Fully to appreciate their attitude as opposed to ours, we must also remember that the south Italian does not trouble himself about the objective truth of any miracle whatever; his senses may be perverted, but his intelligence remains outside the sphere of infection. This is his saving grace. To the people here, the affair of Moses and the Burning Bush, the raising of Lazarus, and Egidio's cow-revival, are on the identical plane of authenticity; the Bible is one of a thousand saints' books; its stories may be as true as theirs, or just as untrue; in any case, what has that to do with his own worldly conduct? But the Englishman with ingenuous ardour thinks to believe in the Burning Bush wonder, and in so far his intelligence is infected; with equal ardour he excludes the cow-performance from the range of possibility; and to him it matters considerably which of the miracles are true and which are false, seeing that his conduct is supposed to take colour from such supernatural events. Ultra-credulous as to one set of narratives, he has no credulity left for other sets; he concentrates his believing energies upon a small space, whereas the Italian's are diffused, thinly, over a wide area. It is the old story: Gothic intensity and Latin spaciousness. So the Gothic believer takes his big dose of irrationalism on one fixed day; the Latin, by attending Mass every morning, spreads it over the whole week. And the sombre strenuousness of our northern character expects a remuneration for this outlay of faith, while the other contents himself with such sensuous enjoyment as he can momentarily extract from his ceremonials. That is why our English religion has a democratic tinge distasteful to the Latin who, at bottom, is always a philosopher; democratic because it relies for its success, like democratic politicians, upon promises—promises that may or may not be kept—promises that form no part (they are only an official appendage) of the childlike paganism of the south. . . .

Fifteen francs will buy you a reliable witness for a south Italian lawsuit; you must pay a good deal more in England. Thence one might argue that the cult of credulity implied by these saintly biographies is responsible for this laxness, for the general disregard of veracity. I doubt it. I am not inclined to blame the monkish saint-makers for this particular trait; I suspect that for fifteen francs you could have bought a first-class witness under Pericles. Southerners are not yet pressed for time; and when people are not pressed for time, they do not learn the time-saving value of honesty. Our respect for truth and fair dealing, such as it is, derives from modern commerce; in the Middle Ages nobody was concerned about honesty save a few trading companies like the Hanseatic League, and the poor mediaeval devil (the only gentleman of his age) who was generally pressed for time and could be relied upon to keep his word. Even God, of whom they talked so much, was systematically swindled. Where time counts for nothing, expeditious practices between man and man are a drug in the market. Besides, it must be noted that this churchly misteaching was only a fraction of that general shattering which has disintegrated all the finer fibres of public life. It stands to reason that the fragile tissues of culture are dislocated, and its delicate edges defaced, by such persistive governmental brutalization as the inhabitants have undergone. None but the grossest elements in a people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile nature will survive its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a few years ago the nobler qualities which we associate with those old Hellenic colonists—their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook upon life, their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature—all these things had been abraded, leaving, as residue, nothing save what the Greeks shared with ruder races. There are indications that this state of affairs is now ending.

The position is this. The records show that the common people never took their saints to heart in the northern fashion—as moral exemplars; from beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for fun and festivals, a means of brightening the cata-combic, the essentially sunless, character of Christianity. So much for the popular saints, the patrons and heroes. The others, the ecclesiastical ones, are an artificial product of monkish institutions. These monkeries were established in the land by virtue of civil authority. Their continued existence, however, was contingent upon the goodwill of the Vatican. One of the surest and cheapest methods of obtaining this goodwill was to produce a satisfactory crop of saints whose beatification swelled the Vatican treasury with the millions collected from a deluded populace for that end. The monks paid nothing; they only furnished the saint and, in due course, the people's money. Can we wonder that they discovered saints galore? Can we wonder that the Popes were gratified by their pious zeal?

So things went on till yesterday. But now a large proportion of the ten thousand (?) churches and monasteries of Naples are closed or actually in ruins; wayside sanctuaries crumble to dust in picturesque fashion; the price of holy books has fallen to zero, and the godly brethren have emigrated to establish their saint-manufactories elsewhere. Not without hope of success; for they will find purchasers of their wares wherever mankind can be interested in that queer disrespect of the body which is taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East.

It was Lewes, I believe, who compared metaphysics to ghosts by saying that there was no killing either of them; one could only dissipate them by throwing light into the dark places they love to inhabit—to show that nothing is there. Spectres, likewise, are these saintly caricatures of humanity, perambulating metaphysics, the application in corpore vili of Oriental fakirism. Nightmare-literature is the crazy recital of their deeds and sufferings. Pathological phantoms! The state of mind which engenders and cherishes such illusions is a disease, and it has been well said that "you cannot refute a disease." You cannot nail ghosts to the counter.

But a ray of light . . .



XXXII

ASPROMONTE, THE CLOUD-GATHERER

Day was barely dawning when we left Delianuova and began the long and weary climb up Montalto. Chestnuts gave way to beeches, but the summit receded ever further from us. And even before reaching the uplands, the so-called Piano di Carmelia, we encountered a bank of bad weather. A glance at the map will show that Montalto must be a cloud-gatherer, drawing to its flanks every wreath of vapour that rises from Ionian and Tyrrhenian; a west wind was blowing that morning, and thick fogs clung to the skirts of the peak. We reached the summit (1956 metres) at last, drenched in an icy bath of rain and sleet, and with fingers so numbed that we could hardly hold our sticks.

Of the superb view—for such it must be—nothing whatever was to be seen; we were wrapped in a glacial mist. On the highest point stands a figure of the Redeemer. It was dragged up in pieces from Delianuova some seven years ago, but soon injured by frosts; it has lately been refashioned. The original structure may be due to the same pious stimulus as that which placed the crosses on Monte Vulture and other peaks throughout the country—a counterblast to the rationalistic congress at Rome in 1904, when Giordano Bruno became, for a while, the hero of the country. This statue does not lack dignity. The Saviour's regard turns towards Reggio, the capital of the province; and one hand is upraised in calm and godlike benediction.

Passing through magnificent groves of fir, we descended rapidly into anothsr climate, into realms of golden sunshine. Among these trees I espied what has become quite a rare bird in Italy—the common wood-pigeon. The few that remain have been driven into the most secluded recesses of the mountains; it was different in the days of Theocritus, who sang of this amiable fowl when the climate was colder and the woodlands reached as far as the now barren seashore. To the firs succeeded long stretches of odorous pines interspersed with Mediterranean heath (brayere), which here grows to a height of twelve feet; one thinks of the number of briar pipes that could be cut out of its knotty roots. A British Vice-Consul at Reggio, Mr. Kerrich, started this industry about the year 1899; he collected the roots, which were sawn into blocks and then sent to France and America to be made into pipes. This Calabrian briar was considered superior to the French kind, and Mr. Kerrich had large sales on both sides of the Atlantic; his chief difficulty was want of labour owing to emigration.

We passed, by the wayside, several rude crosses marking the site of accidents or murders, as well as a large heap of stones, where-under lie the bones of a man who attempted to traverse these mountains in winter-time and was frozen to death.

"They found him," the guide told me, "in spring, when the snow melted from off his body. There he lay, all fresh and comely! It looked as if he would presently wake up and continue his march; but he neither spoke nor stirred. Then they knew he was dead. And they piled all these stones over him, to prevent the wolves, you understand——"

Aspromonte deserves its name. It is an incredibly harsh agglomeration of hill and dale, and the geology of the district, as I learned long ago from my friend Professor Cortese, reveals a perfect chaos of rocks of every age, torn into gullies by earthquakes and other cataclysms of the past—at one place, near Scido, is an old stream of lava. Once the higher ground, the nucleus of the group, is left behind, the wanderer finds himself lost in a maze of contorted ravines, winding about without any apparent system of watershed. Does the liquid flow north or south? Who can tell! The track crawls in and out of valleys, mounts upwards to heights of sun-scorched bracken and cistus, descends once more into dewy glades hemmed in by precipices and overhung by drooping fernery. It crosses streams of crystal clearness, rises afresh in endless gyrations under the pines only to vanish, yet again, into the twilight of deeper abysses, where it skirts the rivulet along precarious ledges, until some new obstruction blocks the way—so it writhes about for long, long hours. . . .

Here, on the spot, one can understand how an outlaw like Musolino was enabled to defy justice, helped, as he was, by the fact that the vast majority of the inhabitants were favourable to him, and that the officer in charge of his pursuers was paid a fixed sum for every day he spent in the chase and presumably found it convenient not to discover his whereabouts. [Footnote: See next chapter.]

We rested awhile, during these interminable meanderings, under the shadow of a group of pines.

"Do you see that square patch yonder?" said my man. "It is a cornfield. There Musolino shot one of his enemies, whom he suspected of giving information to the police. It was well done."

"How many did he shoot, altogether?"

