A periodical visit to this country seems an ordinary and almost
automatic proceeding - a part of one's regular routine, as natural as
going to the barber or to church. Why seek for reasons? They are so hard
to find. One tracks them to their lair and lo! there is another one
lurking in the background, a reason for a reason.
The craving to be in contact with beauty and antiquity, the desire for
self-expression, for physical well-being under that drenching sunshine,
which while it lasts, one curses lustily; above all, the pleasure of
memory and reconstruction at a distance. Yes; herein lies, methinks, the
secret; the reason for the reason. Reconstruction at a distance.... For
a haze of oblivion is formed by lapse of time and space; a kindly haze
which obliterates the thousand fretting annoyances wherewith the
traveller's path in every country is bestrewn. He forgets them; forgets
that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic
islets - those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain
hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain
fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of
its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some
November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember,
to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go
there as a tourist - only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its
conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an
absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among
them.
What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu!
Rome is not only the most engaging capital in Europe, it is unusually
heterogeneous in regard to population. The average Parisian will assure
you that his family has lived in that town from time immemorial. It is
different here. There are few Romans discoverable in Rome, save across
the Tiber. Talk to whom you please, you will soon find that either he or
his parents are immigrants. The place is filled with hordes of
employees - many thousands of them, high and low, from every corner of
the provinces; the commoner sort, too, the waiters, carpenters,
plasterers, masons, painters, coachmen, all the railway folk - they are
hardly ever natives. Your Roman of the lower classes does not relish
labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as
a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating
and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a
metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of
asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula.
There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world
courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a
workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris.
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