So one stumbles, inadvertently, upon problems of the day concerning
which our sages profess to know nothing. And yet I do perceive a
certain Writing upon the Wall setting forth, in clearest language, that
1 + 1 = 3; a legend which it behoves them not to expunge, but to
expound. For it refuses to be expunged; and we do not need a German
lady to tell us how much the “synthetic” sex, the hornless but not
brainless sex, has done for the life of the spirit while those other
two were reclaiming the waste places of earth, and procreating, and
fighting—as befits their horned anatomy.
XVI
REPOSING AT CASTROVILLARI
I remember asking my friend the Roman deputy of whom I have already
spoken, and whom I regard as a fountain of wisdom on matters Italian,
how it came about that the railway stations in his country were apt to
be so far distant from the towns they serve. Rocca Bernarda, I was
saying, lies 33 kilometres from its station; and even some of the
largest towns in the kingdom are inconveniently and unnecessarily
remote from the line.
“True,” he replied. “Very true! Inconveniently . . . but perhaps not
unnecessarily. . . .” He nodded his head, as he often does, when
revolving some deep problem in his mind.
“Well, sir?”
“Inasmuch as everything has its reasons, be they geographical,
sociological, or otherwise . . .” and he mused again. “Let me tell you
what I think as regards our respective English and Italian points of
view,” he said at last. “And to begin with—a few generalities! We may
hold that success in modern life consists in correctly appreciating the
principles which underlie our experiences—in what may be called the
scientific attitude towards things in general. Now, do the English
cultivate this attitude? Not sufficiently. They are in the stage of
those mediæval scholars who contentedly alleged separate primary causes
for each phenomenon, instead of seeking, by the investigation of
secondary ones, for the inevitable interdependence of the whole. In
other words, they do not subordinate facts; they co-ordinate them. Your
politicians and all your public men are guided by impulse—by
expediency, as they prefer to call it; they are empirical; they never
attempt to codify their conduct; they despise it as theorizing. What
happens? This old-fashioned hand-to-mouth system of theirs invariably
breaks down here and there. And then? Then they trust to some divine
interposition, some accident, to put things to rights again. The
success of the English is largely built up on such accidents—on the
mistakes of other people. Providence has favoured them so far, on the
whole; but one day it
may leave them in the lurch, as it did the anti-scientific Russians in
their war with the Japanese. One day other people will forget to make
these pleasant mistakes.”
He paused, and I forbore to interrupt his eloquence.
“To come now to the practical application—to this particular instance.
Tell me, does your English system testify to any constructive
forethought? In London, I am assured, the railway companies have built
stations at enormous expense in the very heart of the town. What will
be the consequence of this hand-to-mouth policy? This, that in fifty
years such structures will have become obsolete—stranded in slums at
the back of new quarters yet undreamed of. New depots will have to be
built. Whereas in Italy the now distant city will in fifty years have
grown to reach its station and, in another half-century, will have
encircled it. Thanks to our sagacity, the station will then be in its
proper place, in the centre of the town. Our progeny will be grateful;
and that again, you will admit, is a worthy aim for our politicians.
Besides, what would happen to our coachmen if nobody needed their
services on arriving at his destination? The poor men must not be
allowed to starve! Cold head and warm heart, you know; humanitarian
considerations cannot be thrust aside by a community that prides itself
on being truly civilized. I trust I have made myself intelligible?”
“You always do. But why should I incommode myself to please your
progeny, or even my own? And I don’t like the kind of warm heart that
subordinates my concerns to those of a cab-driver. You don’t altogether
convince me, dear sir.”
“To speak frankly, I sometimes don’t convince myself. My own country
station, for example, is curiously remote from the city, and it is
annoying on wintry nights to drive through six miles of level mud when
you are anxious to reach home and dinner; so much so that, in my
egoistical moments, I would have been glad if our administration had
adopted the more specious British method. But come now! You cannot
raise that objection against the terminus at Rome.”
