The old church, he told me, was built in the middle of the seventeenth century; this new one, he agreed, might have been constructed on more ambitious lines, "but nowadays——" and he broke off, with eloquent aposiopesis.

It was the same, he went on, with the road to the cemetery; why should it not be continued right up to the cape of the Column as in olden days, over ground dove ogni passo e una memoria: where every footstep is a memory?

"Rich Italians," he said, "sometimes give away money to benefit the public. But the very rich—never! And at Cotrone, you must remember, every one belongs to the latter class."

We spoke of the Sila, which he had occasionally visited.

"What?" he asked incredulously, "you have crossed the whole of that country, where there is nothing to eat—nothing in the purest and most literal sense of that word? My dear sir! You must feel like Hannibal, after his passage of the Alps."

Those barren clay-hills on our right of which Gissing speaks (they are like the baize of the Apennines) annoyed him considerably; they were the malediction of the town, he declared. At the same time, they supplied him with the groundwork of a theory for which there is a good deal to be said. The old Greek city, he conjectured, must have been largely built of bricks made from their clay, which is once more being utilized for this purpose. How else account for its utter disappearance? Much of the finer buildings were doubtless of stone, and these have been worked into the fort, the harbour and palazzi of new Cotrone; but this would never account for the vanishing of a town nearly twelve miles in circumference. Bricks, he said, would explain the mystery; they had crumbled into dust ere yet the Romans rebuilt, with old Greek stones, the city on the promontory now occupied by the new settlement.

The modern palaces on the rising ground of the citadel are worthy of a visit; they are inhabited by some half-dozen "millionaires" who have given Cotrone the reputation of being the richest town of its size in Italy. So far as I can judge, the histories of some of these wealthy families would be curious reading.

"Gentlemen," said the Shepherd, "if you have designs of Trading, you must go another way; but if you're of the admired sort of Men, that have the thriving qualifications of Lying and Cheating, you're in the direct Path to Business; for in this City no Learning flourisheth; Eloquence finds no room here; nor can Temperance, Good Manners, or any Vertue meet with a Reward; assure yourselves of finding but two sorts of Men, and those are the Cheated, and those that Cheat."

If gossip at Naples and elsewhere is to be trusted, old Petronius seems to have had a prophetic glimpse of the dessus du panier of modern Cotrone.



XXXVII

COTRONE

The sun has entered the Lion. But the temperature at Cotrone is not excessive—five degrees lower than Taranto or Milan or London. One grows weary, none the less, of the deluge of implacable light that descends, day after day, from the aether. The glistering streets are all but deserted after the early hours of the morning. A few busy folks move about till midday on the pavements; and so do I—in the water. But the long hours following luncheon are consecrated to meditation and repose.

A bundle of Italian newspapers has preceded me hither; upon these I browse dispersedly, while awaiting the soft call to slumber. Here are some provincial sheets—the "Movement" of Castro-villari—the "New Rossano"—the "Bruttian" of Corigliano, with strong literary flavour. Astonishing how decentralized Italy still is, how brimful of purely local patriotism: what conception have these men of Rome as their capital? These articles often reflect a lively turmoil of ideas, well-expressed. Who pays for such journalistic ventures? Typography is cheap, and contributors naturally content themselves with the ample remuneration of appearing in print before their fellow-citizens; a considerable number of copies are exported to America. Yet I question whether the circulation of the "New Rossano," a fortnightly in its sixth year, can exceed five hundred copies.

But these venial and vapid Neapolitan dailies are my pet aversion. We know them, nous autres, with their odious personalities and playful blackmailing tactics; many "distinguished foreigners," myself included, could tell a tale anent that subject. Instead of descending to such matters, let me copy—it is too good to translate—a thrilling item of news from the chiefest of them, the Mattino, which touches, furthermore, upon the all-important subject of Calabrian progress.

"CETRARO. Per le continuate premure ed insistenze di questo egregio uffiziale postale Signor Rocca Francesco—che nulla lascia pel bene avviamento del nostro uffizio—presso 1' on. Dirczione delle poste di Cosenza, si e ottenuta una cassetta postale, che affissa lungo il Corso Carlo Pancaso, ci da la bella commodita di imbucare le nostre corrispondenze per essere rilevate tre volte al giorno non solo, quanto ci evita persino la dolorosa e lunga via crucis che dovevamo percorrere qualvolta si era costretti d' imbuccare una lettera, essendo il nostro uffizio situato ali' estremita del paese.

"Tributiamo percio sincera lode al nostro caro uffiziale postale Sig. Rocca, e ci auguriamo che egli continui ancora al miglioramento deli' uffizio istesso, e merce 1' opera sua costante ed indefessa siamo sicuri che 1' uffizio postale di Cetraro assurgera fra non molto ad un' importanza maggiore di quella che attualmente."

The erection of a letter-box in the Street of a small place of which 80 per cent of the readers have never so much as heard. ... I begin to understand why the cultured Tarentines do not read these journals.