"Only eighteen. And three of them recovered, more or less; enough to limp about, at all events. Ah, if you could have seen him, sir! He was young, with curly fair hair, and a face like a rose. God alone can tell how many poor people he helped in their distress. And any young girl he met in the mountains he would help with her load and accompany as far as her home, right into her father's house, which none of us would have risked, however much we might have liked it. But every one knew that he was pure as an angel."

"And there was a young fellow here," he went on, "who thought he could profit by pretending to be Musolino. So one day he challenged a proprietor with his gun, and took all his money. When it came to Musolino's ears, he was furious—furious! He lay in wait for him, caught him, and said: 'How dare you touch fathers of children? Where's that money you took from Don Antonio?' Then the boy began to cry and tremble for his life. 'Bring it,' said Musolino, 'every penny, at midday next Monday, to such and such a spot, or else——' Of course he brought it. Then he marched him straight into the proprietor's house. 'Here's this wretched boy, who robbed you in my name. And here's the money: please count it. Now, what shall we do with him?' So Don Antonio counted the money. 'It's all there,' he said; 'let him off this time.' Then Musolino turned to the lad: 'You have behaved like a mannerless puppy,' he said, 'without shame or knowledge of the world. Be reasonable in future, and understand clearly: I will have no brigandage in these mountains. Leave that to the syndics and judges in the towns.'"

We did not traverse Musolino's natal village, Santo Stefano; indeed, we passed through no villages at all. But after issuing from the labyrinth, we saw a few of them, perched in improbable situations—Roccaforte and Roghudi on our right; on the other side, Africo and Casalnuovo. Salis Marschlins says that the inhabitants of these regions are so wild and innocent that money is unknown; everything is done by barter. That comes of copying without discrimination. For this statement he utilized the report of a Government official, a certain Leoni, who was sent hither after the earthquake of 1783, and found the use of money not unknown, but forgotten, in consequence of this terrible catastrophe.

These vales of Aspromonte are one of the last refuges of living Byzantinism. Greek is still spoken in some places, such as Rocca-forte and Roghudi. Earlier travellers confused the natives with the Albanians; Niehbuhr, who had an obsession on the subject of Hellenism, imagined they were relics of old Dorian and Achaean colonies. Scholars are apparently not yet quite decided upon certain smaller matters. So Lenormant (Vol. II, p. 433) thinks they came hither after the Turkish conquest, as did the Albanians; Batiffol argues that they were chased into Calabria from Sicily by the Arabs after the second half of the seventh century; Morosi, who treats mostly of their Apulian settlements, says that they came from the East between the sixth and tenth centuries. Many students, such as Morelli and Comparetti, have garnered their songs, language, customs and lore, and whoever wants a convenient resume of these earlier researches will find it in Pellegrini's book which was written in 1873 (printed 1880). He gives the number of Greek inhabitants of these places—Roghudi, for example, had 535 in his day; he has also noted down these villages, like Africo and Casalnuovo, in which the Byzantine speech has lately been lost. Bova and Condofuri are now the head-quarters of mediaeval Greek in these parts.

From afar we had already descried a green range of hills that shut out the seaward view. This we now began to climb, in wearisome ascension; it is called Pie d'lmpisa, because "your feet are all the time on a steep incline." Telegraph wires here accompany the track, a survival of the war between the Italian Government and Musolino. On the summit lies a lonely Alp, Campo di Bova, where a herd of cattle were pasturing under the care of a golden-haired youth who lay supine on the grass, gazing at the clouds as they drifted in stately procession across the firmament. Save for a dusky charcoal-burner crouching in a cave, this boy was the only living person we encountered on our march—so deserted are these mountain tracks.

At Campo di Bova a path branches off to Staiti; the sea is visible once more, and there are fine glimpses, on the left, towards Staiti (or is it Ferruzzano?) and, down the right, into the destructive and dangerous torrent of Amendolea. Far beyond it, rises the mountain peak of Pentedattilo, a most singular landmark which looks exactly like a molar tooth turned upside down, with fangs in air. The road passes through a gateway in the rock whence, suddenly, a full view is disclosed of Bova on its hill-top, the houses nestling among huge blocks of stone that make one think of some cyclopean citadel of past ages. My guide stoutly denied that this was Bova; the town, he declared, lay in quite another direction. I imagine he had never been beyond the foot of the "Pie d'Impisa."

Here, once more, the late earthquake has done some damage, and there is a row of trim wooden shelters near the entrance of the town. I may add, as a picturesque detail, that about one-third of them have never been inhabited, and are never likely to be. They were erected in the heat of enthusiasm, and there they will stay, empty and abandoned, until some energetic mayor shall pull them down and cook his maccheroni with their timber.

Evening was drawing on apace, and whether it was due to the joy of having accomplished an arduous journey, or to inconsiderate potations of the Bacchus of Bova, one of the most remarkable wines in Italy, I very soon found myself on excellent terms with the chief citizens of this rather sordid-looking little place. A good deal has been written concerning Bova and its inhabitants, but I should say there is still a mine of information to be exploited on the spot. They are bilingual, but while clinging stubbornly to their old speech, they have now embraced Catholicism. The town kept its Greek religious rites till the latter half of the sixteenth century; and Rodota has described the "vigorous resistance" that was made to the introduction of Romanism, and the ceremonies which finally accompanied that event.

Mine hostess obligingly sang me two or three songs in her native language; the priest furnished me with curious statistics of folklore and criminology; and the notary, with whom I conversed awhile on the tiny piazza that overlooks the coastlands and distant Ionian, was a most affable gentleman. Seeing that the Christian names of the populace are purely Italian, I enquired as to their surnames, and learned what I expected, namely, that a good many Greek family names survive among the people. His own name, he said, was unquestionably Greek: Condemi; if I liked, he would go through the local archives and prepare me a list of all such surnames as appeared to him to be non-Italian; we could thus obtain some idea of the percentage of Greek families still living here. My best thanks to the good Signor!

After some further liquid refreshment, a youthful native volunteered to guide me by short cuts to the remote railway station. We stepped blithely into the twilight, and during the long descent I discoursed with him, in fluent Byzantine Greek, of the affairs of his village.

It is my theory that among a populace of this kind the words relative to agricultural pursuits will be those which are least likely to suffer change with lapse of years, or to be replaced by others.

Acting on this principle, I put him through a catechism on the subject as soon as we reached our destination, and was surprised at the relative scarcity of Italian terms—barely 25 per cent I should say. Needless to add, I omitted to note them down. Such as it is, be that my contribution to the literature of these sporadic islets of mediaeval Hellenism, whose outstanding features are being gnawed away by the waves of military conscription, governmental schooling, and emigration.

Caulonia, my next halting-place, lay far off the line. I had therefore the choice of spending the night at Gerace (old Locri) or Rocella Ionica—intermediate stations. Both of them, to my knowledge, possessing indifferent accommodation, I chose the former as being the nearest, and slept there, not amiss; far better than on a previous occasion, when certain things occurred which need not be set down here.

The trip from Delianuova over the summit of Montalto to Bova railway station is by no means to be recommended to young boys or persons in delicate health. Allowing for only forty-five minutes' rest, it took me fourteen hours to walk to the town of Bova, and the railway station lies nearly three hours apart from that place. There is hardly a level yard of ground along the whole route, and though my "guide" twice took the wrong track and thereby probably lost me some little time, I question whether the best walker, provided (as I was) with the best maps, will be able to traverse the distance in less than fifteen hours.

Whoever he is, I wish him joy of his journey. Pleasant to recall, assuredly; the scenery and the mountain flowers are wondrously beautiful; but I have fully realized what the men of Delianuova meant, when they said:

"To Montalto, Yes; to Bova, No."



XXXIII

MUSOLINO AND THE LAW

Musolino will remain a hero for many long years to come. "He did his duty ": such is the popular verdict on his career. He was not a brigand, but an unfortunate—a martyr, a victim of the law. So he is described not only by his country-people, but by the writers of many hundred serious pamphlets in every province of Italy.

At any bookstall you may buy cheap illustrated tracts and poems setting forth his achievements. In Cosenza I saw a play of which he was the leading figure, depicted as a pale, long-suffering gentleman of the "misunderstood" type—friend of the fatherless, champion of widows and orphans, rectifier of all wrongs; in fact, as the embodiment of those virtues which we are apt to associate with Prometheus or the founder of Christianity.

Only to those who know nothing of local conditions will it seem strange to say that Italian law is one of the factors that contribute to the disintegration of family life throughout the country, and to the production of creatures like Musolino. There are few villages which do not contain some notorious assassins who have escaped punishment under sentimental pleas, and now terrorize the neighbourhood. This is one of the evils which derange patriarchalism; the decent-minded living in fear of their lives, the others with a conspicuous example before their eyes of the advantages of evil-doing. And another is that the innocent often suffer, country-bred lads being locked up for months and years in prison on the flimsiest pretexts—often on the mere word of some malevolent local policeman—among hardened habitual offenders. If they survive the treatment, which is not always the case, they return home completely demoralized and a source of infection to others.

