They will be preoccupied,
for the most part, with unseasonable little concerns.
Pleasant folk,
none the less. And sufficiently abundant in Italy. Altogether, the
Englishman here is as often an intenser being than the home product.
Alien surroundings awaken fresh and unexpected notes in his nature. His
fibres seem to lie more exposed; you have glimpses into the man's
anatomy. There is something hostile in this sunlight to the hazy or
spongy quality which saturates the domestic Anglo-Saxon, blurring the
sharpness of his moral outline. No doubt you will also meet with dull
persons; Rome is full of them, but, the type being easier to detect
among a foreign environment, there is still less difficulty in evading
them....
Thus I should have had no compunction, some nights ago, in making myself
highly objectionable to Mr. P. G. who has turned up here on some mission
connected with the war - so he says, and it may well be true; no
compunction whatever, had that gentleman been in his ordinary social
state. Mr. P. G., the acme of British propriety, inhabiting a house, a
mansion, on the breezy heights of north London, was on that occasion
decidedly drunk. "Indulging in a jag," he would probably have called it.
He tottered into a place where I happened to be sitting, having lost his
friends, he declared; and soon began pouring into my ear, after the
confidential manner of a drunkard, a flood of low talk, which if I
attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to
the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest
paragraphs." It was highly instructive - the contrast between that
impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state.
I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of
what he said - just a few shreds; they would have seen a new light on
dear daddy.
In vino veritas. Ever avid of experimentum in some corpore vili and
determined to reach the bed-rock of his gross mentality, I plied him
vigorously with drink, and was rewarded. It was rich sport, unmasking
this Philistine and thanking God, meanwhile, that I was not like unto
him. We are all lost sheep; and none the worse for that. Yet whoso is
liable, however drunk, to make an exhibition of himself after the
peculiar fashion of Mr. P. G., should realize that there is something
fundamentally wrong with his character and take drastic measures of
reform - measures which would include, among others, a total abstention
from alcohol. Old Aristotle, long ago, laboured to define wherein
consisted the trait known as gentlemanliness; others will have puzzled
since his day, for we have bedaubed ourselves with so thick a coating of
manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well,
here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That
was my procedure with P. G. Esquire.
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