—with a couple of little sisters; how shall a man desert his
family? He was born on a farm on the Murge, the watershed between this
country and the Adriatic. Thinking of the Murge, that shapeless and
dismal range of limestone hills whose name suggests its sad monotony, I
began to understand the origin of his pagan wistfulness.
“Happy foreigners!”—such was his constant refrain—“happy foreigners,
who can always do exactly what they like! Tell me something about other
countries,” he said.
“Something true?”
“Anything—anything!”
To cheer him up, I replied with improbable tales of Indian life, of
rajahs and diamonds, of panthers whose eyes shine like
moonbeams in the dark jungle, of elephants huge as battleships, of
sportive monkeys who tie knots in each others’ tails and build
themselves huts among the trees, where they brew iced lemonade, which
they offer in friendliest fashion to the thirsty wayfarer, together
with other light refreshment——
“Cigarettes as well?”
“No. They are not allowed to cultivate tobacco.”
“Ah, that _monopolio,_ the curse of humanity!”
He was almost smiling when, at 2.30 a.m., there resounded a furious
knocking at the door, and the rest of the band appeared from their
unknown quarters in the liveliest of spirits. Altogether, a memorable
night. But at four o’clock the lantern was extinguished and the cavern,
bereft of its Salvator-Rosa glamour, resolved itself into a prosaic and
infernally unclean hovel. Issuing from the door, I saw those murky
recesses invaded by the uncompromising light of dawn, and shuddered. .
. .
The railway journey soon dispelled the phantoms of the night. As the
train sped downhill, the sun rose in splendour behind the Murge hills,
devouring mists so thickly couched that, struck by the first beams,
they glistered like compact snow-fields, while their shaded portions
might have been mistaken for stretches of mysterious swamp, from which
an occasional clump of tree-tops emerged, black and island-like. These
dreamland effects lasted but a brief time, and soon the whole face of
the landscape was revealed. An arid region, not unlike certain parts of
northern Africa.
Yet the line passes through places renowned in history. Who would not
like to spend a day at Altamura, if only in memory of its treatment by
the ferocious Cardinal Ruffo and his army of cut-throats? After a
heroic but vain resistance comparable only to that of Saguntum or
Petelia, during which every available metal, and even money, was
converted into bullets to repel the assailers, there followed a three
days’ slaughter of young and old; then the cardinal blessed his army
and pronounced, in the blood-drenched streets, a general absolution.
Even this man has discovered apologists. No cause so vile, that some
human being will not be found to defend it.
So much I called to mind that morning from the pages of Colletta, and
straightway formed a resolution to slip out of the carriage and arrest
my journey at Altamura for a couple of days. But I must have been
asleep while the train passed through the station, nor did I wake up
again till the blue Ionian was in sight.
At Venosa one thinks of Roman legionaries fleeing from
Hannibal, of Horace, of Norman ambitions; Lucera and Manfredonia call
up Saracen memories and the ephemeral gleams of Hohenstaufen; Gargano
takes us back into Byzantine mysticism and monkery. And now from
Altamura with its dark record of Bourbon horrors, we glide into the
sunshine of Hellenic days when the wise Archytas, sage and lawgiver,
friend of Plato, ruled this ancient city of Tarentum. A wide sweep of
history! And if those Periclean times be not remote enough, yonder lies
Oria on its hilltop, the stronghold of pre-Hellenic and almost
legendary Messapians; while for such as desire more recent associations
there is the Albanian colony of San Giorgio, only a few miles distant,
to recall the glories of Scanderbeg and his adventurous bands.
Herein lies the charm of travel in this land of multiple
civilizations—the ever-changing layers of culture one encounters, their
wondrous juxtaposition.
My previous experiences of Taranto hotels counselled me to take a
private room overlooking the inland sea (the southern aspect is already
intolerably hot), and to seek my meals at restaurants. And in such a
one I have lived for the last ten days or so, reviving old memories.
The place has grown in the interval; indeed, if one may believe certain
persons, the population has increased from thirty to ninety thousand
in—I forget how few years. The arsenal brings movement into the town;
it has appropriated the lion’s share of building sites in the “new”
town. Is it a ripple on the surface of things, or will it truly stir
the spirits of the city? So many arsenals have come and gone, at
Taranto!
This arsenal quarter is a fine example of the Italian mania of _fare
figura—_everything for effect. It is an agglomeration of dreary
streets, haunted by legions of clamorous black swifts, and constructed
on the rectangular principle dear to the Latin mind. Modern, and
surpassingly monotonous. Are such interminable rows of stuccoed
barracks artistic to look upon, are they really pleasant to inhabit? Is
it reasonable or even sanitary, in a climate of eight months’ sunshine,
to build these enormous roadways and squares filled with glaring
limestone dust that blows into one’s eyes and almost suffocates one;
these Saharas that even at the present season of the year (early June)
cannot be traversed comfortably unless one wears brown spectacles and
goes veiled like a Tuareg? This arsenal quarter must be a hell during
the really not season, which continues into October.