It is hardly surprising if, under such conditions, rich and poor alike are ready to hide a picturesque fugitive from justice. A sad state of affairs, but—as an unsavoury Italian proverb correctly says—il pesce puzza dal capo.

For the fault lies not only in the fundamental perversity of all Roman Law. It lies also in the local administration of that law, which is inefficient and marked by that elaborate brutality characteristic of all "philosophic" and tender-hearted nations. One thinks of the Byzantines. . . . That justices should be well-salaried gentlemen, cognizant of their duties to society; that carbineers and other police-functionaries should be civilly responsible for outrages upon the public; that a so-called "habeas-corpus" Act might be as useful here as among certain savages of the north; that the Baghdad system of delays leads to corruption of underpaid officials and witnesses alike (not to speak of judges)—in a word, that the method pursued hereabouts is calculated to create rather than to repress crime: these are truths of too elementary a nature to find their way into the brains of the megalomaniac rhetoricians who control their country's fate. They will never endorse that saying of Stendhal's: "In Italy, with the exception of Milan, the death-penalty is the preface of all civilization." (To this day, the proportion of murders is still 13 per cent higher in Palermo than in Milan.)

Speak to the wisest judges of the horrors of cellular confinement such as Musolino was enduring up to a short time ago, as opposed to capital punishment, and you will learn that they invoke the humanitarian Beccaria in justification of it. Theorists!

For less formidable criminals there exists that wondrous institution of domicilio coatto, which I have studied in the islands of Lipari and Ponza. These evil-doers seldom try to escape; life is far too comfortable, and the wine good and cheap; often, on completing their sentences, they get themselves condemned anew, in order to return. The hard-working man may well envy their lot, for they recuve free lodging from the Government, a daily allowance of money, and two new suits of clothes a year—they are not asked to do a stroke of work in return, but may lie in bed all day long, if so disposed. The law-abiding citizen, meanwhile, pays for the upkeep of this horde of malefactors, as well as for the army of officials who are deputed to attend to their wants. This institution of domicilio coatto is one of those things which would be incredible, were it not actually in existence. It is a school, a State-fostered school, for the promotion of criminality.

But what shall be expected? Where judges sob like children, and jurors swoon away with emotionalism; where floods of bombast—go to the courts, and listen!—take the place of cross-examination and duly-sworn affidavits; where perjury is a humanly venial and almost praiseworthy failing—how shall the code, defective as it is, be administered? Rhetoric, and rhetoric alone, sways the decision of the courts. Scholars are only now beginning to realize to what an extent the ancient sense of veracity was tainted with this vice—how deeply all classical history is permeated with elegant partisan non-truth. And this evil legacy from Greco-Roman days has been augmented by the more recent teachings of Jesuitry and the Catholic theory of "peccato veniale." Rhetoric alone counts; rhetoric alone is "art." The rest is mere facts; and your "penalista" has a constitutional horror of a bald fact, because there it is, and there is nothing to be done with it. It is too crude a thing for cultured men to handle. If a local barrister were forced to state in court a plain fact, without varnish, he would die of cerebral congestion; the judge, of boredom.

In early times, these provinces had a rough-and-ready cowboy justice which answered simple needs, and when, in Bourbon days, things became more centralized, there was still a never-failing expedient: each judge having a fixed and publicly acknowledged tariff, the village elders, in deserving cases, subscribed the requisite sum and released their prisoner. But Italy is now paying the penalty of ambition. With one foot in the ferocity of her past, and the other on a quicksand of dream-nurtured idealism, she contrives to combine the disadvantages of both. She, who was the light o' love of all Europe for long ages, and in her poverty denied nothing to her clientele, has now laid aside a little money, repenting of her frivolous and mercenary deeds (they sometimes do), and becoming puritanically zealous of good works in her old age—all this, however, as might have been expected from her antecedent career, without much discrimination.

It is certainly remarkable that a race of men who have been such ardent opponents of many forms of tyranny in the past, should still endure a system of criminal procedure worthy of Torquemada. High and low cry out against it, but—pazienza! Where shall grievances be ventilated? In Parliament? A good joke, that! In the press? Better still! Italian newspapers nowise reflect the opinions of civilized Italy; they are mere cheese-wrappers; in the whole kingdom there are only three self-respecting dailies. The people have learnt to despair of their rulers—to regard them with cynical suspicion. Public opinion has been crushed out of the country. What goes by that name is the gossip of the town-concierge, or obscure village cabals and schemings.

I am quite aware that the law-abiding spirit is the slow growth of ages, and that a serious mischief like this cannot be repaired in a short generation. I know that even now the Italian code of criminal procedure, that tragic farce, is under revision. I know, moreover, that there are stipendiary magistrates in south Italy whose discernment and integrity would do honour to our British courts. But—take the case out of their hands into a higher tribunal, and you may put your trust in God, or in your purse. Justice hereabouts is in the same condition as it was in Egypt at the time of Lord Dufferin's report: a mockery.

It may be said that it does not concern aliens to make such criticism. A fatuous observation! Everything concerns everybody. The foreigner in Italy, if he is wise, will familiarize himself not only with the cathedrals to be visited, but also, and primarily, with the technique of legal bribery and subterfuge—with the methods locally employed for escaping out of the meshes of the law. Otherwise he may find unpleasant surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called "La Quistione Meridionale" (What's Wrong with the South), that throws a flood of light upon local conditions. It contains the views of twenty-seven of the most prominent men in the country as to how south Italian problems should be faced and solved. Nearly all of them deplore the lack of justice. Says Professor Colajanni: "To heal the south, we require an honest, intelligent and sagacious government, which we have not got." And Lombroso: "In the south it is necessary to introduce justice, which does not exist, save in favour of certain classes."

I am tempted to linger on this subject, not without reason. These people and their attitude towards life will remain an enigma to the traveller, until he has acquainted himself with the law of the land and seen with his own eyes something of the atrocious misery which its administration involves. A murderer like Musolino, crowned with an aureole of saintliness, would be an anomaly in England. We should think it rather paradoxical to hear a respectable old farmer recommending his boys to shoot a policeman, whenever they safely can. On the spot, things begin to wear a different aspect. Musolino is no more to be blamed than a child who has been systematically misguided by his parents; and if these people, much as they love their homes and families, are all potential Musolinos, they have good reasons for it—excellent reasons.

No south Italian living at this present moment, be he of what social class you please—be he of the gentlest blood or most refined culture—is a priori on the side of the policeman. No; not a priori. The abuses of the executive are too terrific to warrant such an attitude. Has not the entire police force of Naples, up to its very head, been lately proved to be in the pay of the camorra; to say nothing of its connection with what Messrs. King and Okey euphemistically call "the unseen hand at Rome"—a hand which is held out for blackmail, and not vainly, from the highest ministerial benches? Under such conditions, the populace becomes profoundly distrustful of the powers that be, and such distrust breeds bad citizens. But so things will remain, until the bag-and-baggage policy is applied to the whole code of criminal procedure, and to a good half of its present administrators.

The best of law-systems, no doubt, is but a compromise. Science being one thing, and public order another, the most enlightened of legislators may well tremble to engraft the fruits of modern psychological research upon the tree of law, lest the scion prove too vigorous for the aged vegetable. But some compromises are better than others; and the Italian code, which reads like a fairy tale and works like a Fury, is as bad a one as human ingenuity can devise. If a prisoner escape punishment, it is due not so much to his innocence as to some access of sanity or benevolence on the part of the judge, who courageously twists the law in his favour. Fortunately, such humane exponents of the code are common enough; were it otherwise, the prisons, extensive as they are, would have to be considerably enlarged. But that ideal judge who shall be paid as befits his grave calling, who shall combine the honesty and common sense of the north with the analytical acumen of the south, has yet to be evolved. What interests the student of history is that things hereabouts have not changed by a hair since the days of Demosthenes and those preposterous old Hellenic tribunals. Not by a single hair! On the one hand, we have a deluge of subtle disquisitions on "jurisprudence," "personal responsibility" and so forth; on the other, the sinister tomfoolery known as law— that is, babble, corruption, palaeolithic ideas of what constitutes evidence, and a court-procedure that reminds one of Gilbert and Sullivan at their best.

There was a report in the papers not long ago of the trial of an old married couple, on the charge of murdering a young girl. The bench dismissed the case, remarking that there was not a particle of evidence against them; they had plainly been exemplary citizens all their long lives. They had spent five years in prison awaiting trial. Five years, and innocent! It stands to reason that such abuses disorganize the family, especially in Italy, where the "family" means much more than it does in England; the land lies barren, and savings are wasted in paying lawyers and bribing greedy court officials. What are this worthy couple to think of Avanti, Savoia! once they have issued from their dungeon?

