Part 39

It turned my thoughts, as I went along, to Brahms and led me to understand why no man, who cares only for his fellow-creatures, will ever relish that music. It is an alien tongue, full of deeps and rippling shallows uncomprehended of those who know nothing of lonely places; full of thrills and silences such as are not encountered among the habitations of men. It echoes the multitudinous voice of nature, and distils the smiles and tears of things non-human. This man listened, all alone; he overheard things to which other ears are deaf--things terrible and sweet; the sigh of some wet Naiad by a reedy lake, the pleadings and furies of the genii--of those that whisper in woodlands and caverns by the sea, and ride wailing on thunder-laden clouds, and rock with ripe laughter in sunny wildernesses. Brahms is the test. Whoso dreads solitude will likewise dread his elemental humour.

It kept me company, this melodious and endearing fairy, till where a path, diverging to the right, led up to the ruins already visible. There the ethereal comrade took flight, scared, maybe, because my senses took on a grossly mundane complexion--it is a way they have, thank God--became absorbed, that is, in the contemplation of certain blackberries wherewith the hedge was loaded. I thought: the tons of blackberries that fall to earth in Italy, unheeded! And not even a Scotsman knows what blackberries are, until he has tasted these. I am no gourmet of such wild things; I rather agree with Goethe when he says: "How berries taste, you must ask children." But I can sympathise with the predilections of others, having certain predilections of my own.

Once, at a miserable place in North Ireland, region of bad whisky and porter, they brought me at dinner some wine of which they knew nothing--they had got it from a shipwreck or some local sale. I am rather fond of hock. And this particular bottle bore on its label the magic imprint of a falcon sitting on a hilltop. Connoisseurs will know that falcon. They will understand how it came about that I remained in the inn till the last bottle of nectar was cracked. What a shame to leave a drop for anybody else! Once again, on a bicycle trip from Paris to the Mediterranean, I came upon a broad, smiling meadow somewhere in the Auvergne, thickly besprinkled with mushrooms. There was a village hard by. In that village I remained till the meadow was close cropped. Half a ton of mushrooms--gone. Some people are rather fond of mushrooms. And that is the right spirit: to leave nothing but a tabula rasa for those that come after. It hurt me to think that anybody else should have a single one of those particular mushrooms. Let them find new ones, in another field; not in mine.

Now what would your amateur of blackberries do in Italy? From the fate which nearly overtook me he might save himself by specialising; by dividing the many local varieties into two main classes and devoting his whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found on Elba--small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their portentous clusters--swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught with chilly mountain dews.

No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an unfair division of labour--so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else--seeing that every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four months--he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense, devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear--browsing aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock and jungle--grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more--the last, the very last, of their race--dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would be a merrier place....

Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare--brown earth, brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones. Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble would not occur there. I seek for coloured ones and find not the smallest fragment; nothing but white. Ergo, the place was relatively insignificant; else the reds and yellows would also be discoverable. I observe incidentally--quite incidentally!--that the architecture corroborates my theory; so do the guide-books, no doubt, if there are any. Now I know, furthermore, the origin of that small slab of verde antico which had puzzled me, mixed up, as it was, among the mosaics of quite modern marbles in that church whither I had been conducted by a local antiquarian to admire a certain fresco recently laid bare, and some rather crude daubs by Romanelli.

Out again, into the path that overlooks the steep ravine. Here I find, resting in the shadow of the wall, an aged shepherd and his flock and a shaggy, murderous-looking dog of the Campagna breed that shows his teeth and growls incessantly, glaring at me as if I were a wolf. "Barone" is the brute's name. I had intended to clamber down and see whether the rock-surface bears any traces of human workmanship; the rock-surface, I now decide, may take care of itself. It has waited for me so long. It can wait a little longer.

"Does that beast of yours eat Christians?"

"He? He is a perfect capo di c----. That is his trick, to prevent people from kicking him. They think he can bite."

I produce half a cigar which he crushes up into his black clay pipe.

"Yours is not a bad life."

"One lives. But I had better times in Zurich."

He had stayed there awhile, working in some factory. He praised its food, its beer, its conveniences.

Zurich: incongruous image! Straightway I was transported from this harmonious desolation of Ferento; I lost sight of yonder clump of withering thistles--thistles of recent growth; you could sit, you could stand, in their shade--and found myself glancing over a leaden lake and wandering about streets full of ill-dressed and ungracious folk; escaping thence further afield, into featureless hills encrusted with smug, tawdry villas and drinking-booths smothered under noisome horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct! Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity?

So this old man had been there.

And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness"--some such phrase. It is apt. Zurich: fearsome town! Its ugliness is of the active kind; it grips you by the throat and sits on your chest like a nightmare.