“Not that one. But I can raise two others. The platforms are
inconveniently arranged, and a traveller will often find it impossible
to wash his hands and face there; as to hot water——”
“Granting a certain deplorable disposition of the lines—why on earth,
pray, should a man cleanse himself at the station when there are
countless hotels and lodging-houses in the city? O you English
originals!”
“And supposing,” I urged, “he is in a hurry to catch another train
going south, to Naples or Palermo?”
“There I have you, my illustrious friend! _Nobody travels south of
Rome.”_
Nobody travels south of Rome. . . .
Often have I thought upon those words.
This conversation was forcibly recalled to my mind by the fact that it
took our creaky old diligence two and a half hours (one of the horses
had been bought the day before, for six pounds) to drive from the
station of Castrovillari to the entrance of the town, where we were
delayed another twenty minutes, while the octroi zealots searched
through every bag and parcel on the post-waggon.
Many people have said bad things about this place. But my once
unpleasant impressions of it have been effaced by my reception at its
new and decent little hostelry. What a change after the sordid filth of
Rossano! Castrovillari, to be sure, has no background of hoary eld to
atone for such deficiencies. It was only built the other day, by the
Normans; or by the Romans, who called it Aprustum; or possibly by the
Greeks, who founded their Abystron on this particular site for the same
reasons that commended it in yet earlier times to certain bronze and
stone age primitives, whose weapons you may study in the British Museum
and elsewhere.[1]
[1] Even so Taranto, Cumae, Paestum, Metapontum, Monteleone and other
southern towns were founded by the ancients on the site of prehistoric
stations.
But what are the stone ages compared with immortal and immutable
Rossano? An ecclesiastical writer has proved that Calabria was
inhabited before the Noachian flood; and Rossano, we may be sure, was
one of the favourite haunts of the antediluvians. None the less, it is
good to rest in a clean bed, for a change; and to feed off a clean
plate.
We are in the south. One sees it in sundry small ways—in the behaviour
of the cats, for instance. . . .
The Tarentines, they say, imported the cat into Europe. If those of
south Italy still resemble their old Nubian ancestors, the beast would
assuredly not have been worth the trouble of acclimatizing. On entering
these regions, one of the first things that strikes me is the
difference between the appearance of cats and dogs hereabouts, and in
England or any northern country; and the difference in their
temperaments. Our dogs are alert in their movements and of wideawake
features; here they are drowsy and degraded mongrels, with
expressionless eyes. Our cats are sleek and slumberous; here they prowl
about haggard,
shifty and careworn, their fur in patches and their ears a-tremble from
nervous anxiety. That domestic animals such as these should be fed at
home does not commend itself to the common people; they must forage for
their food abroad. Dogs eat offal, while the others hunt for lizards in
the fields. A lizard diet is supposed to reduce their weight (it would
certainly reduce mine); but I suspect that southern cats are emaciated
not only from this cause, but from systematic starvation. Many a kitten
is born that never tastes a drop of cow’s milk from the cradle to the
grave, and little enough of its own mother’s.
To say that our English _zoophilomania_—our cult of lap-dogs—smacks of
degeneracy does not mean that I sympathize with the ill-treatment of
beasts which annoys many visitors to these parts and has been
attributed to “Saracenic” influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as
well attribute it to the old Greeks.[2] Poor Saracens! They are a sort
of whipping-boy, all over the country. The chief sinner in this respect
is the Vatican, which has authorized cruelty to animals by its official
teaching. When Lord Odo Russell enquired of the Pope regarding the
foundation of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in
Italy, the papal answer was: “Such an association _could not be
sanctioned_ by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to
wit, that Christians owed any duties to animals.” This language has the
inestimable and rather unusual merit of being perspicuous.
Nevertheless, Ouida’s flaming letters to “The Times” inaugurated an era
of truer humanity. . . .
[2] Whose attitude towards animals, by the way, was as far removed
from callousness as from sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic
oxen fared who had laboured to draw up heavy blocks for the building
of a temple—how, on the completion of their task, they were led into
green fields, there to pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives.
