Both of us know better....
This young girl has no illusions (few Tuscans have) and yet a great
charm. Her lover is at the front. There is little for her to do, the
hotel being practically empty. There is nothing whatever for me to do,
in these Arctic latitudes. Bored to death, both of us, we confabulate
together huddled in shawls and greatcoats, each holding a charcoal pan
to keep the fingers from being frostbitten. I say to myself: "You will
never find a maidservant of this type in Rome, so sprightly of tongue,
distinguished in manner and spotless in person--never!"
The same with her words. The phrases trip out of her mouth, immaculate,
each in full dress. Seldom does she make an original remark, but she
says ordinary things in a tone of intense conviction and invests them
with an appetizing savour. Wherein lies that peculiar salt of Tuscan
speech? In its emphasis, its air of finality. They are emphatic, rather
than profound. Their deepest utterances, if you look below the surface,
are generally found to be variants of one of those ancestral saws or
proverbs wherewith the country is saturated. Theirs is a crusted charm.
A hard and glittering sanity, a kind of ageless enamel, is what
confronts us in their temperament. There are not many deviations from
this Tuscan standard. Close by, in Umbria, you will find a softer type.
One can be passably warm in bed. Here I lie for long, long hours,
endeavouring to generate the spark of energy which will propel me from
this inhospitable mountain. Here I lie and study an old travel-book. I
mean to press it to the last drop.
One seldom presses books out, nowadays. The mania for scraps of one kind
or another, the general cheapening of printed matter, seem to have
dulled that faculty and given us a scattered state of mind. We browse
dispersedly, in goatish fashion, instead of nibbling down to the root
like that more conscientious quadruped whose name, if I mentioned it,
would degrade the metaphor. Devouring so much, so hastily, so
irreverentially, how shall a man establish close contact with the mind
of him who writes, and impregnate himself with his peculiar outlook to
such an extent as to be able to take on, if only momentarily, a
colouring different from his own? It is a task requiring submissiveness
and leisure.
And yet, what could be more interesting than really to observe things
and men from the angle of another individual, to install oneself within
his mentality and make it one's habitation? To sit in his bones--what
glimpses of unexplored regions! Were a man to know what his fellow truly
thinks; could he feel in his own body those impulses which drive the
other to his idiomatic acts and words--what an insight he would gain!
Morally, it might well amount to "tout comprendre, c'est ne rien
pardonner"; but who troubles about pardoning or condemning?
Intellectually, it would be a feast. Thus immersed into an alien
personality, a man would feel as though he lived two lives, and
possessed two characters at the same time. One's own life, prolonged to
an age, could never afford such unexpected revelations.
The thing can be done, up to a point, with patient humility; for
everybody writes himself down more or less, though not everybody is
worth the trouble of deciphering.
I purpose to apply this method; to squeeze the juice, the life-blood,
out of what some would call a rather dry Scotch traveller. I read his
book in England for the first time two years ago, and have brought it
here with a view to further dissection. Would I had known of its
existence five years earlier! Strange to say, despite my deplorable
bookishness (vide Press) this was not the case; I could never ascertain
either the author's name or the title of his volume, though I had heard
about him, rather vaguely, long before that time. It was Dr. Dohrn of
the Naples Aquarium who said to me in those days:
"Going to the South? Whatever you do, don't forget to read that book by
an old Scotch clergyman. He ran all over the country with a top-hat and
an umbrella, copying inscriptions. He was just your style: perfectly
crazy."
Flattered at the notion of being likened to a Scottish divine, I made
all kinds of inquiries--in vain. I abandoned hope of unearthing the
top-hatted antiquarian and had indeed concluded him to be a myth, when a
friend supplied me with what may be absurdly familiar to less bookish
people: "The Nooks and By-ways of Italy." By Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D.
Liverpool, 1868.
A glance sufficed to prove that this Ramage belonged to the brotherhood
of David Urquhart, Mure of Caldwell, and the rest of them. Where are
they gone, those candid inquirers, so full of gentlemanly curiosity, so
informative and yet shrewdly human; so practical--think of Urquhart's
Turkish Baths--though stuffed with whimsicality and abstractions? Where
is the spirit that gave them birth?
One grows attached to these "Nooks and By-ways." An honest book, richly
thoughtful, and abounding in kindly twinkles.
Now, regarding the top-hat. I find no mention of it in these letters.
For letters they are; letters extracted from a diary which was written
on his return from Italy in 1828 from "very full notes made from day to
day during my journey." 1828: that date is important. It was in 1828,
therefore, when the events occurred which he relates, and he allowed an
interval of forty years to elapse ere making them public.
The umbrella on the other hand is always cropping up. It pervades the
volume like a Leitmotif. It is "a most invaluable article" for
protecting the head against the sun's rays; so constantly is it used
that after a single month's wear we find it already in "a sad state of
dilapidation." Still, he clings to it. As a defence against brigands it
might prove useful, and on one occasion, indeed, he seizes it in his
hand "prepared to show fight." This happened, be it remembered, in 1828.
Vainly one conjectures what the mountain folk of South Italy thought of
such a phenomenon. Even now, if they saw you carrying an umbrella about
in the sunshine, they would cross themselves and perhaps pray for your
recovery--perhaps not. Yet Ramage was not mad at all. He was only more
individualistic and centrifugal than many people. Having formed by
bitter experience a sensible theory--to wit, that sunstroke is
unpleasant and can be avoided by the use of an umbrella--he is not above
putting it into practice. Let others think and do as they please!
For the rest, his general appearance was quite in keeping. How
delightful he must have looked! Why have we no such types nowadays?