By far the best part of all such papers is the richly-tinted personal column, wherein lovers communicate with each other, or endeavour to do so. I read it conscientiously from beginning to end, admiring, in my physical capacity, the throbbing passion that prompts such public outbursts of confidence and, from a literary point of view, their lapidary style, model of condensation, impossible to render in English and conditioned by the hard fact that every word costs two sous. Under this painful material stress, indeed, the messages are sometimes crushed into a conciseness which the females concerned must have some difficulty in unperplexing: what on earth does the parsimonious Flower mean by his Delphic fourpenny worth, thus punctuated—

"(You have) not received. How. Safety."

One cannot help smiling at this circuitous and unromantic method of touching the hearts of ladies who take one's fancy; at the same time, it testifies to a resourceful vitality, striving to break through the barriers of Hispano-Arabic convention which surround the fair sex in this country. They are nothing if not poetic, these love-sick swains. Arrow murmurs: "My soul lies on your pillow, caressing you softly"; Strawberry laments that "as bird outside nest, I am alone and lost. What sadness," and Star finds the "Days eternal, till Thursday." And yet they often choose rather prosaic pseudonyms. Here is Sahara who "suffers from your silence," while Asthma is "anticipating one endless kiss," and Old England observing, more ir sorrow than in anger, that he "waited vainly one whole hour."

But the sagacious Cooked Lobster desires, before commiting himself further, "a personal interview." He has perhaps been cooked once before.

Letters and numbers are best, after all. So thinks F. N. 13, who is utterly disgusted with his flame—

"Your silence speaks. Useless saying anything. Ca ira." And likewise 7776—B, a designing rogue and plainly a spendthrift, who wastes ninepence in making it clear that he "wishes to marry rich young lady, forgiving youthful errors." If I were the girl, I would prefer to take my chances with "Cooked Lobster."

"Will much-admired young-lady cherries-in-black-hat indicate method possible correspondence 10211, Post-Office?"

How many of these arrows, I wonder, reach their mark?

Ah, here are politics and News of the World, at last. A promising article on the "Direttissimo Roma-Napoli"—the railway line that is to connect the two towns by way of the Pontine Marshes. . . . Dear me! This reads very familiarly. . . . Why, to be sure, it is the identical dissertation, with a few changes by the office-boy, that has cropped up periodically in these pages for the last half-century, or whenever the railway was first projected. The line, as usual, is being projected more strenuously than before, and certain members of the government have goneso far as to declare. . .. H'm! Let me try something else: "The Feminist Movement in England" by Our London Correspondent (who lives in a little side street off the Toledo); that sounds stimulating. . . . The advanced English Feminists—so it runs—are taking the lead in encouraging their torpid sisters on the Continent. . . . Hardly a day passes, that some new manifestation of the Feminist Movement ... in fact, it may be avowed that the Feminist Movement in England. . . .

The air is cooler, as I awake, and looking out of the window I perceive from the mellow light-effects that day is declining.

Towards this sunset hour the unbroken dome of the sky often undergoes a brief transformation. High-piled masses of cloud may then be seen accumulating over the Sila heights and gathering auxiliaries from every quarter; lightning is soon playing about the livid and murky vapours—you can hear the thunders muttering, up yonder, to some drenching downpour. But on the plain the sun continues to shine in vacuously benevolent fashion; nothing is felt of the tempest save unquiet breaths of wind that raise dust-eddies from the country roads and lash the sea into a mock frenzy of crisp little waves. It is the merest interlude. Soon the blue-black drifts have fled away from the mountains that stand out, clear and refreshed, in the twilight. The wind has died down, the storm is over and Cotrone thirsts, as ever, for rain that never comes. Yet they have a Madonna-picture here—a celebrated black Madonna, painted by Saint Luke—who "always procures rain, when prayed to."

Once indeed the tail of a shower must have passed overhead, for there fell a few sad drops. I hurried abroad, together with some other citizens, to observe the phenomenon. There was no doubt about the matter; it was genuine rain; the drops lay, at respectable intervals, on the white dust of the station turnpike. A boy, who happened to be passing in a cart, remarked that if the shower could have been collected into a saucer or some other small receptacle, it might have sufficed to quench the thirst of a puppy-dog.

I usually take a final dip in the sea, at this time of the evening. After that, it is advisable to absorb an ice or two—they are excellent, at Cotrone—and a glass of Strega liqueur, to ward off the effects of over-work. Next, a brief promenade through the clean, well-lighted streets and now populous streets, or along the boulevard Margherita to view the rank and fashion taking the air by the murmuring waves, under the cliff-like battlements of Charles the Fifth's castle; and so to dinner.

This meal marks the termination of my daily tasks; nothing serious is allowed to engage my attention, once that repast is ended; I call for a chair and sit down at one of the small marble-topped tables in the open street and watch the crowd as it floats around me, smoking a Neapolitan cigar and imbibing, alternately, ices and black coffee until, towards midnight, a final bottle of vino di Ciro is uncorked—fit seal for the labours of the day.

