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.