I read, in yesterday's Parliamentary Proceedings, of an honourable member (Aprile) rising to ask the Minister of Justice (Gallini) whether the time has not come to proceed with the trial of "Signori Camerano and their co-accused," who have been in prison for six years, charged with voluntary homicide. Whereto His Excellency sagely replies that "la magistratura ha avuto i suoi motivi"—the magistrates have had their reasons. Six years in confinement, and perhaps innocent! Can one wonder, under such circumstances, at the anarchist schools of Prato and elsewhere? Can one wonder if even a vindictive and corrupt rag like the socialistic "Avanti" occasionally prints frantic protests of quasi-righteous indignation? And not a hundredth part of such accused persons can cause a Minister of the Crown to be interpellated on their behalf. The others suffer silently and often die, forgotten, in their cells.

And yet—how seriously we take this nation! Almost as seriously as we take ourselves. The reason is that most of us come to Italy too undiscerning, too reverent; in the pre-critical and pre-humorous stages. We arrive here, stuffed with Renaissance ideals or classical lore, and viewing the present through coloured spectacles. We arrive here, above all things, too young; for youth loves to lean on tradition and to draw inspiration from what has gone before; youth finds nothing more difficult than to follow Goethe's advice about grasping that living life which shifts and fluctuates about us. Few writers are sufficiently detached to laugh at these people as they, together with ourselves, so often and so richly deserve. I spoke of the buffoonery of Italian law; I might have called it a burlesque. The trial of the ex-minister Nasi: here was a cause celebre conducted by the highest tribunal of the land; and if it was not a burlesque—why, we must coin a new word for what is.



XXXIV

MALARIA

A black snake of alarming dimensions, one of the monsters that still infest the Calabrian lowlands, glided across the roadway while I was waiting for the post carriage to drive me to Caulonia from its railway-station. Auspicious omen! It carried my thoughts from old Aesculapius to his modern representatives—to that school of wise and disinterested healers who are ridding these regions of their curse, and with whom I was soon to have some nearer acquaintance. We started at last, in the hot hours of the morning, and the road at first skirts the banks of the Alaro, the Sagra of old, on whose banks was fought the fabled battle between the men of Croton and Locri. Then it begins to climb upwards. My companion was a poor peasant woman, nearly blind (from malaria, possibly). Full of my impressions of yesterday, I promptly led the conversation towards the subject of Musolino. She had never spoken to him, she said, or even seen him. But she got ten francs from him, all the same. In dire distress, some years ago, she had asked a friend in the mountains to approach the brigand on her behalf. The money was long in coming, she added, but of course it came in the end. He always helped poor people, even those outside his own country. The site of the original Caulonia is quite uncertain. Excavations now going on at Monasterace, some ten miles further on, may decide that the town lay there. Some are in favour of the miserable village of Foca, near at hand; or of other sites. The name of Foca seems to point, rather, to a settlement of the regenerator Nicephorus Phocas. Be that as it may, the present town of Caulonia used to be called Castelvetere, and it appropriated the Greek name in accordance with a custom which has been largely followed hereabouts. [Footnote: It is represented with two towers in Peutinger's Tables. But these, says an editor, should have been given to the neighbouring Scilatio, for Caulon was in ruins at the time of Pliny, and is not even mentioned by Ptolemy. Servius makes another mistake; he confuses the Calabrian Caulon with a locality of the same name near Capua.] It contains some ten thousand inhabitants, amiable, intelligent and distinguished by a philoxenia befitting the traditions of men who sheltered Pythagoras in his hour of need. As at Rossano, Catanzaro and many other Calabrian towns, there used to be a ghetto of Jews here; the district is still called "La Giudeca"; their synagogue was duly changed into a church of the Madonna.

So much I learn from Montorio, who further informs me that the ubiquitous Saint Peter preached here on his way to Rome, and converted the people to Christianity; and that the town can boast of three authentic portraits of the Mother of God painted by Saint Luke ("Lukas me pinxit"). One is rather bewildered by the number of these masterpieces in Italy, until one realizes, as an old ecclesiastical writer has pointed out, that "the Saint, being excellent in his art, could make several of them in a few days, to correspond to the great devotion of those early Christians, fervent in their love to the Great Mother of God. Whence we may believe that to satisfy their ardent desires he was continually applying himself to this task of so much glory to Mary and her blessed Son." But the sacristan of the church at Caulonia, to whom I applied for information regarding these local treasures, knew nothing about them, and his comments gave me the impression that he has relapsed into a somewhat pagan way of regarding such matters.

You may obtain a fairly good view of Caulonia from the southeast; or again, from the neighbouring hillock of San Vito. The town lies some 300 metres above sea-level on a platform commanding the valleys of the Amusa and Alaro. This position, which was clearly chosen for its strategic value, unfortunately does not allow it to expand, and so the inhabitants are deprived of that public garden which they amply deserve. At the highest point lies a celebrated old castle wherein, according to tradition, Campanella was imprisoned for a while. In the days of Pacicchelli, it was a fine place—"magnifico nelle regole di Fortezza, con cinque baloardi provveduti di cannoni di bronzo, ed una riccha Armeria, degna habitazione di don Carlo Maria Carrafa, Prencipe della Roccella, che se ne intitola Marchese." Mingled with the stones of its old walls they have recently found skeletons—victims, possibly, of the same macabre superstition to which the blood-drenched masonry of the Tower of London bears witness. Here, too, have been unearthed terra-cotta lamps and other antiquities. What are we to surmise from this? That it was a Roman foundation? Or that the malaria in older times forced Caulonia to wander towards healthier inland heights after the example of Sybaris-Terranova, and that the Romans continued to occupy this same site? Or, assuming Castelvetere to date only from mediaeval times, that these ancient relics found their way into it accidentally? The low-lying district of Foca, at this day, is certainly very malarious, whereas the death-rate up here is only about 12 per 1000.

Dr. Francesco Genovese of Caulonia, to whom I am indebted for much kindness and who is himself a distinguished worker in the humanitarian mission of combating malaria, has published, among other interesting pamphlets, one which deals with this village of Foca, a small place of about 200 inhabitants, surrounded by fertile orange and vine plantations near the mouth of the Alaro. His researches into its vital statistics for the half-century ending 1902 reveal an appalling state of affairs. Briefly summarized, they amount to this, that during this period there were 391 births and 516 deaths. In other words, the village, which in 1902 ought to have contained between 600 and 800 inhabitants, not only failed to progress, but devoured its original population of 200; and not only them, but also 125 fresh immigrants who had entered the region from the healthy uplands, lured by the hope of gaining a little money during the vintage season.

A veritable Moloch!

Had the old city of Caulonia, numbering perhaps 20,000 inhabitants, stood here under such conditions of hygiene, it would have been expunged off the face of the earth in fifty years.

Yet—speaking of malaria in general—a good deal of evidence has been brought together to show that the disease has been endemic in Magna Grsecia for two thousand years, and the customs of the Sybarites seem to prove that they had some acquaintance with marsh fever, and tried to guard against it. "Whoever would live long," so ran their proverb, "must see neither the rising nor the setting sun." A queer piece of advice, intelligible only if the land was infested with malaria. Many of their luxurious habits assume another import, on this hypothesis. Like the inhabitants of the malarious Etruscan region, they were adepts at draining, and their river is described, in one of the minor works attributed to Galen, as "rendering men infertile"—a characteristic result of malaria. What is still more significant is that their new town Thurii, built on the heights, was soon infected, and though twice repeopled, decayed away. And that they had chosen the heights for their relative healthfulness we can infer from Strabo, who says that Paestum, a colony from Sybaris, was removed further inland from the shore, on account of the pestilential climate of the lowlands.

But the Ionian shores cannot have been as deadly as they now are. We calculate, for example, that the town walls of Croton measured eighteen kilometres in circumference, a figure which the modern visitor to Cotrone only brings himself to believe when he remembers what can be actually proved of other Hellenic colonies, such as Syracuse. Well, the populace of so large a city requires a surrounding district to supply it with agricultural produce. The Marchesato, the vast tract bordering on Cotrone, is now practically uninhabitable; the population (including the town) has sunk to 45 to the square kilometre. That is malaria.

Or rather, only one side of the evil. For these coastlands attract rural labourers who descend from the mountains during the season of hay-making or fruit-harvest, and then return infected to their homes. One single malarious patient may inoculate an entire village, hitherto immune, granted the anophelines are there to propagate the mischief. By means of these annual migrations the scourge has spread, in the past. And so it spreads to-day, whenever possible. Of forty labourers that left Caulonia for Cotrone in 1908 all returned infected save two, who had made liberal use of quinine as a prophylactic. Fortunately, there are no anophelines at Caulonia.