For no trees whatever are planted to shade the walking population, as
in Paris or Cairo or any other sunlit city.
And who could guess the reason? An Englishman, at least, would never
bring himself to believe what is nevertheless a fact, namely, that if
the streets are converted into shady boulevards, the rents of the
houses immediately fall. When trees are planted, the lodgers complain
and finally emigrate to other quarters; the experiment has been tried,
at Naples and elsewhere, and always with the same result. Up trees,
down rents. The tenants refuse to be deprived of their chief pleasure
in life—that of gazing at the street-passengers, who must be good
enough to walk in the sunshine for their delectation. But if you are of
an inquisitive turn of mind, you are quite at liberty to return the
compliment and to study from the outside the most intimate details of
the tenants’ lives within. Take your fill of their domestic doings;
stare your hardest. They don’t mind in the least, not they! That
feeling of privacy which the northerner fosters doggedly even in the
centre of a teeming city is alien to their hearts; they like to look
and be looked at; they live like fish in an aquarium. It is a result of
the whole palazzo-system that every one knows his neighbour’s business
better than his own. What does it matter, in the end? Are we not all
“Christians”?
The municipality, meanwhile, is deeply indebted for the sky-piercing
ambitions which have culminated in the building of this new quarter. To
meet these obligations, the octroi prices have been raised to the
highest pitch by the City Fathers. This octroi is farmed out and
produces (they tell me) 120 pounds a day; there are some hundred
toll-collecting posts at the outskirts of the town, and the average
salary of their officials is three pounds a month. They are supposed to
be respectable and honest men, but it is difficult to see how a family
can be supported on that wage, when one knows how high the rents are,
and how severely the most ordinary commodities of life are taxed.
[Illustration: Sole Relic of old Taras]
I endeavoured to obtain photographs of the land as it looked ere it was
covered by the arsenal quarter, but in vain. Nobody seems to have
thought it worth while preserving what would surely be a notable
economic document for future generations. Out of sheer curiosity I also
tried to procure a plan of the old quarter, that labyrinth of
thick-clustering humanity, where the streets are often so narrow that
two persons can barely squeeze past each other. I was informed that no
such plan had ever been drawn up; it was agreed that a map of this kind
might be interesting, and suggested, furthermore, that I might
undertake the task myself; the authorities would doubtless appreciate
my labours. We foreigners, be it understood, have ample means and
unlimited leisure, and like nothing better than doing unprofitable jobs
of this kind.[1]
[1] There is a map of old Taranto in Lasor a Varea (Savonarola)
_Universus terrarum etc.,_ Vol. II, p. 552, and another in J. Blaev’s
_Theatrum Civitatum_ (1663). He talks of the “rude houses” of this
town.
One is glad to leave the scintillating desert of this arsenal quarter,
and enter the cool stone-paved streets of the other, which remind one
somewhat of Malta. In the days of Salis-Marschlins this city possessed
only 18,000 inhabitants, and “outdid even the customary Italian filth,
being hardly passable on account of the excessive nastiness and stink.”
It is now scrupulously clean—so absurdly clean, that it has quite
ceased to be picturesque. Not that its buildings are particularly
attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique “Trinità” column of
Doric gravity—sole survivor of Hellenic Taras, which looks wondrously
out of place in its modern environment. One of the finest of these
earlier monuments, the Orsini tower depicted in old prints of the
place, has now been demolished.
Lovers of the baroque may visit the shrine of Saint Cataldo, a jovial
nightmare in stone. And they who desire a literary pendant to this
fantastic structure should read the life of the saint written by Morone
in 1642. Like the shrine, it is the quintessence of insipid exuberance;
there is something preposterous in its very title “Cataldiados,” and
whoever reads through those six books of Latin hexameters will arise
from the perusal half-dazed. Somehow or other, it dislocates one’s
whole sense of terrestrial values to see a frowsy old monk[2] treated
in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a
_jeu d’esprit_ the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single
men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the
marvel is that an entire generation of writers should have worked
themselves into a state of mind which solemnly approved of such freaks.
[2] This wandering Irish missionary is supposed to have died here in
the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed
biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in
1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.
