Part 7 (1/2)
”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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 bete 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-a.s.sertive 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-t.i.tle he has chosen for this volume: Wanderings in search of ancient remains and modern superst.i.tions. To any one who knows the country it appears astonis.h.i.+ng how much he contrived to see, and in how brief a s.p.a.ce of time. He accomplished wonders. For it was no mean task he had proposed to himself, namely, ”to visit every spot in Italy which cla.s.sic 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 G.o.ds 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 ”cla.s.sic 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....
Pisa
After a glacial journey--those Englis.h.!.+ They will not even give us coal for steam-heating--I arrived here. It is warmer, appreciably warmer. Yet I leave to-morrow or next day. The streets of the town, the distant beach of San Rossore and its pine trees--they are fraught with sad memories; memories of an autumn month in the early nineties. A city of ghosts....