We know that the Greeks were appreciative of the graces and virtues of
canine nature—is not the Homeric Argo still the finest dog-type in
literature? Yet to them the dog, even he of the tender Anthology,
remained what he is: a tamed beast. The Greeks, sitting at dinner,
resented the insolence of a creature that, watching every morsel as it
disappeared into the mouth of its master, plainly discovered by its
physiognomy the desire, the presumed right, to devour what he
considered fit only for himself. Whence that profound word [Greek:
kunopes]—dog-eyed, shameless. In contrast to this sanity, observe what
an Englishman can read into a dog’s eye:
That liquid, melancholy eye,
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seemed surging the Virgilian cry—
The sense of tears in mortal things. . . .
That is how Matthew Arnold interprets the feelings of Fido, watching
his master at work upon a tender beefsteak. . . .
[Illustration: Shoeing a Cow]
And the lateness of the dining-hour—another symptom of the south. It
was eleven o’clock when I sat down to dinner on the night of my
arrival, and habitues of the hotel, engineers and so
forth, were still dropping in for their evening meal. Appetite comes
more slowly than ever, now that the heats have begun.
They have begun in earnest. The swoon of summer is upon the land, the
grass is cut, cicadas are chirping overhead. Despite its height of a
thousand feet, Castrovillari must be blazing in August, surrounded as
it is by parched fields and an amphitheatre of bare limestone hills
that exhale the sunny beams. You may stroll about these fields
observing the construction of the line which is to pass through
Cassano, a pretty place, famous for its wine and mineral springs; or
studying the habits of the gigantic grasshoppers that hang in clusters
to the dried thistles and start off, when scared, with the noise of a
covey of partridges; or watching how the cows are shod, at this season,
to thresh the corn. Old authors are unanimous in declaring that the
town was embowered in oak forests; as late as 1844 it was lamented that
this “ancient barbarous custom” of cutting them down had not yet been
discontinued. The mischief is now done, and it would be interesting to
know the difference between the present summer temperature and that of
olden days.
The manna ash used to be cultivated in these parts. I cannot tell
whether its purgative secretion is still in favour. The confusion
between this stuff and the biblical manna gave rise to the legends
about Calabria where “manna droppeth as dew from Heaven.” Sandys says
it was prepared out of the mulberry. He copied assiduously, did old
Sandys, and yet found room for some original blunders of his own. R.
Pococke, by the way, is one of those who were dissatisfied with
Castrovillari. He found no accommodation save an empty house. “A poor
town.” . . .
Driving through modern Castrovillari one might think the place flat and
undeserving of the name of _castrum._ But the old town is otherwise. It
occupies a proud eminence—the head of a promontory which overlooks the
junction of two streams; the newer settlement stands on the more level
ground at its back. This acropolis, once thronged with folk but now
well-nigh deserted, has all the macabre fascination of decay. A mildewy
spirit haunts those tortuous and uneven roadways; plaster drops
unheeded from the walls; the wild fig thrusts luxuriant arms through
the windows of palaces whose balconies are rusted and painted loggias
crumbling to earth ... a mournful and malarious agglomeration of ruins.
There is a castle, of course. It was built, or rebuilt, by the
Aragonese, with four corner towers, one of which became
infamous for a scene that rivals the horrors of the Black Hole of
Calcutta. Numbers of confined brigands, uncared-for, perished miserably
of starvation within its walls. Says the historian Botta:
“The abominable taint prevented the guards from approaching; the dead
bodies were not carried away. The pestilence increased; in pain and
exhaustion, the dying fell shuddering on the dead; the hale on the
dying; all tearing themselves like dogs with teeth and nails. The tower
of Castrovillari became a foul hole of corruption, and the stench was
spread abroad for a long season.”