Every one has heard of the strange position of this hoary
island-citadel (a metropolis, already, in neolithic days). It is of
oval shape, the broad sides washed by the Ionian Sea and an
oyster-producing lagoon; bridges connect it at one extremity with the
arsenal or new town, and at the other with the so-called commercial
quarter. It is as if some precious gem were set, in a ring, between two
others of minor worth. Or, to vary the simile, this acropolis, with its
close-packed alleys, is the throbbing heart
of Taranto; the arsenal quarter—its head; and that other one—well, its
stomach; quite an insignificant stomach as compared with the head and
corroborative, in so far, of the views of Metchnikoff, who holds that
this hitherto commendable organ ought now to be reduced in size, if not
abolished altogether. . . .
From out of this window I gaze upon the purple lagoon flecked with
warships and sailing-boats; and beyond it, upon the venerable land of
Japygia, the heel of Italy, that rises in heliotrope-tinted undulations
towards the Adriatic watershed. At night-time an exquisite perfume of
flowers and ripe corn comes wafted into my room over the still waters,
and when the sun rises, white settlements begin to sparkle among its
olives and vineyards. My eyes often rest upon one of them; it is
Grottaglie, distant a few miles from Taranto on the Brindisi line. I
must visit Grottaglie, for it was here that the flying monk received
his education.
The flying monk!
The theme is not inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are
ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of
Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his
biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain
how I became acquainted with this seventeenth-century pioneer of
aviation.
It was an odd coincidence.
I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news of the
proceedings at a certain aviation meeting in the north, where a rather
inexperienced friend of mine had insisted upon taking a part; the
newspaper reports of these entertainments are enough to disturb
anybody. While admiring the great achievements of modern science in
this direction, I wished devoutly, at that particular moment, that
flying had never been invented; and it was something of a coincidence,
I say, that stumbling in this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable
little side-streets in the neighbourhood of the University, my glance
should have fallen upon an eighteenth-century engraving in a
bookseller’s window which depicted a man raised above the ground
without any visible means of support—flying, in short. He was a monk,
floating before an altar. A companion, near at hand, was portrayed as
gazing in rapturous wonder at this feat of levitation. I stepped within
and demanded the volume to which this was the frontispiece.
The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly dirty hands
and face, began to explain.
[Illustration: CanFishing at Tarantoyon]
“The Flying Monk, sir, Joseph of Copertino. A mighty saint and
conjuror! Or perhaps you would like some other book? I have many, many
lives of _santi_ here. Look at this one of the great Egidio, for
instance. I can tell you all about him, for he raised my mother’s
grand-uncle from the dead; yes, out of the grave, as one may say.
You’ll find out all about it in this book; and it’s only one of his
thousand miracles. And here is the biography of the renowned
Giangiuseppe, a mighty saint and——”
I was paying little heed; the flying monk had enthralled me. An
unsuspected pioneer of aviation . . . here was a discovery!
“He flew?” I queried, my mind reverting to the much-vaunted triumphs of
modern science.
“Why not? The only reason why people don’t fly like that nowadays is
because—well, sir, because they can’t. They fly with machines, and
think it something quite new and wonderful. And yet it’s as old as the
hills! There was Iscariot, for example—Icarus, I mean——”
“Pure legend, my good man.”
“Everything becomes legend, if the gentleman will have the goodness to
wait. And here is the biography of——”
“How much for Joseph of Copertino?” Cost what it may, I said to myself,
that volume must be mine.
He took it up and began to turn over the pages lovingly, as though
handling some priceless Book of Hours.
“A fine engraving,” he observed, _sotto voce._ “And this is the best of
many biographies of the flying monk. It is by Rossi, the
Minister-General of the Franciscan order to which our monk belonged;
the official biography, it might be called—dedicated, by permission, to
His Holiness Pope Clemens XIII, and based on the documents which led to
the saint’s beatification. Altogether, a remarkable volume——”
And he paused awhile. Then continued:
“I possess a cheaper biography of him, also with a frontispiece, by
Montanari, which has the questionable advantage of being printed as
recently as 1853. And here is yet another one, by Antonio Basile—oh, he
has been much written about; a most celebrated _taumaturgo,_
(wonder-worker)! As to this _Life_ of 1767, I could not, with a good
conscience, appraise it at less than five francs.”
“I respect your feelings. But—five francs! I have certain scruples of
my own, you know, and it irks my sense of rectitude to pay five francs
for the flying monk unless you can supply me with six or seven
additional books to be included in that sum.
Twelve _soldi_ (sous) apiece—that strikes me as the proper price of
such literature, for foreigners, at least. Therefore I’ll have the
great Egidio as well, and Montanari’s life of the flying monk, and that
other one by Basile, and Giangiuseppe, and——”
“By all means! Pray take your choice.”