Greatly, indeed, must this country have changed since olden days; and gleaning here and there among the ancients, Dr. Genovese has garnered some interesting facts on this head. The coast-line, now unbroken sand, is called rocky, in several regions, by Strabo, Virgil and Persius Flaccus; of the two harbours, of Locri, of that of Metapontum, Caulonia and other cities, nothing remains; the promontory of Cocynthum (Stilo)—described as the longest promontory in Italy—together with other capes, has been washed away by the waves or submerged under silt carried down from the hills; islands, like that of Calypso which is described in Vincenzo Pascale's book (1796), and mentioned by G. Castaidi (1842), have clean vanished from the map.

The woodlands have retired far inland; yet here at Caulonia, says Thucydides, was prepared the timber for the fleets of Athens. The rivers, irregular and spasmodic torrents, must have flowed with more equal and deeper current, since Pliny mentions five of them as navigable; snow, very likely, covered the mountain tops; the rainfall was clearly more abundant—one of the sights of Locri was its daily rainbow; the cicadas of the territory of Reggio are said to have been "dumb," on account of the dampness of the climate. They are anything but dumb nowadays.

Earth-movements, too, have tilted the coast-line up and down, and there is evidence to show that while the Tyrrhenian shore has been raised by these oscillations, the Ionian has sunk. Not long ago four columns were found in the sea at Cotrone two hundred yards from the beach; old sailors remember another group of columns visible at low tide near Caulonia. It is quite possible that the Ionian used to be as rocky as the other shore, and this gradual sinking of the coast must have retarded the rapid outflow of the rivers, as it has done in the plain of Paestum and in the Pontine marshes, favouring malarious conditions. Earthquakes have helped in the work; that of 1908 lowered certain parts of the Calabrian shore opposite Messina by about one metre. Indeed, though earthquakes have been known to raise the soil and thereby improve it, the Calabrian ones have generally had a contrary effect. The terrific upheavals of 1783-1787 produced two hundred and fifteen lakes in the country; they were drained away in a style most creditable to the Bourbons, but there followed an epidemic of malaria which carried off 18,800 people!

These Calabrian conditions are only part of a general change of climate which seems to have taken place all over Italy; a change to which Columella refers when, quoting Saserna, he says that formerly the vine and olive could not prosper "by reason of the severe winter" in certain places where they have since become abundant, "thanks to a milder temperature." We never hear of the frozen Tiber nowadays, and many remarks of the ancients as to the moist and cold climate seem strange to us. Pliny praises the chestnuts of Tarentum; I question whether the tree could survive the hot climate of to-day. Nobody could induce "splendid beeches" to grow in the lowlands of Latium, yet Theophrastus, a botanist, says that they were drawn from this region for shipbuilding purposes. This gradual desiccation has probably gone on for long ages; so Signor Cavara has discovered old trunks of white fir in districts of the Apennines where such a plant could not possibly grow to-day.

A change to a dry and warm atmosphere is naturally propitious to malaria, granted sufficient water remains to propagate the mosquito. And the mosquito contents itself with very little—the merest teacup fui.

Returning to old Calabria, we find the woods of Locri praised by Proclus—woods that must have been of coniferous timber, since Virgil lauds their resinous pitch. Now the Aleppo pine produces pitch, and would still flourish there, as it does in the lowlands between Taranto and Metaponto; the classical Sila pitch-trees, however, could not grow at this level any more. Corroborative evidence can be drawn from Theocritus, who mentions heath and arbutus as thriving in the marine thickets near Cotrone—mountain shrubs, nowadays, that have taken refuge in cooler uplands, together with the wood-pigeon which haunted the same jungles. It is true that he hints at marshes near Cotrone, and, indeed, large tracts of south Italy are described as marshy by the ancients; they may well have harboured the anopheles mosquito from time immemorial, but it does not follow that they were malarious.

Much of the healthy physical conditions may have remained into the Middle Ages or even later; it is strange to read, for example, in Edrisius, of the pitch and tar that were exported to all parts from the Bradano river, or of the torrential Sinno that "ships enter this river—it offers excellent anchorage"; odd, too, to hear of coral fisheries as late as the seventeenth century at Rocella Ionica, where the waves now slumber on an even and sandy beach.

But malaria had made insidious strides, meanwhile. Dr. Genovese thinks that by the year 1691 the entire coast was malarious and abandoned like now, though only within the last two centuries has man actively co-operated in its dissemination. So long as the woodlands on the plains are cut down or grazed by goats, relatively little damage is done; but it spells ruin to denude, in a country like this, the steep slopes of their timber. Whoever wishes to know what mischief the goats, those picturesque but pernicious quadrupeds, can do to a mountainous country, should study the history of St. Helena. [Footnote: By J. C. Melliss (London, 1875).] Thanks to the goats, Maltese fever has lately been introduced into Calabria. Man, with his charcoal-burning, has completed the disaster. What happens? The friable rock, no longer sustained by plant-life, crashes down with each thunderstorm, blocks up the valleys, devastating large tracts of fertile land; it creates swamps in the lowlands, and impedes the outflow of water to the sea. These ravenous fiumare have become a feature in Calabrian scenery; underneath one of the most terrible of them lies the birthplace of Praxiteles. Dry or half-dry during the warm months, and of formidable breadth, such torrent-beds—the stagnant water at their skirts—are ideal breeding-places for the anophelines from their mouth up to a height of 250 metres. So it comes about that, within recent times, rivers have grown to be the main arteries of malaria. And there are rivers galore in Calabria. The patriotic Barrius enumerates no of them—Father Fiore, less learned, or more prudent, not quite so many. Deforestation and malaria have gone hand in hand here, as in Greece, Asia Minor, North Africa, and other countries.

Thus year after year, from one cause or another, the conditions have become more favourable for the disease to do its fatal work.

That much of this harm has been done quite lately can often be proved. At Caulonia, for instance, the woodlands are known to have reached the shore a hundred years ago, and there are bare tracts of land still bearing the name of "foresta." In a single summer (1807) a French regiment stationed at Cosenza lost 800 men from fever, and when Rath visited the town in 1871 it was described to him as a "vast hospital" during the hot months; nevertheless, says he, the disease has only been so destructive during the last two centuries, for up to that time the forests touched the outskirts of the town and regulated the Crati-bed, preventing the formation of marshes. The literary record of Cosenza is one of exceptional brilliance; for acute and original thought this town can hardly be surpassed by any other of its size on earth. Were statistics available, I have not the slightest doubt that fever could be shown to be largely responsible for the withering of its spiritual life.

The same fate—the same relapse from prosperity to decay—and for the same reasons, has overtaken many other riverside villages, among them that of Tarsia, the Caprasia of the An tonine Itinerary. "It was described to us," says Rath, "as the most miserable and dirty village in Calabria; but we found it worse." It remains, to-day, a highly infected and altogether pitiable place, concerning which I have made certain modest researches that would require, none the less, a chapter to themselves. . . .

Perhaps I have already said over-much on the subject. An Englishman unacquainted with malaria might think so, oblivious of the fact that Sir Ronald Ross has called it "perhaps the most important of human diseases." But let him go to a malarious country and see with his own eyes something of the degradation it involves; how it stamps its accursed imprimatur upon man and nature alike! It is the blight of youth—the desert-maker. A well-known Italian senator has declared that the story of south Italy is, was, and will be the story of malaria; and the greater part of Calabria will certainly remain an enigma to the traveller who ignores what is meant by this plague.

Malaria is the key to a correct understanding of the landscape; it explains the inhabitants, their mode of life, their habits, their history.



XXXV

CAULONIA TO SERRA

"How do you treat your malaria patients?" I once enquired of a doctor in India. A few good stiff doses, he said, when the attack is on; that generally settles them. If not, they can begin again. To take quinine as a prophylactic, he considered folly. It might grow into a habit; you never know. . . .

It is to be hoped that such types are extinct, out there. They are extinct hereabouts. None but an ignorant person would now traverse malarious tracts in summer without previous quininiza-tion; or, if infected, deal with the disease otherwise than by an amply protracted treatment of cure. Yet it is only quite lately that we have gained our knowledge of a proper use of the drug; and this accounts for the great mortality long after its specific effects had been recognized by the profession. It was given both inefficiently and insufficiently. It was sold at a prohibitive price. The country people were distrustful; so-and-so had taken it for three or four days; he had improved, yes; but the fever was on him once more. Why waste money on such experiments?

I remember accosting a lad, anemic, shivering with the tertian, and marked by that untimely senility which is the sign-manual of malaria. I suggested quinine.

"I don't take doctors' stuff," he said. "Even if I wanted to, my father would not let me. And if he did, there's no money to pay for it. And if there were, it would do no good. He's tried it himself."

"Well, but how are you feeling?"

"Oh, all right. There's nothing much the matter with me. Just the bad air."