One might say much in praise of Calabrian wine. The land is full of pleasant surprises for the cenophilist, and one of these days I hope to embody my experiences in the publication of a wine-chart of the province with descriptive text running alongside—the purchasers of which, if few, will certainly be of the right kind. The good Dr. Barth—all praise to him!—has already done something of the kind for certain parts of Italy, but does not so much as mention Calabria. And yet here nearly every village has its own type of wine and every self-respecting family its own peculiar method of preparation, little known though they be outside the place of production, on account of the octroi laws which strangle internal trade and remove all stimulus to manufacture a good article for export. This wine of Ciro, for instance, is purest nectar, and so is that which grows still nearer at hand in the classical vale of the Neto and was praised, long ago, by old Pliny; and so are at least two dozen more. For even as Gregorovius says that the smallest Italian community possesses its duly informed antiquarian, if you can but put your hand upon him, so, I may be allowed to add, every little place hereabouts can boast of at least one individual who will give you good wine, provided—provided you go properly to work to find him.

Now although, when young, the Calabrian Bacchus has a wild-eyed beaute du diable which appeals to one's expansive moods, he already begins to totter, at seven years of age, in sour, decrepit eld. To pounce upon him at the psychological moment, to discover in whose cool and cobwebby cellar he is dreaming out his golden summer of manhood—that is what a foreigner can never, never hope to achieve, without competent local aid.

To this end, I generally apply to the priests; not because they are the greatest drunkards (far from it; they are mildly epicurean, or even abstemious) but by reason of their unrivalled knowledge of personalities. They know exactly who has been able to keep his liquor of such and such a year, and who has been obliged to sell or partially adulterate it; they know, from the confessional of the wives, the why and wherefore of all such private family affairs and share, with the chemist, the gift of seeing furthest into the tangled web of home life. They are "gialosi," however, of these acquirements, and must be approached in the right spirit—a spirit of humility. But if you tactfully lead up to the subject by telling of the manifold hardships of travel in foreign lands, the discomfort of life in hostelries, the food that leaves so much to be desired and, above all, the coarse wine that is already beginning, you greatly fear, to injure your sensitive spleen (an important organ, in Calabria), inducing a hypochondriacal tendency to see all the beauties of this fair land in an odious and sombre light—turning your day into night, as it were—it must be an odd priest, indeed, who is not compassionately moved to impart the desired information regarding the whereabouts of the best vino di famiglia at that moment obtainable. After all, it costs him nothing to do a double favour—one to yourself and another to the proprietor of the wine, doubtless an old friend of his, who will be able to sell his stuff to a foreigner 20 per cent dearer than to a native.

And failing the priests, I go to an elderly individual of that tribe of red-nosed connaisseurs, the coachmen, ever thirsty and mercenary souls, who for a small consideration may be able to disclose not only this secret, but others far more mysterious.

As to your host at the inn—he raises not the least objection to your importing alien liquor into his house. His own wine, he tells you, is last year's vintage and somewhat harsh (slightly watered, he might add)—and why not? The ordinary customers are gentlemen of commerce who don't care a fig what they eat and drink, so long as there is enough of it. No horrible suggestions are proffered concerning corkage; on the contrary, he tests your wine, smacks his lips, and thanks you for communicating a valuable discovery. He thinks he will buy a bottle or two for the use of himself and a few particular friends. . . .

Midnight has come and gone. The street is emptying; the footsteps of passengers begin to ring hollow. I arise, for my customary stroll in the direction of the cemetery, to attune myself to repose by shaking off those restlessly trivial images of humanity which might otherwise haunt my slumbers.

Town visions are soon left behind; it is very quiet here under the hot, starlit heavens; nothing speaks of man save the lighthouse flashing in ghostly activity—no, it is a fixed light—on the distant Cape of the Column. And nothing breaks the stillness save the rhythmic breathing of the waves, and a solitary cricket that has yet to finish his daily task of instrumental music, far away, in some warm crevice of the hills.

A suave odour rises up from the narrow patch of olives, and figs loaded with fruit, and ripening vines, that skirts the path by the beach. The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

And so I plough my way through the sand, in the darkness, encompassed by tepid exhalations of earth and sea. Another spirit has fallen upon me—a spirit of biblical calm. Here, then, stood the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation! It is indeed hard to realize that a town thronged with citizens covered all this area. Yet so it is. Every footstep is a memory. Along this very track walked the sumptuous ladies of Croton on their way to deposit their vain jewels before the goddess Hera, at the bidding of Pythagoras. On this spot, maybe, stood that public hall which was specially built for the delivery of his lectures.

No doubt the townsfolk had been sunk in apathetic luxury; the time was ripe for a Messiah.

And lo! he appeared.