And so it came about that, relieved of a tenuous and very sticky
five-franc note, and loaded down with three biographies of the flying
monk, one of Egidio, two of Giangiuseppe—I had been hopelessly
swindled, but there! no man can bargain in a hurry, and my eagerness to
learn something of the life of this early airman had made me oblivious
of the natural values of things—and with sundry smaller volumes of
similar import bulging out of my pockets I turned in the direction of
the hotel, promising myself some new if not exactly light reading.
But hardly had I proceeded twenty paces before the shopkeeper came
running after me with another formidable bundle under his arm. More
books! An ominous symptom—the clearest demonstration of my defeat; I
was already a marked man, a good customer. It was humiliating, after my
long years’ experience of the south.
And there resounded an unmistakable note of triumph in his voice, as he
said:
“Some more biographies, sir. Read them at your leisure, and pay me what
you like. You cannot help being generous; I see it in your face.”
“I always try to encourage polite learning, if that is what you think
to decipher in my features. But it rains _santi_ this morning,” I
added, rather sourly.
“The gentleman is pleased to joke! May it rain _soldi_ tomorrow.”
“A little shower, possibly. But not a cloud-burst, like today. . . .”
X
THE FLYING MONK
As to the flying monk, there is no doubt whatever that he deserved his
name.
He flew. Being a monk, these feats of his were naturally confined to
convents and their immediate surroundings, but that does not alter the
facts of the case.
Of the flights that he took in the little town of Copertino alone, more
than seventy, says Father Rossi whom I follow throughout, are on record
in the depositions which were taken on oath from eye-witnesses after
his death. This is one of them, for example:
“Stupendous likewise was the _ratto_ (flight or rapture) which he
exhibited on a night of Holy Thursday. . . . He suddenly flew towards
the altar in a straight line, leaving untouched all the ornaments of
that structure; and after some time, being called back by his superior,
returned flying to the spot whence he had set out.”
And another:
“He flew similarly upon an olive tree . . . and there remained in
kneeling posture for the space of half an hour. A marvellous thing it
was to see the branch which sustained him swaying lightly, as though a
bird had alighted upon it.”
But Copertino is a remote little place, already famous in the annals of
miraculous occurrences. It can be urged that a kind of enthusiasm for
their distinguished brother-monk may have tempted the inmates of the
convent to exaggerate his rare gifts. Nothing of the kind. He performed
flights not only in Copertino, but in various large towns of Italy,
such as Naples, Rome, and Assisi. And the spectators were by no means
an assemblage of ignorant personages, but men whose rank and
credibility would have weight in any section of society.
“While the Lord High Admiral of Castille, Ambassador of Spain at the
Vatican, was passing through Assisi in the year 1645, the custodian of
the convent commanded Joseph to descend from the room into the church,
where the Admiral’s lady was waiting
for him, desirous of seeing him. and speaking to him; to whom Joseph
replied, ‘I will obey, but I do not know whether I shall be able to
speak to her.’ And, as a matter of fact, hardly had he entered the
church and raised his eyes to a statue . . . situated above the altar,
when he threw himself into a flight in order to embrace its feet at a
distance of twelve paces, passing over the heads of all the
congregation; then, after remaining there some time, he flew back over
them with his usual cry, and immediately returned to his cell. The
Admiral was amazed, his wife fainted away, and all the onlookers became
piously terrified.”
And if this does not suffice to win credence, the following will
assuredly do so:
“And since it was God’s wish to render him marvellous even in the sight
of men of the highest sphere, He ordained that Joseph, having arrived
in Rome, should be conducted one day by the Father-General (of the
Franciscan Order) to kiss the feet of the High Pontiff, Urban the
Eighth; in which act, while contemplating Jesus Christ in the person of
His Vicar, he was ecstatically raised in air, and thus remained till
called back by the General, to whom His Holiness, highly astonished,
turned and said that ‘if Joseph were to die during his pontificate, he
himself would bear witness to this _successo.’”_
But his most remarkable flights took place at Fossombrone, where once
“detaching himself in swiftest manner from the altar with a cry like
thunder, he went, like lightning, gyrating hither and thither about the
chapel, and with such an impetus that he made all the cells of the
dormitory tremble, so that the monks, issuing thence in consternation,
cried, ‘An earthquake! An earthquake!’” Here, too, he cast a young
sheep into the air, and took flight after it to the height of the
trees, where he “remained in kneeling posture, ecstatic and with
extended arms, for more than two hours, to the extraordinary marvel of
the clergy who witnessed this.” This would seem to have been his
outdoor record—two hours without descent to earth.
Sometimes, furthermore, he took a passenger, if such a term can
properly be applied.
So once, while the monks were at prayers, he was observed to rise up
and run swiftly towards the Confessor of the convent, and “seizing him
by the hand, he raised him from the ground by supernatural force, and
with jubilant rapture drew him along, turning him round and round in a
_violento ballo;_ the Confessor moved by Joseph, and Joseph by God.”