Such types, too, are practically extinct nowadays; the people are being educated to recognize their peril and how to avoid it; they begin to follow Professor Celli's advice in the matter of regarding quinine as their "daily bread." For since the discovery of the anophelic origin of malaria many devices have been put into execution to combat the disease, not the least of them being a popularized teaching of its causes and consequences by means of pamphlets, lectures to school-children, and so forth.

Now, you may either fight the anopheles—the vehicle, or the disease itself. The first entails putting the country into such a state that the mosquito finds it unpleasant to live there, a labour of Hercules. Yet large sums are being expended in draining marshy tracts, regulating river-beds and afforesting bare spaces; and if you are interested in such works, you will do well to see what is going on at Metaponto at this moment. (A considerable portion of the Government grant for these purposes has lately been deflected for use in the Tripolitan war.) Exemplary fines are also imposed for illicit timber-cutting and grazing,—in those towns, at least, where the magistrate has sufficient sense to perceive the ulterior benefits to be derived from what certainly entails a good deal of temporary hardship on poor people. Certain economic changes are helping in this work; so the wealth imported from America helps to break up the big properties, those latifundia which, says an Italian authority, "are synonymous with malaria." The ideal condition—the extirpation of anophelines—will never be attained; nor is it of vital importance that it should be.

Far more pressing is the protection of man against their attacks. Wonderful success has crowned the wire-netting of the windows—an outcome of the classical experiments of 1899, in the Roman Campagna.

But chiefest and most urgent of all is the cure of the infected population. In this direction, results astonishing—results well-nigh incredible—have attended the recently introduced governmental sale of quinine. In the year 1895 there were 16,464 deaths from malaria throughout Italy. By 1908 the number had sunk to 3463. Eloquent figures, that require no comment! And, despite the fact that the drug is now sold at a merely nominal rate or freely given away to the needy—nay, thrust down the very throats of the afflicted peasantry by devoted gentlemen who scour the plains with ambulances during the deadly season—despite this, the yearly profits from its sale are amounting to about three-quarters of a million francs.

So these forlorn regions are at last beginning to revive.

And returning to Foca, of whose dreadful condition up to 1902 (year of the introduction of Government quinine) I have just spoken, we find that a revolution has taken place. Between that year and 1908 the birth-rate more than doubled the death-rate. In 1908 some two hundred poor folks frequented the ambulance, nearly six kilogrammes of quinine being gratuitously distributed; not one of the natives of the place was attacked by the disease; and there was a single death—an old woman of eighty, who succumbed to senile decay. [Footnote: Doctor Genovese's statistical investigations have brought an interesting little fact to light. In the debilitating pre-quinine period there was a surplus of female births; now, with increased healthfulness, those of the males preponderate.]

This is an example of what the new quinine-policy has done for Italy, in briefest space of time. Well may the nation be proud of the men who conceived this genial and beneficial measure and carried it through Parliament, and of those local doctors without whose enlightened zeal such a triumph could not have been achieved. . . .

Sir Ronald Ross's discovery, by the way, has been fruitful not only in practical humanitarian results. For instance, it has reduced North's laborious "Roman Fever" to something little better than a curiosity. And here, on these deserted shores that were once resplendent with a great civilization—here is the place to peruse Mr. W. M. Jones's studies on this subject. I will not give even the shortest precis of his conscientious researches nor attempt to picture their effect upon a mind trained in the old school of thought; suffice to say, that the author would persuade us that malaria is implicated, to an hitherto unsuspected extent, in the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. And he succeeds. Yes; a man accustomed to weigh evidence will admit, I think, that he has made out a suggestively strong case.

How puzzled we were to explain why the brilliant life of Magna Graecia was snuffed out suddenly, like a candle, without any appreciably efficient cause—how we listened to our preachers cackling about the inevitable consequences of Sybaritic luxury, and to the warnings of sage politicians concerning the dangers of mere town-patriotism as opposed to worthier systems of confederation! How we drank it all in! And how it warmed the cockles of our hearts to think that we were not vicious, narrow-minded heathens, such as these!

And now a vulgar gnat is declared to be at the bottom of the whole mystery.

Crudely disconcerting, these scientific discoveries. Or is it not rather hard to be dragged to earth in this callous fashion, while soaring heavenward on the wings of our edifying reflections? For the rest—the old, old story; a simple, physical explanation of what used to be an enigma brimful of moral significance.

That Mr. Jones's facts and arguments will be found applicable to other decayed races in the old and new worlds is highly probable. Meanwhile, it takes one's breath away quite sufficiently to realize that they apply to Hellas and her old colonies on these shores.

"'AUTOS. Strange! My interest waxes. Tell me then, what affliction, God or Devil, wiped away the fair life upon the globe, the beasts, the birds, the delectable plantations, and all the blithe millions of the human race? What calamity fell upon them?'

"'ESCHATA. A gnat.'

"'AUTOS. A gnat?'

"'ESCHATA. Even so.'"

Thus I wrote, while yet unaware that such pests as anophelines existed upon earth. . . .

At the same time, I think we must be cautious in following certain deductions of our author; that theory of brutality, for example, as resulting from malaria. Speaking of Calabria, I would almost undertake to prove, from the archives of law-courts, that certain of the most malarial tracts are precisely those in which there is least brutality of any kind. Cotrone, for instance. . . . The delegato (head of the police) of that town is so young—a mere boy—that I marvelled how he could possibly have obtained a position which is usually filled by seasoned and experienced officers. He was a "son of the white hen," they told me; that is, a socially favoured individual, who was given this job for the simple reason that there was hardly any serious work for him to do. Cosenza, on the other hand, has a very different reputation nowadays. And it is perfectly easy to explain how malaria might have contributed to this end. For the disease—and herein lies its curse—lowers both the physical and social standard of a people; it breeds misery, poverty and ignorance—fit soil for callous rapacity.

But how about his theory of "pessimism" infecting the outlook of generations of malaria-weakened sages? I find no trace of pessimism here, not even in its mild Buddhistic form. The most salient mental trait of cultured Calabrians is a subtle detachment and contempt of illusions—whence their time-honoured renown as abstract thinkers and speculators. This derives from a philosophic view of life and entails, naturally enough, the outward semblance of gravity—a Spanish gravity, due not so much to a strong graft of Spanish blood and customs during the viceregal period, as to actual affinities with the race of Spain. But this gravity has nothing in common with pessimism, antagonistic though it be to those outbursts of irresponsible optimism engendered under northern skies by copious food, or beer.

To reach the uplands of Fabbrizia and Serra, whither I was now bound, I might have utilized the driving road from Gioioso, on the Reggio side of Caulonia. But that was everybody's route. Or I might have gone via Stilo, on the other side. But Stilo with its memories of Campanella—a Spanish type, this!—and of Otho II, its winding track into the beech-clad heights of Ferdinandea, was already familiar to me. I elected to penetrate straight inland by the shortest way; a capable muleteer at once presented himself.

We passed through one single village, Ragona; leaving those of S. Nicola and Nardo di Pace on the right. The first of them is celebrated for its annual miracle of the burning olive, when, armed to the teeth (for some ancient reason), the populace repairs to the walls of a certain convent out of which there grows an olive tree: at its foot is kindled a fire whose flames are sufficient to scorch all the leaves, but behold! next day the foliage is seen to glow more bravely green than ever. Perhaps the roots of the tree are near some cistern. These mountain villages, hidden under oaks and vines, with waters trickling through their lanes, a fine climate and a soil that bears everything needful for life, must be ideal habitations for simple folks. In some of them, the death-rate is as low as 7: 1000. Malaria is unknown here: they seem to fulfil all the conditions of a terrestrial paradise.

There is a note of joyous vigour in this landscape. The mule-track winds in and out among the heights, through flowery meadows grazed by cattle and full of buzzing insects and butterflies, and along hill-sides cunningly irrigated; it climbs up to heathery summits and down again through glades of chestnut and ilex with mossy trunks, whose shadow fosters strange sensations of chill and gloom. Then out again, into the sunshine of waving corn and poppies.

For a short while we stumbled along a torrent-bed, and I grew rather sad to think that it might be the last I should see for some time to come, my days in this country being now numbered. This one was narrow. But there are others, interminable in length and breadth. Interminable! No breeze stirs in those deep depressions through which the merest thread of milky water trickles disconsolately. The sun blazes overhead and hours pass, while you trudge through the fiery inferno; scintillations of heat rise from the stones and still you crawl onwards, breathless and footsore, till eyes are dazed and senses reel. One may well say bad things of these torrid deserts of pebbles which, up till lately, were the only highways from the lowlands into the mountainous parts. But they are sweet in memory. One calls to mind the wild savours that hang in the stagnant air; the cloven hill-sides, seamed with gorgeous patches of russet and purple and green; the spectral tamarisks, and the glory of coral-tinted oleanders rising in solitary tufts of beauty, or flaming congregations, out of the pallid waste of boulders.

