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.
