Soriano

Amid clouds of dust you are whirled to Soriano, through the desert

Campagna and past Mount Soracte, in a business-like tramway--different

from that miserable Olevano affair which, being narrow gauge, can go but

slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails

every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as

to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an

iridescent bubble suspended in the sky.

This region is unfamiliar to me. Soriano lies on the slope of an immense

old volcano and conveys at first glance a somewhat ragged and sombre

impression. It was an unpleasantly warm day, but those macaroni--they

atoned for everything. So exquisite were they that I forthwith vowed to

return to Soriano, for their sake alone, ere the year should end. (I

kept my vow.) The right kind at last, of lily-like candour and

unmistakably authentic, having been purchased in large quantities at the

outbreak of hostilities by the provident hostess, who must have

anticipated a rise in price, a deterioration in quality, or both, as the

result of war.

How came Mrs. Nichol to discover their whereabouts? That is her affair.

I know not how she has managed, in so brief a space of time, to collect

such a variety of useful local information. I can only testify that on

her arrival in Rome she knew no more about the language and place than

the proverbial babe unborn, and that nowadays, when anybody is faced

with a conundrum like mine, one always hears the words: "Try Mrs.

Nichol." And how many women, by the way, would have made a note of the

particular quality of those macaroni? One in a hundred? These are

temperamental matters....

We also--for of course I took a friend with me, a well-preserved old

gentleman of thirty-two, whose downward career from a brilliant youth

into hopeless mediocrity has been watched, by both of us, with

philosophic unconcern--we also consumed a tender chicken, a salad

containing olive oil and not the usual motor-car lubricant, an omelette

made with genuine butter, and various other items which we enjoyed

prodigiously, eating, one would think, not only for the seven lean years

just past but for seven--yea, seventy times seven--lean years to come.

So great a success was this open-air meal that my companion, a

case-hardened Roman, was obliged to confess:

"It seems one fares better in the province than at home. You could not

get such bread in Rome, not if you offered fifty francs a pound."

As for myself, I had lost all interest in the bread by this time, but

grown fairly intimate with the wine, a rosy muscatel, faintly

sparkling--very young, but not altogether innocent.

There were flies, however, and dogs, and children. We ought to have

remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a

liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and

distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff

proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise a rarity

nowadays.

It is a real shame--what is happening to Strega at this moment. It has

grown so popular that the country is flooded with imitations. There must

be fifty firms manufacturing shams of various degrees of goodness and

badness; I have met their travellers in the most unexpected places. They

reproduce the colour of Strega, its minty flavour --everything, in

short, except the essential: its peculiar strength of aroma and of

alcohol. They can afford to sell this poison at half the price of the

original, and your artful restaurateur keeps an old bottle or two of the

real product which he fills up, when empty, out of some hidden but

never-failing barrel of the fraudulent mixture round the corner,

charging you, of course, the full price of true Strega. If you complain,

he proudly points to the bottle, the cork, the label: all authentic! No

wonder foreigners, on tasting these concoctions, vow they will never

touch Strega again....

We had a prolonged argument, over the coffee, about this Strega

adulteration, during which I tried to make my friend comprehend how I

thought the grievance ought to be remedied. How? By an injunction. That

was the way to redress these wrongs. You obtain an injunction, I said,

such as the French Chartreuse people obtained against the manufacturers

of the Italian "Certosa," which was thereafter obliged to change its

name to "Val D'Emma." More than once I endeavoured to set forth, in

language intelligible to his understanding, what an injunction

signified; more than once I explained how well-advised the Strega

Company would be to take this course.

In vain!

He always missed my point. He always brought in some personal element,

whereas I, as usual, confined myself to general lines, to the principle

of the thing. Italians are sometimes unfathomably obtuse.

"But what is an injunction?" he repeated.

"If you were a little younger, there might be some hope for you. I would

then try to explain it again, for the fiftieth time. Instead of that,

what do you say to taking a nap?"

"Ah! You have eaten too much."

"Not at all. But please to note that I am tired of explaining things to

people who refuse to understand."

"No doubt, no doubt. Yes. A little sleep might freshen you up."

"And perhaps inspire you with another subject of conversation."