After exactly six hours Fabbrizia was reached—a large place whose name, like that of Borgia, Savelli, Carafa and other villages on these southern hills, calls up associations utterly non-Calabrian; Fabbrizia, with pretentious new church and fantastically dirty side-streets. It lies at the respectable elevation of 900 metres, on the summit of a monstrous landslide which has disfigured the country.

While ascending along the flank of this deformity I was able to see how the authorities have attempted to cope with the mischief and arrest further collapses. This is what they have done. The minute channels of water, that might contribute to the disintegration of the soil by running into this gaping wound from the sides or above, have been artfully diverted from their natural courses; trees and shrubs are planted at its outskirts in order to uphold the earth at these spots by their roots—they have been protected by barbed wire from the grazing of cattle; furthermore, a multitude of wickerwork dykes are thrown across the accessible portions of the scar, to collect the downward-rushing material and tempt winged plant-seeds to establish themselves on the ledges thus formed. To bridle this runaway mountain is no mean task, for such frane are like rodent ulcers, ever enlarging at the edges. With the heat, with every shower of rain, with every breath of wind, the earth crumbles away; there is an eternal trickling, day and night, until some huge boulder is exposed which crashes down, loosening everything in its wild career; a single tempest may disrupture what the patience and ingenuity of years have contrived.

Three more hours or thereabouts will take you to Serra San Bruno along the backbone of southern Italy, through cultivated lands and pasture and lonely stretches of bracken, once covered by woodlands.

It may well be that the townlet has grown up around, or rather near, the far-famed Carthusian monastery. I know nothing of its history save that it has the reputation of being one of the most bigoted places in Calabria—a fact of which the sagacious General Manhes availed himself when he devised his original and effective plan of chastising the inhabitants for a piece of atrocious conduct on their part. He caused all the local priests to be arrested and imprisoned; the churches were closed, and the town placed under what might be called an interdict. The natives took it quietly at first, but soon the terror of the situation dawned upon them. No religious marriages, no baptisms, no funerals—the comforts of heaven refused to living and dead alike. . . . The strain grew intolerable and, in a panic of remorse, the populace hunted down their own brigand-relations and handed them over to Manhes, who duly executed them, one and all. Then the interdict was taken off and the priests set at liberty; and a certain writer tells us that the people were so charmed with the General's humane and businesslike methods that they forthwith christened him "Saint Manhes," a name which, he avers, has clung to him ever since.

The monastery lies about a mile distant; near at hand is a little artificial lake and the renowned chapel of Santa Maria. There was a time when I would have dilated lovingly upon this structure—a time when I probably knew as much about Carthusian convents as is needful for any of their inmates; when I studied Tromby's ponderous work and God knows how many more—ay, and spent two precious weeks of my life in deciphering certain crabbed MSS. of Tutini in the Brancacciana library—ay, and tested the spleenful Perrey's "Ragioni del Regio Fisco, etc.," as to the alleged land-grabbing propensities of this order—ay, and even pilgrimaged to Rome to consult the present general of the Carthusians (his predecessor, more likely) as to some administrative detail, all-important, which has wholly escaped my memory. Gone are those days of studious gropings into blind alleys! The current of zeal has slowed down or turned aside, maybe, into other channels. They who wish, will find a description of the pristine splendour of this monastery in various books by Pacicchelli; the catastrophe of 1783 was described by Keppel Craven and reported upon, with illustrations, by the Commission of the Naples Academy; and if you are of a romantic turn of mind, you will find a good story of the place, as it looked duringthe ruinous days of desolation, in Misasi's "Calabrian Tales."

It is now rebuilt on modern lines and not much of the original structure remains upright. I wandered about the precincts in the company of two white-robed French monks, endeavouring to reconstruct not the convent as it was in its younger days, but them. That older one, especially—he had known the world. . . .

Meat being forbidden, the godly brethren have a contract for fish to be brought up every day by the post-carriage from the distant Soverato. And what happens, I asked, when none are caught?

"Eh bien, nous mangeons des macaroni!"

Such a diet would never suit me. Let me retire to a monkery where carnivorous leanings may be indulged. Methinks I could pray more cheerfully with the prospect of a rational dejeuner a la fourchette looming ahead.

At the back of the monastery lies a majestic forest of white firs—nothing but firs; a unique region, so far as south and central Italy are concerned. I was there in the golden hour after sunset, and yet again in the twilight of dew-drenched morning; and it seemed to me that in this temple not made by hands there dwelt an enchantment more elemental, and more holy, than in the cloistered aisles hard by. This assemblage of solemn trees has survived, thanks to rare conditions of soil and climate. The land lies high; the ground is perennially moist and intersected by a horde of rills that join their waters to form the river Ancinale; frequent showers descend from above. Serra San Bruno has an uncommonly heavy rainfall. It lies in a vale occupying the site of a pleistocene lake, and the forest, now restricted to one side of the basin, encircled it entirely in olden days. At its margin they have established a manufactory which converts the wood into paper—blissful sight for the utilitarian.

Finding little else of interest in Serra, and hungering for the flesh-pots of Cotrone, I descended by the postal diligence to Soverato, nearly a day's journey. Old Soverato is in ruins, but the new town seems to thrive in spite of being surrounded by deserts of malaria. While waiting for supper and the train to Cotrone, I strolled along the beach, and soon found myself sitting beside the bleached anatomy of some stranded leviathan, and gazing at the mountains of Squillace that glowed in the soft lights of sunset. The shore was deserted save for myself and a portly dogana-official who was playing with his little son—trying to amuse him by elephantine gambols on the sand, regardless of his uniform and manly dignity. Notwithstanding his rotundity, he was an active and resourceful parent, and enjoyed himself vastly; the boy pretending, as polite children sometimes do, to enter into the fun of the game.



XXXVI

MEMORIES OF GISSING

Two new hotels have recently sprung up at Cotrone. With laudable patriotism, they are called after its great local champions, athletic and spiritual, in ancient days—Hotel Milo and Hotel Pythagoras. As such, they might be expected to make a strong appeal to the muscles and brains of their respective clients. I rather fancy that the chief customers of both are commercial travellers who have as little of the one as of the other, and to whom these fine names are Greek.

As for myself, I remain faithful to the "Concordia" which has twice already sheltered me within its walls.

The shade of George Gissing haunts these chambers and passages. It was in 1897 that he lodged here with that worthy trio: Gibbon, Lenormant and Cassiodorus. The chapters devoted to Cotrone are the most lively and characteristic in his "Ionian Sea." Strangely does the description of his arrival in the town, and his reception in the "Concordia," resemble that in Bourget's "Sensations."

The establishment has vastly improved since those days. The food is good and varied, the charges moderate; the place is spotlessly clean in every part—I could only wish that the hotels in some of our English country towns were up to the standard of the "Concordia" in this respect. "One cannot live without cleanliness," as the housemaid, assiduously scrubbing, remarked to me. It is also enlarged; the old dining-room, whose guests are so humorously described by him, is now my favourite bedroom, while those wretched oil-lamps sputtering on the wall have been replaced by a lavish use of electricity. One is hardly safe, however, in praising these inns over-much; they are so apt to change hands. So long as competition with the two others continues, the "Concordia" will presumably keep to its present level.

Of freaks in the dining-room, I have so far only observed one whom Gissing might have added to his collection. He is a director of some kind, and his method of devouring maccheroni I unreservedly admire—it displays that lack of all effort which distinguishes true art from false. He does not eat them with deliberate mastication; he does not even—like your ordinary amateur—drink them in separate gulps; but he contrives, by some swiftly-adroit process of levitation, that the whole plateful shall rise in a noiseless and unbroken flood from the table to his mouth, whence it glides down his gullet with the relentless ease of a river pouring into a cavern. Altogether, a series of films depicting him at work upon a meal would make the fortune of a picture-show company—in England. Not here, however; such types are too common to be remarked, the reason being that boys are seldom sent to boarding schools where stereotyped conventions of "good form" are held up for their imitation, but brought up at home by adoring mothers who care little for such externals or, if they do, have no great authority to enforce their views. On entering the world, these eccentricities in manner are proudly clung to, as a sign of manly independence.

Death has made hideous gaps in the short interval. The kindly Vice-Consul at Catanzaro is no more; the mayor of Cotrone, whose permit enabled Gissing to visit that orchard by the riverside, has likewise joined the majority; the housemaid of the "Concordia," the domestic serf with dark and fiercely flashing eyes—dead! And dead is mine hostess, "the stout, slatternly, sleepy woman, who seemed surprised at my demand for food, but at length complied with it."

But the little waiter is alive and now married; and Doctor Sculco still resides in his aristocratic palazzo up that winding way in the old town, with the escutcheon of a scorpion—portentous emblem for a doctor—over its entrance. He is a little greyer, no doubt; but the same genial and alert personage as in those days.

I called on this gentleman, hoping to obtain from him some reminiscences of Gissing, whom he attended during a serious illness.