This castle is now used as a place of confinement. Sentries warned me
at one point not to approach too near the walls; it was “forbidden.” I
had no particular desire to disobey this injunction. Judging by the
number of rats that swarm about the place, it is not exactly a model
prison.
One of the streets in this dilapidated stronghold bears to this day the
inscription “Giudea,” or Jewry. Southern Italy was well stocked with
those Hebrews concerning whom Mr. H. M. Adler has sagely discoursed.
They lived in separate districts, and seem to have borne a good
reputation. Those of Castrovillari, on being ejected by Ferdinand the
Catholic in 1511, obligingly made a donation of their school to the
town. But they returned anon, and claimed it again. Persecuted as they
were, they never suffered the martyrdom of the ill-starred Waldensian
colonies in Calabria.
The houses of this Jewry overlook the Coscile river, the Sybaris of
old, and from a spot in the quarter a steep path descends to its banks.
Here you will find yourself in another climate, cool and moist. The
livid waters tumble gleefully towards the plain, amid penurious plots
of beans and tomatoes, and a fierce tangle of vegetation wherever the
hand of man has not made clearings. Then, mounting aloft once more, you
will do well to visit the far-famed chapel that sits at the apex of the
promontory, Santa Maria del Castello. There is a little platform where
you may repose and enjoy the view, as I have done for some evenings
past—letting the eye roam up-country towards Dolcedorme and its sister
peaks, and westwards over the undulating Sila lands whose highest
point, Botte Donato, is unmistakable even at this distance of forty
miles, from its peculiar shape.
The Madonna picture preserved within the sanctuary has performed so
many miracles in ages past that I despair of giving any account of
them. It is high time, none the less, for a new sign from Heaven.
Shattered by earthquakes, the chapel is in a disruptured and even
menacing condition. Will some returned emigrant from America come
forward with the necessary funds?
That would be a miracle, too, in its way. But gone, for the present,
are the ages of Faith—the days when the peevishly-protestant J. H.
Bartels sojourned here and groaned as he counted up the seven
monasteries of Castrovillari (there used to be nearly twice that
number), and viewed the 130 priests, “fat-paunched rascals, loafing
about the streets and doorways.” . . .
From my window in the hotel I espy a small patch of snow on the hills.
I know the place; it is the so-called “Montagna del Principe” past
which the track winds into the Pollino regions. Thither I am bound; but
so complicated is life that even for a short three days’ ramble among
those forests a certain amount of food and clothing must be provided—a
mule is plainly required. There seem to be none of these beasts
available at Castrovillari.
“To Morano!” they tell me. “It is nearer the mountain, and there you
will find mules plentiful as blackberries. To Morano!”
Morano lies a few miles higher up the valley on the great military road
to Lagonegro, which was built by Murat and cuts through the interior of
Basilicata, rising at Campo Tenese to a height of 1100 metres. They are
now running a public motor service along this beautiful stretch of 52
kilometres, at the cheap rate of a sou per kilometre.
_En route!_
POSTSCRIPT.—Another symptom of the south:
Once you have reached the latitude of Naples, the word _grazie_ (thank
you) vanishes from the vocabulary of all save the most cultured. But to
conclude therefrom that one is among a thankless race is not altogether
the right inference. They have a wholly different conception of the
affair. Our septentrional “thanks” is a complicated product in which
gratefulness for things received and for things to come are
unconsciously balanced; while their point of view differs in nothing
from that of the beau-ideal of Greek courtesy, of Achilles, whose
mother procured for him a suit of divine armour from Hephaistos, which
he received without a word of acknowledgment either for her or for the
god who had been put to some little trouble in the matter. A thing
given they regard as a thing found, a hermaion, a happy hit in the
lottery of life; the giver is the blind instrument of Fortune. This
chill attitude repels us; and our effusive expressions of thankfulness
astonish these people and the Orientals.