XXXVIII

THE SAGE OF CROTON

The popularity of this sage at Croton offers no problem: the inhabitants had become sufficiently civilized to appreciate the charm of being regenerated. We all do. Renunciation has always exercised an irresistible attraction for good society; it makes us feel so comfortable, to be told we are going to hell—and Pythagoras was very eloquent on the subject of Tartarus as a punishment. The Crotoniates discovered in repentance of sins a new and subtle form of pleasure; exactly as did the Florentines, when Savonarola appeared on the scene.

Next: his doctrines found a ready soil in Magna Graecia which was already impregnated with certain vague notions akin to those he introduced. And then—he permitted and even encouraged the emotional sex to participate in the mysteries; the same tactics that later on materially helped the triumph of Christianity over the more exclusive and rational cult of Mithra. Lastly, he came with a "message," like the Apostle of the Gentiles; and in those times a preaching reformer was a novelty. That added a zest. We know them a little better, nowadays.

He enjoyed the specious and short-lived success that has attended, elsewhere, such efforts to cultivate the ego at the expense of its environment. "A type of aspiring humanity," says Gissing, echoing the sentiments of many of us, "a sweet and noble figure, moving as a dim radiance through legendary Hellas." I fancy that the mist of centuries of undiscriminating admiration has magnified this figure out of all proportion and contrived, furthermore, to fix an iridescent nimbus of sanctity about its head. Such things have been known to happen, in foggy weather.

Was Greece so very legendary, in those times? Why, on the contrary, it was full of real personages, of true sages to whom it seemed as if no secrets of heaven or earth were past fathoming; far from being legendary, the countryhad never attained a higher plane of intellectual curiosity than when Pythagoras made his appearance. And it cannot be gainsaid that he and his disciples gave the impetus away from these wise and beneficial researches into the arid regions of metaphysics. It is so much more gentlemanly (and so much easier) to talk bland balderdash about soul-migrations than to calculate an eclipse of the moon or bother about the circulation of the blood.

That a man of his speculative vigour, knowing so many extra-Hellenic races, should have hit upon one or two good things adventitiously is only to be expected. But they were mere by-products. One might as well praise John Knox for creating the commons of Scotland with a view to the future prosperity of that country—a consummation which his black fanaticism assuredly never foresaw.

The chief practical doctrine of Pythagoras, that mankind are to be governed on the principle of a community of eastern monks, makes for the disintegration of rational civic life.

And his chief theoretical doctrines, of metempsychosis and the reduction of everything to a system of numbers [Footnote: Vincenzo Dorsa, an Albanian, has written two pamphlets on the survival of Greco-Roman traditions in Calabria. They are difficult to procure, but whoever is lucky enough to find them will be much helped in his understanding of the common people. In one place, he speaks of the charm-formula of Otto-Nave! (Eight-Nine) It is considered meet and proper, in the presence of a suckling infant, to spit thrice and then call out, three times, Otto-Nove! This brings luck; and the practice, he thinks, is an echo of the number-system of Pythagoras.]—these are sheer lunacy.

Was it not something of a relapse, after the rigorous mental discipline of old, to have a man gravely assuring his fellows that he is the son of Hermes and the divinely appointed messenger of Apollo; treating diseases, like an Eskimo Angekok, by incantation; recording veracious incidents of his experiences during a previous life in Hell, which he seems to have explored almost as thoroughly as Swedenborg; dabbling in magic, and consulting dreams, birds and the smoke of incense as oracles? And in the exotic conglomerate of his teachings are to be found the prima stamina of much that is worse: the theory of the pious fraud which has infected Latin countries to this day; the Jesuitical maxim of the end justifying the means; the insanity of preferring deductions to facts which has degraded philosophy up to the days of Kant; mysticism, demon-worship and much else of pernicious mettle—they are all there, embryonically embedded in Pythagoras.

We are told much of his charity; indeed, an English author has written a learned work to prove that Pythagoreanism has close affinities with Christianity. Charity has now been tried on an ample scale, and has proved a dismal failure. To give, they say, is more blessed than to receive. It is certainly far easier, for the most part, to give than to refrain from giving. We are at last shaking off the form, of self-indulgence called charity; we realize that if mankind is to profit, sterner conceptions must prevail. The apotheosis of the god-favoured loafer is drawing to a close.

For the rest, there was the inevitable admixture of quackery about our reforming sage; his warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the bean-humbug . . .

He had the true maraboutic note.

And for me, this regenerator crowned with a saintly aureole remains a glorified marabout—an intellectual dissolvent; the importer of that oriental introspectiveness which culminated in the idly-splendid yearnings of Plato, paved the way for the quaint Alexandrian tutti-frutti known as Christianity, and tainted the well-springs of honest research for two thousand years. By their works ye shall known them. It was the Pythagoreans who, not content with a just victory over the Sybarites, annihilated their city amid anathemas worthy of those old Chaldeans (past masters in the art of pious cursings); a crime against their common traditions and common interests; a piece of savagery which wrecked Hellenic civilization in Italy. It is ever thus, when the soul is appointed arbiter over reason. It is ever thus, when gentle, god-fearing dreamers meddle with worldly affairs. Beware of the wrath of the lamb!