"Yes," he replied, to my enquiries, "I remember him quite well; the young English poet who was ill here. I prescribed for him. Yes—yes! He wore his hair long."

And that was all I could draw from him. I have noticed more than once that Italian physicians have a stern conception of the Hippocratic oath: the affairs of their patients, dead or alive, are a sacred trust in perpetuity.

The town, furthermore, has undergone manifold improvements in those few years. Trees are being planted by the roadsides; electric light is everywhere and, best of all, an excellent water-supply has been led down from the cool heights of the Sila, bringing cleanliness, health and prosperity in its train. And a stately cement-bridge is being built over the Esaro, that "all but stagnant and wholly pestilential stream." The Esaro glides pleasantly, says the chronicler Noia Molisi. Perhaps it really glided, in his day.

One might do worse than spend a quiet month or two at Cotrone in the spring, for the place grows upon one: it is so reposeful and orderly. But not in winter. Gissing committed the common error of visiting south Italy at that season when, even if the weather will pass, the country and its inhabitants are not true to themselves. You must not come to these parts in winter time.

Nor yet in the autumn, for the surrounding district is highly malarious. Thucydides already speaks of these coastlands as depopulated (relatively speaking, I suppose), and under the Romans they recovered but little; they have only begun to revive quite lately. [Footnote: Between 1815—1843, and in this single province of Catanzaro, there was an actual decline in the population of thirty-six towns and villages. Malaria!] Yet this town must have looked well enough in the twelfth century, since it is described by Edrisius as "a very old city, primitive and beautiful, prosperous and populated, in a smiling position, with walls of defence and an ample port for anchorage." I suspect that the history of Cotrone will be found to bear out Professor Celli's theory of the periodical recrudescences and abatements of malaria. However that may be, the place used to be in a deplorable state. Riedesel (1771) calls it "la ville la plus affreuse de l'Italie, et peut-etre du monde entier"; twenty years later, it is described as "sehr ungesund ... so aermlich als moeglich"; in 1808 it was "reduite a une population de trois mille habitants ronges par la misere, et les maladies qu'occasionne la stagnation des eaux qui autrefois fertilisaient ces belles campagnes." In 1828, says Vespoli, it contained only 3932 souls.

I rejoice to cite such figures. They show how vastly Cotrone, together with the rest of Calabria, has improved since the Bourbons were ousted. The sack of the town by their hero Cardinal Ruffo, described by Pepe and others, must have left long traces. "Horrible was the carnage perpetrated by these ferocious bands. Neither age nor sex nor condition was spared. . . . After two days of pillage accompanied by a multitude of excesses and cruelties, they erected, on the third day, a magnificent altar in the middle of a large square"—and here the Cardinal, clothed in his sacred purple, praised the good deeds of the past two days and then, raising his arms, displayed a crucifix, absolving his crew from the faults committed during the ardour of the sack, and blessed them.

I shall be sorry to leave these regions for the north, as leave them I must, in shortest time. The bathing alone would tempt me to prolong my stay, were it possible. Whereas Taranto, despite its situation, possesses no convenient beach, there are here, on either side of the town, leagues of shimmering sand lapped by tepid and caressing waves; it is a sunlit solitude; the land is your own, the sea your own, as far as eye can reach. One may well become an amphibian, at Cotrone.

The inhabitants of this town are well-mannered and devoid of the "ineffable" air of the Tarentines. But they are not a handsome race. Gissing says, a propos of the products of a local photographer, that it was "a hideous exhibition; some of the visages attained an incredible degree of vulgar ugliness." That is quite true. Old authors praise the beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal. Of the girls and boys one notices only those who possess a peculiar trait: the eyebrows pencilled in a dead straight line, which gives them an almost hieratic aspect. I cannot guess from what race is derived this marked feature which fades away with age as the brows wax thicker and irregular in contour. We may call it Hellenic on the old-fashioned principle that everything attractive comes from the Greeks, while its opposite is ascribed to those unfortunate "Arabs" who, as a matter of fact, are a sufficiently fine-looking breed.

And there must be very little Greek blood left here. The town—among many similar vicissitudes—was peopled largely by Bruttians, after Hannibal had established himself here. In the Viceregal period, again, there was a great infusion of Spanish elements. A number of Spanish surnames still linger on the spot.

And what of Gissing's other friend, the amiable guardian of the cemetery? "His simple good nature and intelligence greatly won upon me. I like to think of him as still quietly happy amid his garden walls, tending flowers that grow over the dead at Cotrone."

Dead, like those whose graves he tended; like Gissing himself. He expired in February 1901—the year of the publication of the "Ionian Sea," and they showed me his tomb near the right side of the entrance; a. poor little grave, with a wooden cross bearing a number, which will soon be removed to make room for another one.

This cemetery by the sea is a fair green spot, enclosed in a high wall and set with flowering plants and comely cypresses that look well against their background of barren clay-hills. Wandering here, I called to mind the decent cemetery of Lucera, and that of Manfredonia, built in a sleepy hollow at the back of the town which the monks in olden days had utilized as their kitchen garden (it is one of the few localities where deep soil can be found on that thirsty limestone plain); I remembered the Venosa burial-ground near the site of the Roman amphitheatre, among the tombs of which I had vainly endeavoured to find proofs that the name of Horace is as common here as that of Manfred in those other two towns; the Taranto cemetery, beyond the railway quarter, somewhat overloaded with pretentious ornaments; I thought of many cities of the dead, in places recently explored—that of Rossano, ill-kept within, but splendidly situated on a projecting spur that dominates the Ionian; of Caulonia, secluded among ravines at the back of the town. . . .

They are all full of character; a note in the landscape, with their cypresses darkly towering amid the pale and lowly olives; one would think the populace had thrown its whole poetic feeling into the choice of these sites and their embellishments. But this is not the case; they are chosen merely for convenience—not too far from habitations, and yet on ground that is comparatively cheap. Nor are they truly venerable, like ours. They date, for the most part, from the timewhen the Government abolished the oldsystem of inhumation in churches—a system which, for the rest, still survives; there are over six hundred of these fosse carnarie in use at this moment, most of them in churches.

And a sad thought obtrudes itself in these oases of peace and verdure. The Italian law requires that the body shall be buried within twenty-four hours after decease (the French consider forty-eight hours too short a term, and are thinking of modifying their regulations in this respect): a doctor's certificate of death is necessary but often impossible to procure, since some five hundred Italian communities possess no medical man whatever. Add to this, the superstitions of ignorant country people towards the dead, testified to by extraordinary beliefs and customs which you will find in Pitre and other collectors of native lore—their mingled fear and hatred of a corpse, which prompts them to thrust it underground at the earliest possible opportunity. . . . Premature burial must be all too frequent here. I will not enlarge upon the theme of horror by relating what gravediggers have seen with their own eyes on disturbing old coffins; if only half what they tell me is true, it reveals a state of affairs not to be contemplated without shuddering pity, and one that calls for prompt legislation. Only last year a frightful case came to light in Sicily. Videant Consules.

Here, at the cemetery, the driving road abruptly ends; thenceforward there is merely a track along the sea that leads, ultimately, to Capo Nau, where stands a solitary column, last relic of the great temple of Hera. I sometimes follow it as far as certain wells that are sunk, Arab-fashion, into the sand, and dedicated to Saint Anne. Goats and cows recline here after their meagre repast of scorched grasses, and the shepherds in charge have voices so soft, and manners so gentle, as to call up suggestions of the Golden Age. These pastoral folk are the primitives of Cotrone. From father to son, for untold ages before Theocritus hymned them, they have kept up their peculiar habits and traditions; between them and the agricultural classes is a gulf as deep as between these and the citizens. Conversing with them, one marvels how the same occupation can produce creatures so unlike as these and the goat-boys of Naples, the most desperate camorristi.

The cows may well be descendants of the sacred cattle of Hera that browsed under the pines which are known to have clothed the bleak promontory. You may encounter them every day, wandering on the way to the town which they supply with milk; to avoid the dusty road, they march sedately through the soft wet sand at the water's edge, their silvery bodies outlined against a cserulean flood of sky and sea.

On this promenade I yesterday observed, slow-pacing beside the waves, a meditative priest, who gave me some details regarding the ruined church of which Gissing speaks. It lies in the direction of the cemetery, outside the town; "its lonely position," he says, "made it interesting, and the cupola of coloured tiles (like that of the cathedral of Amalfi) remained intact, a bright spot against the grey hills behind." This cupola has recently been removed, but part of the old walls serve as foundation for a new sanctuary, a sordid-looking structure with red-tiled roof: I am glad to have taken a view of it, some years ago, ere its transformation. Its patroness is the Madonna del Carmine—the same whose church in Naples is frequented by thieves and cut-throats, who make a special cult of this Virgin Motherand invoke Her blessing on their nefarious undertakings.