And This Evil Legacy From
Greco-Roman Days Has Been Augmented By The More Recent Teachings Of
Jesuitry And The
Catholic theory of "peccato veniale." Rhetoric alone
counts; rhetoric alone is "art." The rest is mere facts; and your
"penalista"
Has a constitutional horror of a bald fact, because there
it is, and there is nothing to be done with it. It is too crude a thing
for cultured men to handle. If a local barrister were forced to state in
court a plain fact, without varnish, he would die of cerebral
congestion; the judge, of boredom.
In early times, these provinces had a rough-and-ready cowboy justice
which answered simple needs, and when, in Bourbon days, things became
more centralized, there was still a never-failing expedient: each judge
having a fixed and publicly acknowledged tariff, the village elders, in
deserving cases, subscribed the requisite sum and released their
prisoner. But Italy is now paying the penalty of ambition. With one foot
in the ferocity of her past, and the other on a quicksand of
dream-nurtured idealism, she contrives to combine the disadvantages of
both. She, who was the light o' love of all Europe for long ages, and in
her poverty denied nothing to her clientele, has now laid aside a little
money, repenting of her frivolous and mercenary deeds (they sometimes
do), and becoming puritanically zealous of good works in her old
age - all this, however, as might have been expected from her antecedent
career, without much discrimination.
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