The instinct of those
whose religion and culture are on the surface only is to conceive
that they have found, or can find, an absolute and eternal
standard, about which they can be as earnest as they choose. They
would have even the pains of hell eternal if they could. If there
had been any means discoverable by which they could torment
themselves beyond endurance, we may be sure they would long since
have found it out; but fortunately there is a stronger power which
bars them inexorably from their desire, and which has ensured that
intolerable pain shall last only for a very little while. For
either the circumstances or the sufferer will change after no long
time. If the circumstances are intolerable, the sufferer dies: if
they are not intolerable, he becomes accustomed to them, and will
cease to feel them grievously. No matter what the burden, there
always has been, and always must be, a way for us also to escape.
CHAPTER XVII - Soazza and the Valley of Mesocco
I regret that I have not space for any of the sketches I took at
Bellinzona, than which few towns are more full of admirable
subjects. The Hotel de la Ville is an excellent house, and the
town is well adapted for an artist's headquarters. Turner's two
water-colour drawings of Bellinzona in the National Gallery are
doubtless very fine as works of art, but they are not like
Bellinzona, the spirit of which place (though not the letter) is
better represented by the background to Basaiti's Madonna and
child, also in our gallery, supposing the castle on the hill to
have gone to ruin.
At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by
the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years
earlier. So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no
longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten
years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew.
Almost all days in the subalpine valleys of North Italy have a
beauty with them of some kind or another, but none are more lovely
than a quiet gray day just at the beginning of autumn, when the
clouds are drawing lazily and in the softest fleeces over the pine
forests high up on the mountain sides. On such days the mountains
are very dark till close up to the level of the clouds; here, if
there is dewy or rain-besprinkled pasture, it tells of a luminous
silvery colour by reason of the light which the clouds reflect upon
it; the bottom edges of the clouds are also light through the
reflection upward from the grass, but I do not know which begins
this battledore and shuttlecock arrangement. These things are like
quarrels between two old and intimate friends; one can never say
who begins them.