So rapidly did the virus act, that soon we find Plato declaring that all the useful arts are degrading; that "so long as a man tries to study any sensible object, he can never be said to be learning anything"; in other words, that the kind of person to whom one looks for common sense should be excluded from the management of his most refined republic. It needed courage of a rather droll kind to make such propositions in Greece, under the shadow of the Parthenon. And hand in hand with this feudalism in philosophy there began that unhealthy preoccupation with the morals of our fellow-creatures, that miasma of puritanism, which has infected life and literature up to this moment.

The Renaissance brought many fine things to England. But the wicked fairy was there with her gift: Pythagoras and Plato. We were not like the Italians who, after the first rapture of discovery was over, soon outgrew these distracted dialectics; we stuck fast in them. Hence our Platonic touch: our demi-vierge attitude in matters of the mind, our academic horror of clean thinking. How Plato hated a fact! He could find no place for it in his twilight world of abstractions. Was it not he who wished to burn the works of Democritus of Abdera, most exact and reasonable of old sages?

They are all alike, these humanitarian lovers of first causes. Always ready to burn something, or somebody; always ready with their cheerful Hell-fire and gnashing of teeth.

Know thyself: to what depths of vain, egocentric brooding has that dictum led! But we are discarding, now, such a mischievously narrow view of the Cosmos, though our upbringing is still too rhetorical and mediaeval to appraise its authors at their true worth. Youth is prone to judge with the heart rather than the head; youth thrives on vaporous ideas, and there was a time when I would have yielded to none in my enthusiasm for these mellifluous babblers; one had a blind, sentimental regard for their great names. It seems to me, now, that we take them somewhat too seriously; that a healthy adult has nothing to learn from their teachings, save by way of warning example. Plato is food for adolescents. And a comfort, possibly, in old age, when the judicial faculties of the mind are breaking up and primitive man, the visionary, reasserts his ancient rights. For questioning moods grow burdensome with years; after a strain of virile doubt we are glad to acquiesce once more—to relapse into Platonic animism, the logic of valetudinarians. The dog to his vomit.

And after Plato—the deluge. Neo-platonism. . . .

Yet it was quite good sport, while it lasted. To "make men better" by choice dissertations about Utopias, to sit in marble halls and have a fair and fondly ardent jeunesse doree reclining about your knees while you discourse, in rounded periods, concerning the salvation of their souls by means of transcendental Love—it would suit me well enough, at this present moment; far better than croaking, forlorn as the night-raven, among the ruins of their radiant lives.

Meanwhile, and despite our Universities, new conceptions are prevailing, Aristotle is winning the day. A fresh kind of thinker has arisen, whose chief idea of "virtue" is to investigate patiently the facts of life; men of the type of Lister, any one of whom have done more to regenerate mankind, and to increase the sum of human happiness, than a wilderness of the amiably-hazy old doctrinaires who professed the same object. I call to mind those physicians engaged in their malaria-campaign, and wonder what Plato would have thought of them. Would he have recognized the significance of their researches which, while allaying pain and misery, are furthering the prosperity of the country, causing waters to flow in dry places and villages to spring up in deserts—strengthening its political resources, improving its very appearance? Not likely. Plato's opinion of doctors was on a par with the rest of his mentality. Yet these are the men who are taking up the thread where it was dropped, perforce, by those veritable Greek sages, whelmed under turbid floods of Pythagorean irrationalism. And are such things purely utilitarian? Are they so grossly mundane? Is there really no "philosophy" in the choice of such a healing career, no romance in its studious self-denial, no beauty in its results? If so, we must revise that classic adage which connects vigour with beauty—not to speak of several others.



XXXIX

MIDDAY AT PETELIA

Day after day, I look across the six miles of sea to the Lacinian promontory and its column. How reach it? The boatmen are eager for the voyage: it all depends, they say, upon the wind.

Day after day—a dead calm.

"Two hours—three hours—four hours—according!" And they point to the sky. A little breeze, they add, sometimes makes itself felt in the early mornings; one might fix up a sail.

"And for returning at midday?"

"Three hours—four hours—five hours—according!"

The prospect of rocking about for half a day in a small boat under a blazing sky is not my ideal of enjoyment, the novelty of such an experience having worn off a good many years ago. I decide to wait; to make an attack, meanwhile, upon old Petelia—the "Stromboli" of my lady-friend at the Catanzaro Museum....

It is an easy day's excursion from Cotrone to Strongoli, which is supposed to lie on the site of that ancient, much-besieged town. It sits upon a hill-top, and the diligence which awaits the traveller at the little railway-station takes about two hours to reach the place, climbing up the olive-covered slopes in ample loops and windings.