And what happened at Assisi is still more noteworthy, for here
was a gentleman, a suffering invalid, whom Joseph “snatched by the
hair, and, uttering his customary cry of ‘oh!’ raised himself from the
earth, while he drew the other after him by his hair, carrying him in
this fashion for a short while through the air, to the intensest
admiration of the spectators.” The patient, whose name was Chevalier
Baldassarre, discovered, on touching earth again, that he had been
cured by this flight of a severe nervous malady which had hitherto
afflicted him. . . .
Searching in the biography for some other interesting traits of Saint
Joseph of Copertino, I find, in marked contrast to his heaven-soaring
virtues, a humility of the profoundest kind. Even as a full-grown man
he retained the exhilarating, childlike nature of the pure in heart.
“_La Mamma mia_”—thus he would speak, in playful-saintly fashion, of
the Mother of God—“_la Mamma mia_ is capricious. When I bring Her
flowers, She tells me She does not want them; when I bring Her candles,
She also does not want them; and when I ask Her what She wants, She
says, ‘I want the heart, for I feed only on hearts.’” What wonder if
the “mere pronouncement of the name of Maria often sufficed to raise
him from the ground into the air”?
Nevertheless, the arch-fiend was wont to creep into his cell at night
and to beat and torture him; and the monks of the convent were
terrified when they heard the hideous din of echoing blows and jangling
chains. “We were only having a little game,” he would then say. This is
refreshingly boyish. He once induced a flock of sheep to enter the
chapel, and while he recited to them the litany, it was observed with
amazement that “they responded at the proper place to his verses—he
saying _Sancta Maria,_ and they answering, after their manner, _Bah!”_
I am not disguising from myself that an incident like the last-named
may smack of childishness to a certain austere type of northern
Puritan. Childishness! But to go into this question of the relative
hilarity and moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for
aught I know it may, at bottom, be a matter of climatic influences, and
there we can leave it. Under the sunny sky of Italy, who would not be
disposed to see the bright side of things?
Saint Joseph of Copertino performed a variety of other miracles. He
multiplied bread and wine, calmed a tempest, drove out devils, caused
the lame to walk and the blind to see—all of which are duly attested by
eye-witnesses on oath. Though “illiterate,” he had an innate knowledge
of ecclesiastical dogma; he detected persons of impure life by their
smell, and sinners were revealed to
his eyes with faces of black colour (the Turks believe that on judgment
day the damned will be thus marked); he enjoyed the company of two
guardian angels, which were visible not only to himself but to other
people. And, like all too many saints, he duly fell into the clutches
of the Inquisition, ever on the look-out for victims pious or
otherwise.
There is one little detail which it would be disingenuous to slur over.
It is this. We are told that Saint Joseph was awkward and backward in
his development. As a child his boy-comrades used to laugh at him for
his open-mouthed staring habits; they called him “bocca-aperta”
(gape-mouth), and in the frontispiece to Montanari’s life of him, which
depicts him as a bearded man of forty or fifty, his mouth is still
agape; he was, moreover, difficult to teach, and Rossi says he profited
very little by his lessons and was of _niuna letteratura._ As a lad of
seventeen he could not distinguish white bread from brown, and he used
to spill water-cans, break vases and drop plates to such an extent that
the monks of the convent who employed him were obliged, after eight
months’ probation, to dismiss him from their service. He was unable to
pass his examination as priest. At the age of twenty-five he was
ordained by the Bishop of Castro, without that formality.
All this points to a certain weak-mindedness or arrested development,
and were this an isolated case one might be inclined to think that the
church had made Saint Joseph an object of veneration on the same
principles as do the Arabs, who elevate idiots, epileptics, and
otherwise deficient creatures to the rank of marabouts, and credit them
with supernatural powers.
But it is not an isolated case. The majority of these southern saints
are distinguished from the vulgar herd by idiosyncrasies to which
modern physicians give singular names such as “gynophobia,”
“glossolalia” and “demonomania”[1]; even the founder of the flying
monk’s order, the great Francis of Assisi, has been accused of some
strange-sounding mental disorder because, with touching humility, he
doffed his vestments and presented himself naked before his Creator.
What are we to conclude therefrom?
[1] Good examples of what Max Nordau calls _Echolalie_ are to be found
in this biography (p. 22).
The flying monk resembles Saint Francis in more than one feature. He,
too, removed his clothes and even his shirt, and exposed himself thus
to a crucifix, exclaiming, “Here I am, Lord, deprived of everything.”
