For They Are Poor,
And Their Homes Of Miserable Aspect.
Like all too many villages in South
Italy, this one is depopulated of its male inhabitants, and otherwise
dirty and neglected.
The impression one gains on first seeing one of
these places is more than that of Oriental decay; they are not merely
ragged at the edges. It is a deliberate and sinister chaos, a note of
downright anarchy - a contempt for those simple forms of refinement which
even the poorest can afford. Such persons, one thinks, cannot have much
sense of home and its hallowed associations; they seem to be
everlastingly ready to break with the existing state of things. How
different from England, where the humblest cottages, the roadways, the
very stones testify to immemorial love of order, to neighbourly feelings
and usages sanctioned by time!
They lack the sense of home as a fixed and old-established topographical
point; as do the Arabs and Russians, neither of whom have a word
expressing our "home" or "Heimat." Here, the nearest equivalent is la
famiglia. We think of a particular house or village where we were born
and where we spent our impressionable days of childhood; these others
regard home not as a geographical but as a social centre, liable to
shift from place to place; they are at home everywhere, so long as their
clan is about them. That acquisitive sense which affectionately adorns
our meanest dwelling, slowly saturating it with memories, has been
crushed out of them - if it ever existed - by hard blows of fortune; it is
safer, they think, to transform the labour of their hands into gold,
which can be moved from place to place or hidden from the tyrant's eye.
They have none of our sentimentality in regard to inanimate objects.
Eliza Cook's feelings towards her "old arm-chair" would strike them as
savouring of childishness.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 268 of 488
Words from 71766 to 72078
of 131203