Of Strangoli my memories, even at this short distance of time, are confused and blurred. The drive up under the glowing beams of morning, the great heat of the last few days, and two or three nights' sleeplessness at Cotrone had considerably blunted my appetite for new things. I remember seeing some Roman marbles in the church, and being thence conducted into a castle.

Afterwards I reposed awhile in the upper regions, under an olive, and looked down towards the valley of the Neto, which flows not far from here into the Ionian. I thought upon Theocritus, trying to picture this vale of Neaithos as it appeared to him and his shepherds. The woodlands are gone, and the rains of winter, streaming down the earthen slopes, have remodelled the whole face of the country.

Yet, be nature what it may, men will always turn to one who sings so melodiously of eternal verities—of those human tasks and needs which no lapse of years can change. How modern he reads to us, who have been brought into contact with the true spirit by men like Johnson-Cory and Lefroy! And how unbelievably remote is that Bartolozzi-Hellenism which went before! What, for example—what of the renowned pseudo-Theocritus, Salamon Gessner, who sang of this same vale of Neto in his "Daphnis"? Alas, the good Salamon has gone the way of all derivative bores; he is dead—deader than King Psammeticus; he is now moralizing in some decorous Paradise amid flocks of Dresden-China sheep and sugar-watery youths and maidens. Who can read his much-translated masterpiece without unpleasant twinges? Dead as a doornail!

So far as I can recollect, there is an infinity of kissing in "Daphnis." It was an age of sentimentality, and the Greek pastoral ideal, transfused into a Swiss environment of 1810, could not but end in slobber and Gefuehlsduselei. True it is that shepherds have ample opportunities of sporting with Amaryllis in the shade; opportunities which, to my certain knowledge, they do not neglect. Theocritus knew it well enough. But, in a general way, he is niggardly with the precious commodity of kisses; he seems to have thought that in literature, if not in real life, one can have too much of a good thing. Also, being a southerner, he could not have trusted his young folks to remain eternally at the kissing-stage, after the pattern of our fish-like English lovers. Such behaviour would have struck him as improbable; possibly immoral. . . .

From where I sat one may trace a road that winds upwards into the Sila, past Pallagorio. Along its sides are certain mounded heaps and the smoke of refining works. These are mines of that dusky sulphur which I had observed being drawn in carts through the streets of Cotrone. There are some eight or ten of them, they tell me, discovered about thirty years ago—this is all wrong: they are mentioned in 1571—and employing several hundred workmen. It had been my intention to visit these excavations. But now, in the heat of day, I wavered; the distance, even to the nearest of them, seemed inordinately great; and just as I had decided to look for a carnage with a view of being driven there (that curse of conscientiousness!) an amiable citizen snatched me up as his guest for luncheon. He led me, weakly resisting, to a vaulted chamber where, amid a repast of rural delicacies and the converse of his spouse, all such fond projects were straightway forgotten. Instead of sulphur-statistics, I learnt a little piece of local history.

"You were speaking about the emptiness of our streets of Strangoli," my host said. "And yet, up to a short time ago, there was no emigration from this place. Then a change came about: I'll tell you how it was. There was a guardia di finanze here—a miserable octroi official. To keep up the name of his family, he married an heiress; not for the sake of having progeny, but—well! He began buying up all the land round about—slowly, systematically, cautiously—till, by dint of threats and intrigues, he absorbed nearly all the surrounding country. Inch by inch, he ate it up; with his wife's money. That was his idea of perpetuating his memory. All the small proprietors were driven from their domains and fled to America to escape starvation; immense tracts of well-cultivated land are now almost desert. Look at the country! But some day he will get his reward; under the ribs, you know."

By this purposeful re-creation of those feudal conditions of olden, days, this man has become the best-hated person in the district.

Soon it was time to leave the friendly shelter and inspect in the glaring sunshine the remaining antiquities of Petelia. Never have I felt less inclined for such antiquarian exploits. How much better the hours would have passed in some cool tavern! I went forth, none the less; and was delighted to discover that there are practically no antiquities left—nothing save a few walls standing near a now ruined convent, which is largely built of Roman stone-blocks and bricks. Up to a few years ago, the municipality carried on excavations here and unearthed a few relics which were promptly dispersed. Perhaps some of these are what one sees in the Catanzaro Museum. The paternal government, hearing of this enterprise, claimed the site and sat down upon it; the exposed remains were once more covered up with soil.

A goat-boy, a sad little fellow, sprang out of the earth as I dutifully wandered about here. He volunteered to show me not only Strongoli, but all Calabria; in fact, his heart's desire was soon manifest: to escape from home and find his way to America under my passport and protection. Here was his chance—a foreigner (American) returning sooner or later to his own country! He pressed the matter with naif forcefulness. Vainly I told him that there were other lands on earth; that I was not going to America. He shook his head and sagely remarked:

"I have understood. You think my journey would cost too much. But you, also, must understand. Once I get work there, I will repay you every farthing."