He followed his prototype, further, in that charming custom of
introducing the animal world into his
ordinary talk (“Brother Wolf, Sister Swallow,” etc.). So Joseph used to
speak of himself as _l’asinelio—_the little ass; and a pathetic scene
was witnessed on his death-bed when he was heard to mutter:
“_L’asinelio_ begins to climb the mountain; _l’asinelio_ is half-way
up; _l’asinelio_ has reached the summit; _l’asinelio_ can go no
further, and is about to leave his skin behind.”
It is to be noted, in this connection, that Saint Joseph of Coper-tino
was born in a stable.
This looks like more than a mere coincidence. For the divine Saint
Francis was likewise born in a stable.
But why should either of these holy men be born in stables?
A reasonable explanation lies at hand. A certain Japanese statesman is
credited with that shrewd remark that the manifold excellencies and
diversities of Hellenic art are due to the fact that the Greeks had no
“old masters” to copy from—no “schools” which supplied their
imagination with ready-made models that limit and smother individual
initiative. And one marvels to think into what exotic beauties these
southern saints would have blossomed, had they been at liberty, like
those Greeks, freely to indulge their versatile genius—had they not
been bound to the wheels of inexorable precedent. If the flying monk,
for example, were an ordinary mortal, there was nothing to prevent him
from being born in an omnibus or some other of the thousand odd places
where ordinary mortals occasionally are born. But—no! As a Franciscan
saint, he was obliged to conform to the school of Bethlehem and Assisi.
He was obliged to select a stable. Such is the force of tradition. . .
.
Joseph of Copertino lived during the time of the Spanish viceroys, and
his fame spread not only over all Italy, but to France, Germany and
Poland. Among his intimates and admirers were no fewer than eight
cardinals, Prince Leopold of Tuscany, the Duke of Bouillon, Isabella of
Austria, the Infanta Maria of Savoy and the Duke of Brunswick, who,
during a visit to various courts of Europe in 1649, purposely went to
Assisi to see him, and was there converted from the Lutheran heresy by
the spectacle of one of his flights. Prince Casimir, heir to the throne
of Poland, was his particular friend, and kept up a correspondence with
him after the death of his father and his own succession to the throne.
Towards the close of his life, the flying monk became so celebrated
that his superiors were obliged to shut him up in the convent of Osimo,
in close confinement, in order that his aerial voyages “should not be
disturbed by the concourse of the vulgar.” And here he expired, in his
sixty-first year, on the 18th September,
1663. He had been suffering and infirm for some little time previous to
that event, but managed to take a short flight on the very day
preceding his demise.
Forthwith the evidences of his miraculous deeds were collected and
submitted to the inspired examination of the Sacred Congregation of
Rites in Rome. Their conscientiousness in sifting and weighing the
depositions is sufficiently attested by the fact that ninety years were
allowed to elapse ere Joseph of Copertino was solemnly received into
the number of the Blessed. This occurred in 1753; and though the date
may have been accidentally chosen, some people will be inclined to
detect the hand of Providence in the ordering of the event, as a
challenge to Voltaire, who was just then disquieting Europe with
certain doctrines of a pernicious nature.
XI
BY THE INLAND SEA
The railway line to Grottaglie skirts the shore of the inland sea for
two or three miles, and then turns away. Old Taranto glimmers in lordly
fashion across the tranquil waters; a sense of immemorial culture
pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.
They led me, at Grottaglie, to the only convent of males now in use,
San Francesco, recently acquired by the Jesuits. In the sacristy of its
church, where I was told to wait, a slender young priest was praying
rapturously before some image, and the clock that stood at hand
recorded the flight of twenty minutes ere his devotions were ended.
Then he arose slowly and turned upon me a pair of lustrous, dreamy
eyes, as though awakened from another world.
This was quite a new convent, he explained; it could not possibly be
the one I was seeking. But there was another one, almost a ruin, and
now converted into a refuge for a flock of poor old women; he would
gladly show me the way. Was I a “Germanese”?[1] No, I replied; I came
from Scotland.
[1] _Germanese_ or _Allemanno_ = a German. _Tedesco,_ hereabouts,
signifies an Austrian—a detested nationality, even at this distance of
time. I have wondered, since writing the above, whether this is really
the place of which Rossi speaks. He calls it Grot-tole (the difference
in spelling would be of little account), and says it lies not far
distant from Copertino. But there may be a place of this name still
nearer; it is a common appellation in these honeycombed limestone
districts. This Grottaglie is certainly the birth-place of another
religious hero, the priest-brigand Ciro, who gave so much trouble to
Sir R. Church.
“A Calvinist,” he remarked, without bitterness.
“A Presbyterian,” I gently corrected.
“To be sure—a Presbyterian.”
