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.
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