A further difference is that the actual gift is viewed quite
extrinsically, intellectually, either in regard to what it would fetch
if bartered or sold, or, if to be kept, as to how far its possession
may raise the recipient in the eyes of other men. This is purely
Homeric, once more—Homeric or primordial, if you prefer. Odysseus told
his kind host Alkinoos, whom he was never to see again, that he would
be glad to receive farewell presents from him—to cherish as a friendly
memory? No, but “because they would make him look a finer fellow when
he got home.” The idea of a keepsake, of an emotional value attaching
to some trifle, is a northern one. Here life is give and take, and
lucky he who takes more than he gives; it is what Professor Mahaffy
calls the “ingrained selfishness of the Greek character.” Speaking of
all below the upper classes, I should say that disinterested
benevolence is apt to surpass their comprehension, a good-natured
person being regarded as weak in the head.
Has this man, then, no family, that he should benefit strangers? Or is
he one of nature’s unfortunates—soft-witted? Thus they argue. They will
do acts of spontaneous kindness towards their family, far oftener than
is customary with us. But outside that narrow sphere, _interesse_
(Odyssean self-advantage) is the mainspring of their actions. Whence
their smooth and glozing manners towards the stranger, and those
protestations of undying affection which beguile the unwary—they wish
to be forever in your good graces, for sooner or later you may be of
use; and if perchance you do content them, they will marvel
(philosophically) at your grotesque generosity, your lack of
discrimination and restraint. Such _malizia_ (cleverness) is none the
more respectable for being childishly transparent. The profound and
unscrupulous northerner quickly familiarizes himself with its
technique, and turns it to his own profit. Lowering his moral notions,
he soon—so one of them expressed it to me—“walks round them without
getting off his chair” and, on the strength of his undeserved
reputation for simplicity and fair dealing, keeps them dangling a
lifetime in a tremble of obsequious amiability, cheered on by the hope
of ultimately over-reaching him. Idle dream, where a pliant and
sanguine southerner is pitted against the unswerving Saxon or Teuton!
This accounts for the success of foreign trading houses in the south.
Business is business, and the devil take the hindmost! By all means;
but they who are not rooted to the spot by commercial exigencies nor
ready to adopt debased standards of conduct will find that a prolonged
residence in a centre like Naples—the daily attrition of its
ape-and-tiger elements—sullies their homely candour and self-respect.
For a tigerish flavour does exist in most of these southern towns.
Camorra, the law of intimidation, rules the city. This is what Stendhal
meant when, speaking of the “simple and inoffensive” personages in the
_Vicar of Wakefield,_ he remarked that “in the sombre Italy, a simple
and inoffensive creature would be quickly destroyed.” It is not easy to
be inoffensive and yet respected in a land of teeth and claws, where a
man is reverenced in proportion as he can browbeat his fellows. So much
ferocity tinctures civic life, that had they not dwelt in towns while
we were still shivering in bogs, one would deem them not yet ripe for
herding together in large numbers; one would say that post-patriarchal
conditions evoked the worst qualities of the race. And we must revise
our conceptions of fat and lean men; we must pity Cassius, and dread
Falstaff.
“What has happened”—you ask some enormous individual—“to your adversary
at law?”
“To which one of them?”
“Oh, Signor M——, the timber merchant.”
“_L’abbiamo mangiato!_” (I have eaten him.)
Beware of the fat Neapolitan. He is fat from prosperity, from, dining
off his leaner brothers.
Which reminds me of a supremely important subject, eating.
The feeding here is saner than ours with its all-pervading animal
grease (even a boiled egg tastes of mutton fat in England), its
stock-pot, suet, and those other inventions of the devil whose awful
effects we only survive because we are continually counteracting or
eliminating them by the help of (1) pills, (2) athletics, and (3)
alcohol. Saner as regards material, but hopelessly irrational in
method. Your ordinary employé begins his day with a thimbleful of black
coffee, nothing more. What work shall be got out of him. under such
anti-hygienic conditions? Of course it takes ten men to do the work of
one; and of course all ten of them are sulky and irritable throughout
the morning, thinking only of their luncheon. Then indeed—then they
make up for lost time; those few favoured ones, at least, who can
afford it.
