To do at Rome as the Romans do is sage advice, not always nor often
followed by those of us who wander afield. Voluntarily placing
ourselves among people whose ways and habits are different from our
own, and whose principles of action are as sacred to them as ours are
to us, we ‘fling our five fingers’ in the face of rules and regulations
which are to them the very sign and substance of social decorum.
Principles which are stricter than our own we call prejudices; and
pooh-pooh as valueless those virtues in which we are wanting, while
condemning as unpardonably immoral everything whatever which is of
laxer fibre and looser holding than the corresponding circumstance at
home. Thus, we fall foul of the southern nations for their want of
straightforwardness, their sweet deceptive flatteries, their small
short-sighted dishonesties; yet we count it but a little matter that
they should be sober, abstemious, kind-hearted, and charitable; that
they should not beat their children nor kick their wives to death;
nor spend on one gross meal of beef and beer half the earnings of the
week. We forget, too, that if we are ‘done’ in the vineyards and the
orange groves, others are as much ‘done’ in the hop gardens and the
hay-fields; and that: ‘Here is a stranger—come, let us rob him,’ is
the rule of life all the world over. We deride the costly political
efforts made by young nations struggling to obtain a place in European
councils; but we have not a word of praise for the patience with which
the people bear their heavy burden of taxation, that their country may
be great with the great, and strong with the strong. In short, we find
more barren land than fertile, all the way from Dan to Beersheba; and,
once across the silver streak, very few points, if any, attract our
admiration, while fewer still compel our adhesion.
One of the most striking acts of unconformity lies in the charter of
liberty given to our girls, compared with the close guard enforced
among the bold wooers and jealous possessors of the fervid south. An
amount of freedom, which is both innocent and recognised here, is held
as dangerous and improper there; but few English girls will submit to
more personal restraint in Palermo or Madrid than that to which they
have been accustomed in Cornwall or Cumberland. And indeed, they often
launch out into strange license, and do things in foreign cities which
they would not dare to do in their own native towns. They think they
are not known; and what does it signify what people say of them?—the
honour of the English name not counting. If you reason with them, and
tell them that such and such things are ill thought of by the natives,
they look at you blankly and answer: ‘What does it matter to us? Their
ways are not ours, thank goodness! and we prefer our own. Besides, they
must be very horrid people to think evil when there is none.’ Mothers
and chaperons are no more sensitive, no more conformable, than their
charges, and quite as resolute to reject any new view and trample under
foot any rule of life to which they have not been accustomed. Tell
one of them that, in a purely foreign hotel, the girl must not be let
to sleep in another corridor—on another floor—or away from her own
immediate vicinity, and she asks: ‘Why? My daughter is not a baby; she
can take care of herself. And what harm should happen to her?’ Tell her
that the girl must not wander unaccompanied about the passages, the
gardens, the public rooms of the hotel, nor sit apart in corners of
the salon talking in whispers with the men, nor lounge on the benches
with one favoured individual alone—and she scouts all these precautions
as foolish if not insulting. Say that it is not considered correct
for the young lady to come to table-d’hôte by herself at any time of
the meal it may suit her to appear—perhaps dashing into dinner in her
hat, breathless, heated, excited—and again the advice is rejected.
Her daughter has been accustomed to be mistress of her own time as
well as actions, and lawn-tennis is a game which cannot be interrupted
nor determined by one person only. She did just the same last year
at Scarborough, and no one made unpleasant observations; so, why
should she be under more control now? Yes, she did all these things
at home, where they are compatible with ‘well-and-wise-walking.’ But
in a foreign hotel, tenanted by men who respect young women only in
proportion to the care that is taken of them, they are not well nor
wise; nay, more, they are looked on as criminal acts of neglect in
those who have the guidance of things.
Manners are special to countries as to classes, and are accepted as
so much current coin, which passes here, but would not run out of the
limits of the realm. Jermimer, down at Margate, giggles back to ’Arry,
making lollipop eyes at her over the old boat, while sucking the knob
of his sixpenny cane. From giggling and making lollipop eyes, the pair
soon come to speech; from speech to association; from association to
love-making in earnest, and mayhap to marriage. In any case, no harm
is done; and Jermimer and ’Arry are as little out of the right course,
judged from their own stand-point, when they make acquaintance in this
primitive manner, as is Lady Clara Vere de Vere when she is whirled
away in Lord Verisopht’s arms on a first introduction. The coin is good
where it is minted. But Lady Clara Vere de Vere would be but base metal
at Tangier and Tunis; and Jermimer is not understood, say at Palermo,
when she comes there in force, trailing her Margate manners at her
heels. Consequently, when three pretty girls alight at that fair city,
and ‘carry on’ as if they were in ’appy ’Ampton, they naturally excite
some attention, not of a flattering kind, among people to whom girlhood
is at once brittle ware and a sacred deposit. A showy triad, dressed
in the fluttering fashion dear to the tribe of Jermimer—bows here,
ends there—colours which dazzle, and shapes not to be overlooked—they
make themselves still more conspicuous by their millinery than nature
has already made them by her gift of milkwhite skins and flaxen hair.