I looked at the old fellow. He was sound; he had escaped the contagion. Those others, those many hundred thousand others in Switzerland and America--they can nevermore shake off the horrible dead ordinariness of that life among machines. Future generations will hardly recognise the Italian race from our descriptions. A new type is being formed, cold and loveless, with all the divinity drained out of them.

Having a long walk before me and being due home for luncheon, I rose to depart, and in so doing bestowed a vigorous kick upon Barone, in order to test the truth of his master's theory. It worked. The glowering and snarling ceased. He was a good dog--almost human. I think, with a few more kicks, he might have grown quite friendly.

Along that hot road the spectre of Zurich pursued me, in all its starkness. A land without atmosphere, and deficient in every element of the picturesque, whether of man or nature. Four harsh, dominant tones, which never overlap or intermingle: blue sky, white snow, black fir-woods, green fields, and, if you insist upon having a fifth, then take--yes, take and keep--that theatrical pink Alpenglühen which is turned on at fixed hours for the delectation of gaping tourists, like a tap of strontium light or the display of electric fluid at Schaffhausen Falls.

"Did you observe the illumination of the Falls, sir, last night?"

"How can one avoid seeing the beastly thing?"

"Ah! Then we must add two francs to the bill."

Many are the schools of art that have grown up in England and elsewhere and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only on condensed milk tins. These folks can write. My taste in lyrics may be peculiar, but I used to love my Leuthold--I wish I had him here at this moment; the bold strokes of Keller, the miniature work, the cameo-like touches, of C. F. Meyer--they can write! They would doubtless paint, were there anything to paint. Holbein: did the landscape of Switzerland seduce him? And Boecklin? He fled out of its welter of raw materialism. Even his Swiss landscapes are mediterraneanized. Boecklin----

And here, as the name formulated itself, that little sprite of Brahms, that intermezzo, once more leapt to my side out of the parched fields. I imagine it came less for my sake than for the companionship of Boecklin. They were comrades in the spirit; they understood. What one had heard, the other beheld--shapes of mystery, that peer out of forest gloom and the blue hush of midday and out of glassy waters--shapes that shudder and laugh. No doubt you may detect a difference between Boecklin's creations and those of classic days; it is as if the light of his dreamings had filtered through some medium, some stained-glass window in a Gothic church which distorted their outlines and rendered them somewhat more grotesque. It is the hand of time. The world has aged. Yet the shapes are young; they do but change their clothes and follow the fashion in externals. They laugh as of old. How they laugh! No mortal can laugh so heartily. No mortal has such good cause. Theirs is not the serene mirth of Olympian spheres; it sounds demoniac, from the midway region. What are they laughing at, these cheerful monsters? At the greatest jest in the universe. At us....

That lake of Conterano--the accent is on the ante-penultima--it looked appetising on the map, all alone out there. It attracted me strongly. I pictured a placid expanse, an eye of blue, sleepily embowered among wooded glens and throwing upward the gleam of its calm waters. Lakes are so rare in Italy. During the whole of this summer I saw only one other, fringed with the common English reed--two, rather, lying side by side, one turbid and the other clear, and filling up two of those curious circular depressions in the limestone. I rode past them on the watershed behind Cineto Romano. These were sweet water. Of sulphur lakelets I also saw two.

Sitting on a stone into which the coldness of midnight had entered (Alatri lies at a good elevation) I awaited my companion in the dusk of dawn. Soon enough, I knew, we should both be roasted. This half-hour's shivering before sunrise in the square of Alatri, and listening to the plash of the fountain, is one of those memories of the town which are graven most clearly in my mind. I could point out, to-day, the very spot whereon I sat.

We wandered along the Ferentino road to begin with, profiting by some short cuts through chestnut woods; turned to the right, ever ascending, behind that strange village of Fumone, aloft on its symmetrical hill; thence by a mule-track onward. Many were the halts by the way. A decayed roadside chapel with faded frescoes--a shepherd who played us some melodies on his pipe--those wondrous red lilies, now in their prime, glowing like lamps among the dark green undergrowth--the gateway of a farmhouse being repaired--a reservoir of water full of newts--a fascinating old woman who told us something about something--the distant view upon the singular peak of Mount Cacume, they all gave us occasion for lingering. Why not loaf and loiter in June? The days are so endless!

At last, through a gap in the landscape, we saw the lake at our feet, simmering in the noonday beams--an everyday sheet of water, brown in colour, with muddy banks and seemingly not a scrap of shade within miles; one of those lakes which, by their periodical rising and sinking, give so much trouble that there is talk, equally periodical, of draining them off altogether. This one, they say, shifts continually and sometimes reaches so low a level that rich crops are planted in its oozy bed.