The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly
good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt
against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the
morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense:
"One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these,
and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed
herd."
It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull
downwards - stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the
aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and
white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look
around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on
political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our
race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The
individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect....
Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware
of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always
returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence
and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and
Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not
go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for
it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites
might have been explored during that period! Adventures and discoveries
might have fallen to my lot, and been duly noted down. As it is, nothing
happened, and nothing was noted down. I have only a diary of dates to go
upon, out of which, with the help of memory and imagination, have been
extracted these pages. For generally, delving down into memory, a man
can bring up at least one clear-cut fragment, something still fervid and
flashing, a remembered voice or glimpse of landscape which helps to
unveil the main features of a scenario already relegated to the
lumber-room. And this detail will unravel the next; the scattered
elements jostle each other into place, as in the final disentangling of
some complicated fugue.
Such things will do for a skeleton. Imagination will kindly provide
flesh and blood, life, movement. Imagination - why not? One suppresses
much; why not add a little? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy
has been so sternly banned of late from travellers' tales that I am
growing tender-hearted towards the poor old dame; quite chivalrous, in
fact - especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself
unable to dispense with her services.
Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our
age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to
truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where
graver issues are at stake.
