Now The Place Has Been Set By The
Ears, And A Tone Of Exacerbation Prevails.
The natives spend their days
in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a
quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the
carbineers.
Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are
nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace.
Seldom do they meddle with local concerns - far from it! They live in
sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony
of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other
things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against
his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set
in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have
settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice
as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on
reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his
opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a
couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics
on a judge of the high court - which calls for a different technique.
Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a
queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third
man you meet - an official, of course, of some kind - with a revolver
strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of
savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten
thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal
guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men
perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a
question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of
common sense - of realising that local institutions often work with less
friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation
of which the carbineers are an example.
Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses
five gateways - five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away
from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing
themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with
unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into
inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral
strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of
many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and
racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the
incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial
buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition,
it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of
Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four gateways!
For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green
space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning,
to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human
wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you
will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal,
those blocks - what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have
now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From
this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it
climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad
modern "Via Romana" - a goat-track, nowadays....
These Alatri remains are wonderful - more so than many of the sites which
old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his
curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he
stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations
about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the
same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him
"hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again
says nothing whatever....
I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly
well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we
do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one
mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for
information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which
is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of
what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a
philosophy of life.
And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical
sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He
copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no
small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these
half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient
situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself
thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards
antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes.
Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected
knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as
inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these
documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly
sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but
for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of
one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men
who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the
fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be
completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.
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