Wearing a "white merino frock-coat, nankeen trowsers, a large-brimmed
straw hat, and white shoes," he must have been a fairly conspicuous
object in the landscape. That hat alone will have alarmed the peasantry
who to this day and hour wear nothing but felt on their heads. And note
the predominance of the colour white in his attire; it was popular, at
that period, with English travellers. Such men, however, were unknown in
most of the regions which Ramage explored. The colour must have inspired
feelings akin to awe in the minds of the natives, for white is their
bête noire. They have a rooted aversion to it and never employ it in
their clothing, because it suggests to their fancy the idea of
bloodlessness--of anaemia and death. If you want to make one of them ill
over his dinner, wear a white waistcoat.
Accordingly, it is not surprising that he sometimes finds himself "an
object of curiosity." An English Vice-Consul, at one place, was "quite
alarmed at my appearance." Elsewhere he meets a band of peasant-women
who "took fright at my appearance and scampered off in the utmost
confusion." And what happened at Taranto? By the time of his arrival in
that town his clothes were already in such a state that "they would
scarcely fit an Irish beggar." Umbrella in hand--he is careful to
apprise us of this detail--and soaked moreover from head to foot after
an immersion in the river Tara, he entered the public square, which was
full of inhabitants, and soon found himself the centre of a large crowd.
Looking, he says, like a drowned rat, his appearance caused "great
amazement."
"What is the matter? Who is he?" they asked.
The muleteer explained that he was an Englishman, and "that immediately
seemed to satisfy them."
Of course it did. People in those times were prepared for anything on
the part of an Englishman, who was a far more self-assertive and
self-confident creature than nowadays.
Thus arrayed in snowy hue, like the lilies of the field, he perambulates
during the hot season the wildest parts of South Italy, strangely
unprejudiced, heedless of bugs and brigands--a real danger in 1828: did
he not find the large place Rossano actually blocked by them?--sleeping
in stables and execrable inns, viewing sites of antiquity and natural
beauty, interrogating everybody about everything and, in general,
"satisfying his curiosity." That curiosity took a great deal to satisfy.
It is a positive relief to come upon a sentence in this book, a sentence
unique, which betrays a relaxing or waning of this terrible curiosity.
"It requires a strong mania for antiquities to persevere examining such
remains as Alife furnishes, and I was soon satisfied with what I had
seen." Nor did he climb to the summit of Mount Vulture, as he would have
done if the view had not been obscured by a haze.
His chief concern could not be better summed up than in the sub-title he
has chosen for this volume: Wanderings in search of ancient remains and
modern superstitions. To any one who knows the country it appears
astonishing how much he contrived to see, and in how brief a space of
time. He accomplished wonders. For it was no mean task he had proposed
to himself, namely, "to visit every spot in Italy which classic writers
had rendered famous."
To visit every spot--what a Gargantuan undertaking! None but a quite
young man could have conceived such a project, and even Ramage, with all
his good health and zest, might have spent half a lifetime over the
business but for his habit of breathless hustle, which leaves the reader
panting behind. He is always on the move. He reminds one of Mr. Phineas
Fogg in that old tale. The moment he has "satisfied his curiosity" there
is no holding him; off he goes; the smiles of the girls whom he adores,
the entreaties of some gentle scholar who fain would keep him as guest
for the night--they are vain; he is tired to death, but "time is
precious" and he "tears himself away from his intelligent host" and
scampers into the wilderness once more, as if the Furies were at his
heels. He thinks nothing of rushing from Catanzaro to Cotrone, from
Manduria to Brindisi, in a single day--at a time when there was hardly a
respectable road in the country. Up to the final paragraph of the book
he is "hurrying" because time is "fast running out."
This sense of fateful hustle--this, and the umbrella--they impart quite
a peculiar flavour to his pages.
One would like to learn more about so lovable a type--for such he was,
unquestionably; one would like to know, above all things, why his
descriptions of other parts of Italy have never been printed. Was the
enterprise interrupted by his death? He tells us that the diaries of his
tours through the central and northern regions were written; that he
visited "every celebrated spot in Umbria and Etruria" and wandered "as
far as the valley of the Po." Where are these notes? Those on Etruria,
especially, would make good reading at this distance of time, when even
Dennis has acquired an old-world aroma. The Dictionary of National
Biography might tell us something about him, but that handy little
volume is not here; moreover, it has a knack of telling you everything
about people save what you ought to know.
So, for example, I had occasion not long ago to look up the account of
Charles Waterton the naturalist. [3] He did good work in his line, but
nothing is more peculiar to the man than his waywardness. It was
impossible for him to do anything after the manner of other folks. In
all his words and actions he was a freak, a curiosity, the prince of
eccentrics. Yet this, the essence of the man, the fundamental trait of
his character which shines out of every page of his writing and every
detail of his daily life--this, the feature by which he was known to his
fellows and ought to be known to posterity--it is intelligible from that
account only if you read between the lines. Is that the way to write
"biography"?
Fortunately he has written himself down; so has Ramage; and it is
instructive to compare the wayside reflections of these two
contemporaries as they rove about the ruins of Italy; the first, ardent
Catholic, his horizon close-bounded by what the good fathers of
Stonyhurst had seen fit to teach him; the other, less complacent, all
alive indeed with Calvinistic disputatiousness and ready to embark upon
bold speculations anent the origin of heathen gods and their modern
representatives in the Church of Rome; amiable scholars and gentlemen,
both of them; yet neither venturing to draw those plain conclusions
which the "classic remains of paganism" would have forced upon anybody
else--upon anybody, that is, who lacked their initial warp, whose mind
had not been twisted in youth or divided, rather, into watertight
compartments.
A long sentence....