In the little hotel there were no rooms available just then wherein we

might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street

promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we

moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber,

part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large

tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the

distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden

orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend,

having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of

this plant, was soon snoring--another senile trait--snoring in a

rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some

people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes,

and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied

myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my

bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen,

all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other

birds--how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls

began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological

days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that

first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which

fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's

stint--victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the

reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed

Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis----

And all those slaughtered beasts--those chamois, first and foremost,

sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the

trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly

ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and

theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new

environments--they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a

molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of

life.

And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history

fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three

months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts

to the country and wild things. Social reasons too--a certain weariness

of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with

creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing--for the

killing alone would pass--invoke specially manufactured systems of

ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such

folk?

That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of

yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and

begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were

conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the

naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract

therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these

travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which

tries to see things as they are. For the pursuit brought one into

relations not only with interesting birds and beasts, but with men.

There was Mr. H. of the Linnean Society, whose waxed moustache curled

round upon itself like an ammonite. A great writer of books was Mr. H.,

and a great collector of them. He collected, among other things, a rare

monograph belonging to me and dealing with the former distribution of

the beaver in Bavaria (we were both absorbed in beavers). Nothing I

could do or say would induce him to disgorge it again; he had always

lent it to a friend, who was just on the point of returning it, etc.

etc. Bitterly grieved, I not only forgave him, but put him into

communication with my friend Dr. Girtanner of St. Gallen, another

beaver--and marmot--specialist. It stimulated his love of Swiss zoology

to such an extent that he straightway borrowed a still rarer pamphlet of

mine, J. J. Tschudi's "Schweizer Echsen," which I likewise never saw

again. What an innocent one was! Where is now the man who will induce me

to lend him such books?

In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum,

an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake

Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic

islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs

from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys,

whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last

gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever

heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my

happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was

tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an

immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have

early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam

Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young,

[24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow

bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews)

of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I

gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged

partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six

would have been enough," he said--a remark which struck me as rather

unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common

as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins,

dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a

pin-tail duck.

He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had

learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in

taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity--from a grimy old

naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who

relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the

other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that

period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The

Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study,

into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless

trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds

(I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the

profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was

ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets,

arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the

trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped.

There were large grounds belonging to this estate, fields and woodlands

once green, then blackened with soot, and now cut up into allotments and

built over. Here, ever since men could remember--certainly since the

place had come into the possession of the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.

Edward T.--a kingfisher had dwelt by a little streamlet of artificial

origin which supported a few withered minnows and sticklebacks and dace.

This kingfisher was one of the sights of the domain. Visitors were taken

to see it. The bird, though sometimes coy, was generally on view.

Nevertheless it was an extremely prudent old kingfisher; to my infinite

annoyance, I never succeeded in destroying it. Nor did I even find its

nest, an additional source of grief. Lancashire naturalists may be

interested to know that this bird was still on the spot in the 'eighties

(I have the exact date somewhere [25])--surely a noteworthy state of

affairs, so near the heart of a smoky town like Manchester.

Later on I learnt to slay kingfishers--the first victim falling to my

gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings

of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are

so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their

habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible;

once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry,

now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones--the

grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of

all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree,

that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and

quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly

lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch----

At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous

grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir.

My friend awoke, refreshed. He rubbed his eyes, and looked round.

"I remember!" he began, sitting up. "I remember everything. Are you

feeling better? I hope so. Yes. Exactly. Where were we? An

injunction--what did you say?"

At it again!

"I said it was the drawback of old people that they never know when they

have had enough of an argument."

"But what is an injunction?"

"How many more times do you wish me to make that clear? Shall I begin

all over again? Have it your way! When you go into Court and ask the

judge to do something to prevent a man from doing something he wants to

do when you do not want him to do it. Like that, more or less."

"So I gather. But I confess I do not see why a man should not do

something he wants to do just because you want him not to do it. You

might as well go into Court and ask the judge to do something to make a

man do something he does not want to do just because you want him to do

it."

"Ah, but he must not, in this case. Good Lord, have I not explained that

a thousand times already? You always miss my point. It is illegal, don't

you understand? Illegal, illegal."