As we walked along the street under the glowing beams of midday I set
forth the object of my visit. He had never heard of the flying monk—it
was astonishing, he said. He would look up the subject without delay.
The flying monk! That a Protestant should come all the way from “the
other end of the world” to enquire about a local Catholic saint of
whose existence he himself was unaware, seemed not so much to surprise
as positively to alarm him.
Among other local curiosities, he pointed out the portal of the parish
church, a fine but dilapidated piece of work, with a large rosette
window overhead. The town, he told me, derives its name from certain
large grottoes wherein the inhabitants used to take refuge during
Saracen raids. This I already knew, from the pages of Swinburne and
Sanchez; and in my turn was able to inform him that a certain
Frenchman, Bertaux by name, had written about the Byzantine
wall-paintings within these caves. Yes, those old Greeks! he said. And
that accounted for the famous ceramics of the place, which preserved
the Hellenic traditions in extraordinary purity. I did not inform him
that Hector Preconi, who purposely visited Grottaglie to study these
potteries, was considerably disappointed.
At the door of the decayed convent my guide left me, with sundry polite
expressions of esteem. I entered a spacious open courtyard; a well
stood in the centre of a bare enclosure whereon, in olden days, the
monks may have cultivated their fruit and vegetables; round this court
there ran an arched passage, its walls adorned with frescoes, now dim
and faded, depicting sacred subjects. The monastery itself was a sombre
maze of stairways and cells and corridors—all the free spaces,
including the very roof, encumbered with gleaming potteries of every
shape and size, that are made somewhere near the premises.
I wandered about this sunless and cobwebby labyrinth, the old woman
pensioners flitting round me like bats in the twilight. I peered into
many dark closets; which of them was it—Joseph’s famous
blood-bespattered cell?
“He tormented his body so continuously and obstinately with pins,
needles and blades of steel, and with such effusion of blood, that even
now, after entire years, the walls of his cell and other places of
retirement are discoloured and actually encrusted with blood.” Which of
them was it—the chamber that witnessed these atrocious macerations? It
was all so gloomy and forlorn.
Then, pushing aside a door in these tenebrous regions, I suddenly found
myself bathed in dazzling light. A loggia opened here, with a view over
stretches of gnarled olives, shining all silvery under the immaculate
sky of noonday and bounded by the sapphire belt of the Ionian. Sunshine
and blue sea! Often must the monks have taken pleasure in this fair
prospect; and the wiser among them, watching the labourers returning
home at nightfall, the children at play, and all the happy life of a
world so alien to their own, may well have heaved a sigh.
[Illustration: By the Inland Sea]
Meanwhile a crowd of citizens had assembled below, attracted
by the unusual novelty of a stranger in their town. The simple
creatures appeared to regard my investigations in the light of a good
joke; they had heard of begging monks, and thieving monks, and monks of
another variety whose peculiarities I dare not attempt to describe; but
a flying monk—no, never!
“The Dark Ages,” said one of them—the mayor, I dare say—with an air of
grave authority. “Believe me, dear sir, the days of such fabulous
monsters are over.”
So they seem to be, for the present.
No picture or statue records the life of this flying wonder, this
masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet—in this land of
commemorative stones—has been erected to perpetuate the glory of his
signal achievements; no street is called after him. It is as if he had
never existed. On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway
leading past his convent evokes the memory of a misty heathen poet,
likewise native of these favoured regions, a man whose name Joseph of
Copertino had assuredly never heard—Ennius, of whom I can now recall
nothing save that one unforgettable line which begins “O Tite tute Tati
tibi——”; Ennius, who never so much as tried to fly, but contented
himself with singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.
_Via Ennio. . . ._
It is the swing of the pendulum. The old pagan, at this moment, may be
nearer to our ideals and aspirations than the flying monk who died only
yesterday, so to speak.
But a few years hence—who can tell?
A characteristic episode. I had carefully timed myself to catch the
returning train to Taranto. Great was my surprise when, half-way to the
station, I perceived the train swiftly approaching. I raced it, and
managed to jump into a carriage just as it drew out of the station. The
guard straightway demanded my ticket and a fine for entering the train
without one (return tickets, for weighty reasons of “internal
administration,” are not sold). I looked at my watch, which showed that
we had left six minutes before the scheduled hour. He produced his; it
coincided with my own. “No matter,” he said. “I am not responsible for
the eccentricities of the driver, who probably had some urgent private
affairs to settle at Taranto. The fine must be paid.” A
fellow-passenger took a more charitable view of the case. He suggested
that an inspector of the line had been travelling along with us, and
that the driver, knowing this, was naturally ambitious to show how fast
he could go.