As a consolation, I offered him some cigarettes. He accepted one; pensive, unresigned.

The goat-herds had no such cravings—in the days of Theocritus.



XL

THE COLUMN

"Two hours—three hours—four hours: according!"

The boatmen are still eager for the voyage. It all depends, as before, upon the wind.

And day after day the Ionian lies before us—immaculate, immutable.

I determined to approach the column by land. A mule was discovered, and starting from the "Concordia" rather late in the morning, reached the temple-ruin in two hours to the minute. I might have been tempted to linger by the way but for the intense sunshine and for the fact that the muleteer was an exceptionally dull dog—a dusky youth of the taciturn and wooden-faced Spanish variety, whose anti-Hellenic profile irked me, in that landscape. The driving road ends at the cemetery. Thence onward a pathway skirts the sea at the foot of the clay-hills; passes the sunken wells; climbs up and down steepish gradients and so attains the plateau at whose extremity stands the lighthouse, the column, and a few white bungalows—summer-residences of Cotrone citizens.

A day of shimmering heat. . . .

The ground is parched. Altogether, it is a poor and thinly peopled stretch of land between Cotrone and Capo Rizzuto. No wonder the wolves are famished. Nine days ago one of them actually ventured upon the road near the cemetery, in daylight.

Yet there is some plant-life, and I was pleased to see, emerging from the bleak sand-dunes, the tufts of the well-known and conspicuous sea lily in full flower. Wishful to obtain a few blossoms, I asked the boy to descend from his mule, but he objected.

"Non si toccano questi fiori," he said. These flowers are not to be touched.

Their odour displeased him. Like the Arab, the uncultivated Italian is insensitive to certain smells that revolt us; while he cannot endure, on the other hand, the scent of some flowers. I have seen a man professing to feel faint at the odour of crushed geranium leaves. They are fiori di morti, he says: planted (sometimes) in graveyards.

The last remarkable antiquity found at this site, to my knowledge, is a stone vase, fished up some years ago out of the sea, into which it may have fallen while being carried off by pious marauders for the purpose of figuring as font in some church (unless, indeed, the land has sunk at this point, as there is some evidence to show). I saw it, shortly after its return to dry land, in a shed near the harbour of Cotrone; the Taranto museum has now claimed it. It is a basin of purple-veined pavonazzetto marble. Originally a monolith, it now consists of two fragments; the third and smallest is still missing. This noble relic stands about 85 centimetres in height and measures some 215 centimetres in circumference; it was never completed, as can be seen by the rim, which is still partially in the rough. A similar vessel is figured, I believe, in Tischbein.

The small villa-settlement on this promontory is deserted owing to lack of water, every drop of which has to be brought hither by sea from Cotrone. One wonders why they have not thought of building a cistern to catch the winter rains, if there are any; for a respectable stone crops up at this end of the peninsula.

One often wonders at things. . . .

The column has been underpinned and strengthened by a foundation of cement; rains of centuries had begun to threaten its base, and there was some risk of a catastrophe. Near at hand are a few ancient walls of reticulated masonry in strangely leaning attitudes, peopled by black goats; on the ground I picked up some chips of amphorse and vases, as well as a fragment of the limb of a marble statue. The site of this pillar, fronting the waves, is impressively forlorn. And it was rather thoughtful, after all, of the despoiling Bishop Lucifero to leave two of the forty-eight columns standing upright on the spot, as a sample of the local Doric style. One has fallen to earth since his day. Nobody would have complained at the time, if he had stolen all of them, instead of only forty-six. I took a picture of the survivor; then wandered a little apart, in the direction of the shore, and soon found myself in a solitude of burning stones, a miniature Sahara.

The temple has vanished, together with the sacred grove that once embowered it; the island of Calypso, where Swinburne took his ease (if such it was), has sunk into the purple realms of Glaucus; the corals and sea-beasts that writhed among its crevices are en-gulphed under mounds of submarine sand. There was life, once, at this promontory. Argosies touched here, leaving priceless gifts; fountains flowed, and cornfields waved in the genial sunshine. Doubtless there will be life again; earth and sea are only waiting for the enchanter's wand.

All now lies bare, swooning in summer stagnation.

Calabria is not a land to traverse alone. It is too wistful and stricken; too deficient in those externals that conduce to comfort. Its charms do not appeal to the eye of romance, and the man who would perambulate Magna Graecia as he does the Alps would soon regret his choice. One needs something of that "human element" which delighted the genteel photographer of Morano—comrades, in short; if only those sages, like old Noia Molisi, who have fallen under the spell of its ancient glories. The joys of Calabria are not to be bought, like those of Switzerland, for gold.

Sir Giovati Battista di Noia Molisi, the last of his family and name, having no sons and being come to old age without further hope of offspring, has desired in the place of children to leave of himself an eternal memory to mankind— to wit, this Chronicle of the most Ancient, Magnificent, and Faithful City of Cotrone. A worthier effort at self-perpetuation than that of Strangoli. . . .

