His Equipment In The Interpretation Of These Stones And Of All Else He
Picked Up In The Way Of Lore And Legend Was Of The Proper Kind.
Boundless Curiosity, First Of All.
And then, an adequate apparatus of
learning.
He knew his classics - knew them so well that he could always
put his finger on those particular passages of theirs which bore upon a
point of interest. We may doubtless be able to supply some apt quotation
from Virgil or Martial. It is quite a different thing remembering, and
collating, references in. Aelian or Pliny or Aristotle or Ptolemy. And
wide awake, withal; not easily imposed upon. He is not of the kind to
swallow the tales of the then fashionable cicerone's. He has critical
dissertations on sites like Cannae and the Bandusian Fountain and
Caudine Forks; and when, at Nola, they opened in his presence a
sepulchre containing some of those painted Greek vases for which the
place is famous, he promptly suspects it to be a "sepulchre prepared for
strangers," and instead of buying the vases allows them to remain where
they are "for more simple or less suspicious travellers." On the way to
Cape Leuca he passes certain mounds whose origin he believes to be
artificial and the work of a prehistoric race. I fancy his conjecture
has proved correct. On page 258, speaking of an Oscan inscription, he
mentions Mommsen, which shows that he kept himself up to date in such
researches....
Of course it would be impossible to feel any real fondness for Ramage
before one has discovered his failings and his limitations. Well, he
seems to have taken Pratilli seriously. I like this. A young fellow who,
in 1828, could have guessed Pratilli to have been the arch-forger he
was - such a young fellow would be a freak of learning. He says little of
the great writers of his age; that, too, is a weakness of youth whose
imagination lingers willingly in the past or future, but not in the
present. The Hohenstauffen period does not attract him. He rides close
to the magnificent Castel del Monte but fails to visit the site; he
inspects the castle of Lucera and says never a word about Frederick II
or his Saracens. At Lecce, renowned for its baroque buildings, he finds
"nothing to interest a stranger, except, perhaps, the church of Santa
Croce, which is not a bad specimen of architectural design." True, the
beauty of baroque had not been discovered in his day.
What pleases me less is that there occurs hardly any mention of wild
animals in these pages, and that he seems to enjoy natural scenery in
proportion as it reminds him of some passage in one of those poets whom
he is so fond of quoting. This love of poetic extracts and citations is
a mark of his period. It must have got the upper hand of him in course
of time, for we find, from the title-page of these "Nooks and Byways,"
that he was the author of "Beautiful Thoughts from Greek authors;
Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian authors, etc."; [29] indeed,
the publication of this particular book, as late as 1868, seems to have
been an afterthought. How greatly one would prefer a few more "Nooks and
By-ways" to all these Beautiful Thoughts! He must have been at home
again, in some bleak Caledonian retreat, when the poetic flowers were
gathered. If only he had lingered longer among the classic remains of
the south, instead of rushing through them like an express train. That
mania of "pressing forward"; that fatal gift of hustle....
His body flits hither and thither, but his mind remains observant,
assimilative. It is only on reading this book carefully that one
realises how full of information it is. Ay, he notices things, does
Ramage - non-antiquarian things as well. He always has time to look
around him. It is his charm. An intelligent interest in the facts of
daily life should be one of the equipments of the touring scholar,
seeing that the present affords a key to the past. Ramage has that gift,
and his zest never degenerates into the fussiness of many modern
travellers. He can talk of sausages and silkworms, and forestry and
agriculture and sheep-grazing, and how they catch porcupines and cure
warts and manufacture manna; he knows about the evil eye and witches and
the fata morgana and the tarantula spider, about figs in ancient and
modern times and the fig-pecker bird - that bird you eat bones and all,
the focetola or beccafico (garden warbler). In fact, he has multifarious
interests and seems to have known several languages besides the
classics. He can hit off a thing neatly, as, when contrasting our
sepulchral epitaphs with those of olden days, he says that the key-note
of ours is Hope, and of theirs, Peace; or "wherever we find a river in
this country (Calabria) we are sure to discover that it is a source of
danger and not of profit." He knew these southern torrents and
river-beds! He garners information about the Jewish and Albanian
colonies of South Italy; he studies Romaic "under one of the few Greeks
who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek
speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea (Maratea, by the way, has a
Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as
they did at Marathon itself).
A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially
bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic
conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure
basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would
gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his
heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in
Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation,
with the Jesuits.
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