A mile or so before reaching Taranto the railway crosses a stream that
flows into the inland sea. One would be glad to believe those sages who
hold it to be the far-famed Galaesus. It rises near at hand in a marsh,
amid mighty tufts of reeds and odorous flowers, and the liquid bubbles
up in pools of crystalline transparency—deep and perfidious cauldrons
overhung by the trembling soil on which you stand. These fountains form
a respectable stream some four hundred yards in length; another copious
spring rises up in the sea near its mouth. But can this be the river
whose virtues are extolled by: Virgil, Horace, Martial, Statius,
Propertius, Strabo, Pliny, Varrò and Columella? What a constellation of
names around these short-lived waters! Truly, _minuit praesentia
famam,_ as Boccaccio says of the once-renowned Sebethus.
Often have I visited this site and tried to reconstruct its vanished
glories. My enthusiasm even led me, some years ago, to the town hall,
in order to ascertain its true official name, and here they informed me
that “it is vulgarly called Citrezze; but the correct version is ‘Le
Giadrezze,’ which, as you are aware, sir, signifies _pleasantness”_
This functionary was evidently ignorant of the fact that so long ago as
1771 the learned commentator (Carducci) of the “Delizie Tarentine”
already sneered at this popular etymology; adding, what is of greater
interest, that “in the time of our fathers” this region was covered
with woods and rich in game. In the days of Keppel Craven, the vale was
“scantily cultivated with cotton.” Looking at it from above, it
certainly resembles an old river-bed of about five hundred yards in
breadth, and I hold it possible that the deforestation of the higher
lands may have suffocated the original sources with soil carried down
from thence, and forced them to seek a lower level, thus shortening the
stream and reducing its volume of water.
But who shall decide? If we follow Polybius, another brook at the
further end of the inland sea has more valid claims to the title of
Galaesus. Virgil called it “black Galaesus”—a curious epithet, still
applied to water in Italy as well as in Greece (Mavromati, etc.). “For
me,” says Gissing, “the Galaesus is the stream I found and tracked,
whose waters I heard mingle with the little sea.” There is something to
be said for such an attitude, on the part of a dilettante traveller,
towards these desperate antiquarian controversies.
[Illustration: Fountains of Galaesus]
It is an agreeable promenade from the Giadrezze rivulet to Taranto
along the shore of this inland sea. Its clay banks are full of shells
and potteries of every age, and the shallow waters planted
with stakes indicating the places where myriads of oysters and mussels
are bred—indeed, if you look at a map you will observe that the whole
of this lagoon, as though to shadow forth its signification, is split
up into two basins like an opened oyster.
Here and there along this beach are fishermen’s huts constructed of
tree-stems which are smothered under multitudinous ropes of grass,
ropes of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly
fresh, others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay. There
is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these
shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones
stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew the
ground; a few stakes emerge, hard by, out of the placid and oozy
waters. In such a cabin, methinks, dwelt those two old fishermen of
Theocritus—here they lived and slumbered side by side on a couch of sea
moss, among the rude implements of their craft.
The habits of these fisherfolk are antique, because the incidents of
their calling have remained unchanged. Some people have detected traces
of “Greek” in the looks and language of these of Taranto. I can detect
nothing of the kind.
And the same with the rest of the population. Hellenic traits have
disappeared from Taranto, as well they may have done, when one
remembers its history. It was completely latinized under Augustus, and
though Byzantines came hither under Nicephorus Phocas—Benjamin of
Tudela says the inhabitants are “Greeks”—they have long ago become
merged into the Italian element. Only the barbers seem to have
preserved something of the old traditions: grandiloquent and terrible
talkers, like the cooks in Athenæus.
I witnessed an Aristophanic scene in one of their shops lately, when a
simple-minded stranger, a north Italian—some arsenal official—brought a
little boy to have his hair cut “not too short” and, on returning from
a brief visit to the tobacconist next door, found it cropped much
closer than he liked.
“But, damn it,” he said (or words to that effect), “I told you not to
cut the hair too short.”
The barber, immaculate and imperturbable, gave a preliminary bow. He
was collecting his thoughts, and his breath.
“I say, I told you not to cut it too short. It looks horrible——”
“Horrible? That, sir—pardon my frankness!—is a matter of opinion. I
fully admit that you desired the child’s hair to be cut not too short.
Those, in fact, were your very words. Notwithstanding, I venture to
think you will come round to my point of
view, on due reflection, like most of my esteemed customers. In the
first place, there is the ethnological aspect of the question. You are
doubtless sufficiently versed in history to know that under the late
regime it was considered improper, if not criminal, to wear a
moustache. Well, nowadays we think differently. Which proves that
fashions change; yes, they change, sir; and the wise man bends to
them—up to a certain point, of course; up to a certain reasonable
point——” “But, damn it——”