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.
