I don't care what I eat: what a confession to make! Is it not the same
as saying, I don't care whether I am dirty or clean? When others tell me
this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly
sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He
looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated
form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself.
It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of
our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good
taste in viands has been painfully acquired; it is a sacred trust.
Beware of gross feeders. They are a menace to their fellow-creatures.
Will they not act, on occasion, even as they feed? Assuredly they will.
Everybody acts as he feeds.
Then lingered on the departure platform, comparing its tone with that of
similar places in England. A mournful little crowd is collected here.
Conscripts, untidy-looking fellows, are leaving - perhaps for ever. They
climb into those tightly packed carriages, loaded down with parcels and
endless recommendations. Some of the groups are cheerful over their
farewells, though the English note of deliberate jocularity is absent.
The older people are resigned; in the features of the middle generation,
the parents, you may read a certain grimness and hostility to fate; they
are the potential mourners. The weeping note predominates among the
sisters and children, who give themselves away pretty freely. An
infectious thing, this shedding of tears. One little girl, loth to part
from that big brother, contrived by her wailing to break down the
reserve of the entire family....
It rains persistently in soft, warm showers. Rome is mirthless.
There arises, before my mind's eye, the vision of a sweet old lady
friend who said to me, in years gone by:
"When next you go to Rome, please let me know if it is still raining
there."
It was here that she celebrated her honeymoon - an event which must have
taken place in the 'sixties or thereabouts. She is dead now. So is her
husband, the prince of moralizers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become. Doubtless he expired with some
edifying platitude on his lips and is deblatterating them at this very
moment in Heaven, where the folks may well be seasoned to that kind of
talk.
Let us be charitable, now that he is gone!
To have lived so long with a person of this incurable respectability
would have soured any ordinary woman's temper. Hers it refined; it made
her into something akin to an angel. He was her cross; she bore him
meekly and not, I like to think, without extracting a kind of sly, dry
fun out of the horrible creature. A past master in the art of gentle
domestic nagging, he made everybody miserable as long as he lived, and I
would give something for an official assurance that he is now miserable
himself. He was a worm; a good man in the worse sense of the word. It
was the contrast - the contrast between his gentle clothing and ungentle
heart, which moved my spleen. What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood
were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty;
a brood that has never yet been called by its proper name. Victorians?
Why, not altogether. The mischief has its roots further back. Addison,
for example, is a fair specimen.
Why say unkind things about a dead man? He cannot answer back.
Upon my word, I am rather glad to think he cannot. The last thing I ever
wish to hear again is that voice of his. And what a face: gorgonizing in
its assumption of virtue! Now the whole species is dying out, and none
too soon. Graft abstract principles of conduct upon natures devoid of
sympathy and you produce a monster; a sanctimonious fish; the coldest
beast that ever infested the earth. This man's affinities were with
Robespierre and Torquemada - both of them actuated by the purest
intentions and without a grain of self-interest: pillars of integrity.
What floods of tears would have been spared to mankind, had they only
been a little corrupt! How corrupt a person of principles? He lacks the
vulgar yet divine gift of imagination.
That is what these Victorians lacked. They would never have subscribed
to this palpable truth: that justice is too good for some men, and not
good enough for the rest. They cultivated the Cato or Brutus tone; they
strove to be stern old Romans - Romans of the sour and imperfect
Republic; for the Empire, that golden blossom, was to them a period of
luxury and debauch. Nero - most reprehensible! It was not Nero, however,
but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the
wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a
spoon. I wish I had it here, that book which everybody ought to read,
that book by George Ives on the History of Penal Methods - it would help
me to say a few more polite things. The villainies of the virtuous: who
shall recount them? I can picture this vastly offensive old man acting
as judge on that occasion and then, his "duties towards society"
accomplished, being driven home in his brougham to thank Providence for
one of those succulent luncheons, the enjoyment of which he invariably
managed to ruin for every one except himself.
God rest his soul, the unspeakable phenomenon! He ought to have
throttled himself at his mother's breast. Only a woman imbued with
ultra-terrestrial notions of humour could have tolerated such an
infliction. Anybody else would have poisoned him in the name of
Christian charity and common sense, and earned the gratitude of
generations yet unborn.
Well, well! R.I.P....
On returning to Rome after a considerable absence - a year or so - a few
things have to be done for the sake of auld lang syne ere one may again
feel at home.