They make themselves more conspicuous by their manners than by either
millinery or colour. They care nothing for sight-seeing, and all
for flirting, or what in their vernacular is ‘larking.’ Like their
prototype giggling back to ’Arry over the old boat, they look back and
laugh and beckon and nod to the young officers who follow them through
the streets, thinking that here is sport made to their hand, and that
to reject the roasted larks which fall from the sky would be a folly
unworthy a rational human being. From looking they pass into speech;
and, by aid of a dictionary and their fingers, make appointments and
go off on expeditions, unchaperoned, with these young men, to whom
they have no more clue than is given by their uniform and the number
of their regiment. When warned by experienced compatriots, they treat
the warning as envy of their enjoyment. When advised by the handsome
general who takes his own share of the cake, liberally, they treat his
advice as jealousy of the younger men; and so, following their own
course, they become the town’s talk, the shame of the English colony,
the indignation of their hotel companions, and the standing marvel of
the whole native population. They put, too, a stone in the hand of the
reactionary and exclusive; and: ‘See to what your dangerous liberties
lead your girls!’ is a reproach which no one can ward off. This is an
instance of unconformity known to the writer of these lines as having
taken place last winter in Palermo.
English and American girls flirt in a way which the fervid south
neither permits nor understands. So far that fervid south is more real
and more intense than we, who yet pride ourselves on both our sincerity
and our depth. A painful little drama took place not long ago, founded
on these cross lines of violated custom. Down on the Gulf of Naples a
quite young girl, precocious in character and appearance and given up
by her mother to the care of her maid, flirted with a young Italian
as a foolish child would, given the chance, and only a venal servant
to accept bribes for not looking after her. The young fellow took her
seriously. When the trying moment came, she opened her large blue eyes
and said with the candid air of a cherub: ‘I meant nothing but fun. I
do not love you, and I am too young to marry.’ The youth shot himself
as his commentary on her answer.
Again, no kind of warning as to the untrustworthiness of certain
plausible scoundrels, known to be mere _cacciatori_ or fortune-hunters,
will do any good to certain women determined to ruin themselves. A
girl not long ago fell in love with a Sicilian scamp of handsome
presence and desperate character. In vain her friends warned her of
his reputation, and besought her to conquer her suicidal passion—in
vain! in vain! She would not, and she did not; but, like the poor
foolish moth, flew right up to the candle, and proved too fatally what
the flame was like. She married; and then learnt what a torturer and
a tyrant could do when put to it. Before the year was out she had to
escape by stealth from a man who starved her and beat her; who slept
with a revolver under his pillow, with which he threatened her at
dead of night—waking her from her sleep to terrify her into almost
madness—and who made her regret too bitterly that she had not taken
advice when it was given her, and believed in the truer knowledge of
the more experienced.
In health it is the same story. We, who go on a visit of a few weeks,
know so much better what is good for us than the natives of the place,
who have had the experience of a lifetime and the traditions of
centuries to guide them! We laugh at their precautions, and refuse to
be ‘coddled.’ Hence, we go straight into the jaws of danger, and then
wonder that we are bitten. We hang over the malarial waters stagnating
in the Colosseum, when we go there to ‘enthuse’ by moonlight. We lie
on the rank grass in the Campagna, cooling our flushed faces on the
earth which teems with the germs that slay and the emanations that
destroy. We whip our blood to fever-heat by violent exertion under
the burning sun, then get chilled to the marrow when the great orb
sinks to darkness and the cold damps rise like malignant spirits from
the tomb; and we think the inhabitants lazy because they take their
exercise doucely, and effeminate because they avoid the half-hour of
sundown as they would avoid a tiger crouching in the jungle. We eat and
drink in feverish Italy and exciting Spain as we eat and drink in damp,
depressing England; and we refuse to do at Rome as the Romans do, to
the damage of our liver and the ruin of our nerves. We know best—are
we not free-born Britons?—and our flag of unconformity is the sign of
our superiority. We despise the religion of the countries we visit,
and will not believe that the worshippers of the saints have more
respect than have we ourselves for the faith into which they have been
born and bred. A friend of our own carries this feeling to its last
development, not being able to understand, nor to believe, that the
old Greeks and Romans had any respect for Zeus or worship for Minerva.
The grandeur and multiplicity of their temples, the magnificence and
frequency of their processions, say nothing to him. Their ways are not
his, and he cannot accept them as true for them if not for him. All
people who have been abroad, and who respect the habits and feelings of
those among whom they have placed themselves, know how painful it is
to meet certain of their countrymen and women in the churches during
service. These nonconformists pay no more respect to the place than if
it were a barn cleared out for a play-night. They walk about making
comments in audible voices, and stepping over the obstructive feet of
the kneeling worshippers as unconcernedly as if they were picking their
way among so many bales of cotton and wool. Why should they not? When
faith and habits clash, are not our own those which we must consider?
At a funeral service in St Roch, when the nave was draped in black and
occupied by the mourners gathered round the coffin, there came up the
side aisle, arm-in-arm, a young Englishman and, perhaps, his bride,
joyous, happy, talking, laughing. What to them, in the flush of their
youthful bliss, was the sorrow of the widow, the grief of the children,
the loss of a good man and a useful life? They were on one plane,
and all these weeping mourners were on another; and their own was
predominant.
In a smaller matter than this, we show the same want of conformity.
We go to a theatre in full dress where the ladies of the place go in
bonnets, and to the opera in ulsters and travel-worn hats where the
élite are in their diamonds and plumes. But so it is all through.
We are British, and may do as we like, not being slaves nor wearing
wooden shoes like those others, and Britannia ruling the seas—a cross
between Neptune and Minerva. We eat and drink and dress and flirt and
live independent of the rules by which the people of the country are
guided and checked. But if any one does not conform to our ways, he is
anathematised, and we wonder how such bad taste is possible with a
well-conditioned person! It is the stiff Anglo-Saxon neck, which, were
it to bend, would not lose in power, but would gain in grace.