A sturgeon, he notes, was caught in 1593 by the Spanish Castellan of the town. This nobleman, puzzling whom he could best honour with so rare a dainty, despatched it by means of a man on horseback to the Duke of Nocera. The Duke was no less surprised than pleased; he thought mighty well of the sturgeon and of the respectful consideration which prompted the gift; and then, by another horseman, sent it to Noia Molisi's own uncle, accompanied, we may conjecture, by some ceremonious compliment befitting the occasion.

A man of parts, therefore, our author's uncle, to whom his Lordship of Nocera sends table-delicacies by mounted messenger; and himself a mellow comrade whom I am loath to leave; his pages are distinguished by a pleasing absence of those saintly paraphernalia which hang like a fog athwart the fair sky of the south.

Yet to him and to all of them I must bid good-bye, here and now. At this hour to-morrow I shall be far from Cotrone.

Farewell to Capialbi, inspired bookworm! And to Lenormant.

On a day like this, the scholar sailed at Bivona over a sea so unruffled that the barque seemed to be suspended in air. The water's surface, he tells us, is "unie comme une glace." He sees the vitreous depths invaded by piercing sunbeams that light up its mysterious forests of algae, its rock-headlands and silvery stretches of sand; he peers down into these "prairies pelagiennes" and beholds all their wondrous fauna—the urchins, the crabs, the floating fishes and translucent medusae "semblables a des clochettes d'opale." Then, realizing how this "population pullulante des petits animaux marins" must have impressed the observing ancients, he goes on to touch—ever so lightly!—upon those old local arts of ornamentation whereby sea-beasts and molluscs and aquatic plants were reverently copied by master-hand, not from dead specimens, but "pris sur le vif et observes au milieu des eaux"; he explains how an entire school grew up, which drew its inspiration from the dainty ... apes and movements of these frail creatures. This is au meilleur Lenormant. His was a full-blooded yet discriminating zest of knowledge. One wonders what more was fermenting in that restlessly curious brain, when a miserable accident ended his short life, after 120 days of suffering.

So Italy proved fatal to him, as Greece to his father. But one of his happiest moments must have been spent on the sea at Bivona, on that clear summer day—a day such as this, when every nerve tingles with joy of life.

Meanwhile it is good to rest here, immovable but alert, in the breathless hush of noon. Showers of benevolent heat stream down upon this desolation; not the faintest wisp of vapour floats upon the horizon; not a sail, not a ripple, disquiets the waters. The silence can be felt. Slumber is brooding over the things of earth:

Asleep are the peaks of the hills, and the vales,

The promontories, the clefts,

And all the creatures that move upon the black earth. . . .

Such torrid splendour, drenching a land of austerut simplicity, decomposes the mind into corresponding states of primal contentment and resilience. There arises before our phantasy a new perspective of human affairs; a suggestion of well-being wherein the futile complexities and disharmonies of our age shall have no place. To discard these wrappings, to claim kinship with some elemental and robust archetype, lover of earth and sun——

How fair they are, these moments of golden equipoise!

Yes; it is good to be merged awhile into these harshly-vibrant surroundings, into the meridian glow of all things. This noontide is the "heavy" hour of the Greeks, when temples are untrodden by priest or worshipper. Controra they now call it—the ominous hour. Man and beast are fettered in sleep, while spirits walk abroad, as at midnight. Non timebis a timore noctuno: a sagitta volante in aie: a negotio perambulante in tenebris: ab incursu et demonio meridiano. The midday demon—that southern Haunter of calm blue spaces. . . .

So may some enchantment of kindlier intent have crept over Phaedrus and his friend, at converse in the noontide under the whispering plane-tree. And the genius dwelling about this old headland of the Column is candid and benign.

This corner of Magna Graecia is a severely parsimonious manifestation of nature. Rocks and waters! But these rocks and waters are actualities; the stuff whereof man is made. A landscape so luminous, so resolutely scornful of accessories, hints at brave and simple forms of expression; it brings us to the ground, where we belong; it medicines to the disease of introspection and stimulates a capacity which we are in danger of unlearning amid our morbid hyperborean gloom—the capacity for honest contempt: contempt of that scarecrow of a theory which would have us neglect what is earthly, tangible. What is life well lived but a blithe discarding of primordial husks, of those comfortable intangibilities that lurk about us, waiting for our weak moments?

The sage, that perfect savage, will be the last to withdraw himself from the influence of these radiant realities. He will strive to knit closer the bond, and to devise a more durable and affectionate relationship between himself and them. Let him open his eyes. For a reasonable adjustment lies at his feet. From these brown stones that seam the tranquil Ionian, from this gracious solitude, he can carve out, and bear away into the cheerful din of cities, the rudiments of something clean and veracious and wholly terrestrial—some tonic philosophy that shall foster sunny mischiefs and farewell regret.

THE END