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 shines 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 gods 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 "classic 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 English! 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....
The old hotel had put on a new face; freshly decorated, it wears none
the less a poverty-stricken air. My dinner was bad and insufficient. One
grows sick of those vile maccheroni made with war-time flour. The place
is full of rigid officers taking themselves seriously. Odd, how a
uniform can fill a simpleton with self-importance. What does Bacon say?
I forget. Something apposite - something about the connection between
military costumes and vanity. For the worst of this career is that it is
liable to transform even a sensible man into a fool. I never see these
sinister-clanking marionettes without feelings of distrust. They are the
outward symbol of an atavistic striving: the modern infame. We have been
dying for sometime past from over-legislation. Now we are caught in the
noose. A bureaucracy is bad enough. A bureaucracy can at least be
bribed. Militarism dries up even that little fount of the imagination.
Another twenty years of this, and we may be living in caves again; they
came near it, at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Such a cataclysm as
ours may account for the extinction of the great Cro-Magnon
civilization - as fine a race, physically, as has yet appeared on earth;
they too may have been afflicted with the plague of nationalism, unless,
as is quite likely, that horrid work was accomplished by a microbe of
some kind....
In the hour of evening, under a wintry sky amid whose darkly massed
vapours a young moon is peering down upon this maddened world, I wander
alone through deserted roadways towards that old solitary brick-tower.
Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at
such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted
snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now
creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid
mud - irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here
for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into
the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a flood.
There is dreary monotony in all Italian rivers, once they have reached
the plain. They are livelier in their upper reaches. At Florence - where
those citron-tinted houses are mirrored in the stream - you may study the
Arno in all its ever-changing moods. Seldom is its colour quite the
same. The hue of cafe-au-lait in full spate, it shifts at other times
between apple-green and jade, between celadon and chrysolite and
eau-de-Nil. In the weariness of summer the tints are prone to fade
altogether out of the waves. They grow bleached, devitalized; they are
spent, withering away like grass that has lain in the sun. [4] Yet with
every thunder-storm on yonder hills the colour-sprite leaps back into
the waters.
Your Florentine of the humbler sort loves to dawdle along the bank on a
bright afternoon, watching the play of the river and drawing a kind of
philosophic contentment out of its cool aquatic humours. Presently he
reaches that bridge - the jewellers' bridge. He thinks he must buy a
ring. Be sure the stone will reflect his Arno in one of its moods. I
will wager he selects a translucent chrysoprase set in silver, a cheap
and stubborn gem whose frigidly uncompromising hue appeals in mysterious
fashion to his own temperament.
Whoever suffers from insomnia will find himself puzzling at night over
questions which have no particular concern for him at other times. And
one seems to be more wide awake, during those moments, than by day. Yet
the promptings of the brain, which then appear so lucid, so novel and
convincing, will seldom bear examination in the light of the sun. To
test the truth of this, one has only to jot down one's thoughts at the
time, and peruse them after breakfast.
