. .
That is why so many of them suffer from chronic troubles of the
digestive organs. The head of a hospital at Naples tells me that stomach
diseases are more prevalent there than in any other part of Europe, and
the stomach, whatever sentimentalists may say to the contrary, being the
true seat of the emotions, it follows that a judicious system of dieting
might work wonders upon their development. Nearly all Mediterranean
races have been misfed from early days; that is why they are so small. I
would undertake to raise the Italian standard of height by several
inches, if I had control of their nutrition for a few centuries. I would
undertake to alter their whole outlook upon life, to convert them from
utilitarians into romantics - were such a change desirable. For if
utilitarianism be the shadow of starvation, romance is nothing but the
vapour of repletion.
And yet men still talk of race-characteristics as of something fixed and
immutable! The Jews, so long as they starved in Palestine, were the most
acrimonious bigots on earth. Now that they live and feed sensibly, they
have learnt to see things in their true perspective - they have become
rationalists. Their less fortunate fellow-Semites, the Arabs, have
continued to starve and to swear by the Koran - empty in body and empty
in mind. No poise or balance is possible to those who live in uneasy
conditions. The wisest of them can only attain to stoicism - a dumb
protest against the environment. There are no stoics among well-fed
people. The Romans made that discovery for themselves, when they
abandoned the cheese-paring habits of the Republic.
In short, it seems to me that virtues and vices which cannot be
expressed in physiological terms are not worth talking about; that when
a morality refuses to derive its sanction from the laws which govern our
body, it loses the right to exist. This being so, what is the most
conspicuous native vice?
Envy, without a doubt.
Out of envy they pine away and die; out of envy they kill one another.
To produce a more placid race, [Footnote: By placid I do not mean
peace-loving and pitiful in the Christian sense. That doctrine of loving
and forgiving one's enemies is based on sheer funk; our pity for others
is dangerously akin to self-pity, most odious of vices. Catholic
teaching - in practice, if not in theory - -glides artfully over the
desirability of these imported freak-virtues, knowing that they cannot
appeal to a masculine stock. By placid I mean steady, self-contained.]
to dilute envious thoughts and the acts to which they lead, is at bottom
a question of nutrition. One would like to know for how much black
brooding and for how many revengeful deeds that morning thimbleful of
black coffee is responsible.
The very faces one sees in the streets would change. Envy is reflected
in all too many of those of the middle classes, while the poorest
citizens are often haggard and distraught from sheer hunger - hunger
which has not had time to be commuted into moral poison; college-taught
men, in responsible positions, being forced to live on salaries which a
London lift-boy would disdain. When that other local feature, that
respect for honourable poverty - the reverse of what we see in England
where, since the days of the arch-snob Pope, a slender income has grown
to be considered a subject of reproach.
And yet another symptom of the south - -
Enough! The clock points to 6.20; it is time for an evening walk - my
final one - to the terrace of S. M. del Castello.
XVII
OLD MORANO
This Morano is a very ancient city; Tufarelli, writing in 1598, proves
that it was then exactly 3349 years old. Oddly enough, therefore, its
foundation almost coincides with that of Rossano. . . .
There may be mules at Morano; indeed, there are. But they are illusive
beasts: phantom-mules. Despite the assistance of the captain of the
carbineers, the local innkeeper, the communal policeman, the secretary
of the municipality, an amiable canon of the church and several
non-official residents, I vainly endeavoured, for three days, to procure
one - flitting about, meanwhile, between this place and Castrovillari.
For Morano, notwithstanding its size (they say it is larger than the
other town) offers no accommodation or food in the septentrional sense
of those terms.
Its situation, as you approach from Castrovillari, is striking. The
white houses stream in a cataract down one side of a steep conical hill
that dominates the landscape - on the summit sits the inevitable castle,
blue sky peering through its battered windows. But the interior is not
at all in keeping with this imposing aspect. Morano, so far as I was
able to explore it, is a labyrinth of sombre, tortuous and fetid alleys,
whexe black pigs wallow amid heaps 'of miscellaneous and malodorous
filth - in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic
liberty which consists in everybody being free to throw their own
private refuse into the public street and leave it there, from
generation to generation. What says Lombroso? "The street-cleaning is
entrusted, in many towns, to the rains of heaven and, in their absence,
to the voracity of the pigs." None the less, while waiting for mules
that never came, I took to patrolling those alleys, at first out of
sheer boredom, but soon impelled by that subtle fascination which
emanates from the ne plus ultra of anything - even of grotesque
dirtiness. On the second day, however, a case of cholera was announced,
which chilled my ardour for further investigations. It was on that
account that I failed to inspect what was afterwards described to me as
the chief marvel of the place - a carved wooden altar-piece in a certain
church.
"It is prodigious and antichissimo," said an obliging citizen to
whom I applied for information.