"Anybody can say that. It would be a very natural thing to say, under

the circumstances. I should say it myself! Now just take my advice. You

go and tell your brother----"

"My brother? It is not my brother. You are quite beside the point. Why

introduce this personal element? It is the Strega Company. Strega, a

liqueur. I am talking about a commercial concern obtaining an

injunction. Burroughs and Wellcome--they got injunctions on the same

grounds. I know a great deal of such things, though I don't talk about

them all day long as other people would, if they possessed half my

knowledge. A company, don't you see? An injunction. A liqueur. Please to

note that I am talking about a company, a company. Have I now made

myself clear, or how many more times----"

"One would think he was at least your brother, from the way you take his

part. Let us say he is a friend, then; some never-to-be-mentioned friend

who is interested in a shady liqueur business and now wants to make a

judge do something to make a man do something----"

"Wrong again! To prevent a man doing something----"

"--Wants to do something to make a judge do something to prevent a man

doing something he wants to do because he does not want him to do it. Is

that right? Very well. You tell your friend that no Italian judge is

going to do dirty work of that kind for nothing."

"Dirty work. God Almighty! I don't want any judge to do dirty work----"

"No doubt, no doubt. I am quite convinced you don't. But your priceless

friend does. Come now! Why not be open about it?"

"Open about what?"

"It is positively humiliating for me to be treated like this, after all

the years we have known each other. I wish you would try to cultivate

the virtue of frankness. You are far too secretive. Something will

really have to be done about it."

"A company, a company."

"A company consists of a certain number of human beings. Why make

mysteries about one of them? It may happen to the best of mankind to be

mixed up----"

"Mixed up----"

"You are going to be disagreeable about my choice of words. Have it your

way! We all know you think you can talk better Italian than the Pope. My

own father, I was going to say, has been involved in some pretty dirty

work in the course of his professional career----"

"No doubt, no doubt."

"And please to note that he is as good a man as any brother of yours."

"You always miss my point."

"Now try to be truthful, for once in your life. Out with it!"

"A liqueur."

"Is that all? Sleep does not seem to have sharpened your wits to any

great extent."

"I was not asleep. I was thinking about eggs. A company."

"A company? You are waking up. Anything else?"

"An injunction...."

A distinguished writer some years ago started a crusade in favour of

pure English. He wished to counteract those influences which are forever

at work debasing the standard of language; whether, as he seemed to

think, that standard should be inalterably fixed, is yet another

question. For in literature as in conversation there is a "pure English"

for every moment of history; that of our childhood is different from

to-day's; and to adopt the tongue of the Bible or Shakespeare, because

it happens to be pure, looks like setting back the hands of the clock.

Men would surely be dull dogs if their phraseology, whether written or

spoken, were to remain stagnant and unchangeable. We think well of

Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear

comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms;

why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on!

Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be

it. Were there no bad ones, there would be no good ones, and I see no

reason why men should desire to live in a Golden Age of literature, save

in so far as that millennium might coincide with a Golden Age of living.

I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their

privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a

distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a

vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of

literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some

mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural

taste, and their origin is academic laziness.

Certain it is that every language worthy of the name should be in a

state of perennial flux, ready and avid to assimilate new elements and

be battered about as we ourselves are--is there anything more charming

than a thoroughly defective verb?--fresh particles creeping into its

vocabulary from all quarters, while others are silently discarded. There

is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an

access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable

repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the

calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth?

Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the

year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance

with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a

cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things.

Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own

merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or

put on new faces!

I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do

not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for

one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They

are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let

them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be

allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a

corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.

What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,

with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly

misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise

a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,

or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.

My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....

Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit

the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the

spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long

paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they

hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.

Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They

cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion.

Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes

of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after

life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect.

Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others

are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed

crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered

fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the

defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should

once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that

these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of

the skull--a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and

which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of

the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.

One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle

Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose

civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to

transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and

mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair

attached to contorted limbs--they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome

link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between

them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish.

They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of

your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over----

Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative

and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid

lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare

phenomenon--life, and individuality, after death. They are more

noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or

at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of

them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness

out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of

night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and

flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at

that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not

easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made

flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming

been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have

been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to

how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror,

against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The

nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards

Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose

creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of

the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to

those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the

bodies of their dear friends and relatives....

Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for

something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the

kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he

be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the

body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who,

during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's

fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that

every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and

texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a

suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in

the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm.

Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.