I once watched a young fellow, a clerk of some kind, in a restaurant at
midday. He began by informing the waiter that he had no appetite that
morning—_sangue di Dio!_ no appetite whatever; but at last allowed
himself to be persuaded into consuming a _hors d’ oeuvres_ of anchovies
and olives. Then he was induced to try the maccheroni, because they
were “particularly good that morning”; he ate, or rather drank, an
immense plateful. After that came some slices of meat and a dish of
green stuff sufficient to satisfy a starving bullock. A little fish?
asked the
waiter. Well, perhaps yes, just for form’s sake—two fried mullets and
some nondescript fragments. Next, he devoured a couple of raw eggs “on
account of his miserably weak stomach,” a bowl of salad and a goodly
lump of fresh cheese. Not without a secret feeling of envy I left him
at work upon his dessert, of which he had already consumed some six
peaches. Add to this (quite an ordinary repast) half a bottle of heavy
wine, a cup of black coffee and three glasses of water—what work shall
be got out of a man after such a boa-constrictor collation? He is as
exasperated and prone to take offence as in the morning—this time from
another cause. . . .
That is why so many of them suffer from chronic troubles of the
digestive organs. The head of a hospital at Naples tells me that
stomach diseases are more prevalent there than in any other part of
Europe, and the stomach, whatever sentimentalists may say to the
contrary, being the true seat of the emotions, it follows that a
judicious system of dieting might work wonders upon their development.
Nearly all Mediterranean races have been misfed from early days; that
is why they are so small. I would undertake to raise the Italian
standard of height by several inches, if I had control of their
nutrition for a few centuries. I would undertake to alter their whole
outlook upon life, to convert them from utilitarians into
romantics—were such a change desirable. For if utilitarianism be the
shadow of starvation, romance is nothing but the vapour of repletion.
And yet men still talk of race-characteristics as of something fixed
and immutable! The Jews, so long as they starved in Palestine, were the
most acrimonious bigots on earth. Now that they live and feed sensibly,
they have learnt to see things in their true perspective—they have
become rationalists. Their less fortunate fellow-Semites, the Arabs,
have continued to starve and to swear by the Koran—empty in body and
empty in mind. No poise or balance is possible to those who live in
uneasy conditions. The wisest of them can only attain to stoicism—a
dumb protest against the environment. There are no stoics among
well-fed people. The Romans made that discovery for themselves, when
they abandoned the cheese-paring habits of the Republic.
In short, it seems to me that virtues and vices which cannot be
expressed in physiological terms are not worth talking about; that when
a morality refuses to derive its sanction from the laws which govern
our body, it loses the right to exist. This being so, what is the most
conspicuous native vice?
Envy, without a doubt.
Out of envy they pine away and die; out of envy they kill one another.
To produce a more placid race,[3] to dilute envious thoughts and the
acts to which they lead, is at bottom a question of nutrition. One
would like to know for how much black brooding and for how many
revengeful deeds that morning thimbleful of black coffee is
responsible.
[3] By placid I do not mean peace-loving and pitiful in the Christian
sense. That doctrine of loving and forgiving one’s enemies is based on
sheer funk; our pity for others is dangerously akin to self-pity, most
odious of vices. Catholic teaching—in practice, if not in
theory—-glides artfully over the desirability of these imported
freak-virtues, knowing that they cannot appeal to a masculine stock.
By placid I mean steady, self-contained.
The very faces one sees in the streets would change. Envy is reflected
in all too many of those of the middle classes, while the poorest
citizens are often haggard and distraught from sheer hunger—hunger
which has not had time to be commuted into moral poison; college-taught
men, in responsible positions, being forced to live on salaries which a
London lift-boy would disdain. When that other local feature, that
respect for honourable poverty—the reverse of what we see in England
where, since the days of the arch-snob Pope, a slender income has grown
to be considered a subject of reproach.