Old Calabria Part 22

Fencing and music are taught, but those athletic exercises which led to the victories of Marathon and Salamis are not much in vogue--_mens sana in corpare sana_ is clearly not the ideal of the place; fighting among the boys is reprobated as "savagery," and corporal punishment forbidden.

There is no playground or workshop, and their sole exercise consists in dull promenades along the high road under the supervision of one or more teachers, during which the youngsters indulge in attempts at games by the wayside which are truly pathetic. So the old "Inviolable Const.i.tutions" ordain that "the scholars must not play outside the college, and if they meet any one, they should lower their voices." A rule of recent introduction is that in this warm weather they must all lie down to sleep for two hours after the midday meal; it may suit the managers, but the boys consider it a great hards.h.i.+p and would prefer being allowed to play. Altogether, whatever the intellectual results may be, the moral tendency of such an upbringing is damaging to the spirit of youth and must make for precocious frivolity and brutality. But the pedagogues of Italy are like her legislators: theorists. They close their eyes to the cardinal principles of all education--that the waste products and toxins of the imagination are best eliminated by motor activities, and that the immature stage of human development, far from being artificially shortened, should be prolonged by every possible means. . If the internal arrangement of this inst.i.tution is not all it might be as regards the healthy development of youth, the situation of the college resembles the venerable structures of Oxford in that it is too good, far too good, for mere youngsters. This building, in its seclusion from the world, its pastoral surroundings and soul-inspiring panorama, is an abode not for boys but for philosophers; a place to fill with a wave of deep content the sage who has outgrown earthly ambitions.

Your eye embraces the snow-clad heights of Dolcedorme and the Ionian Sea, wandering over forests, and villages, and rivers, and long reaches of fertile country; but it is not the variety of the scene, nor yet the historical memories of old Sybaris which kindle the imagination so much as the s.p.a.cious amplitude of the whole prospect. In England we think something of a view of ten miles. Conceive, here, a grandiose valley wider than from Dover to Calais, filled with an atmosphere of such impeccable clarity that there are moments when one thinks to see every stone and every bush on the mountains yonder, thirty miles distant. And the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such as would inspire the brush of Turner or Claude Lorraine. . . .

For the college, as befits its grave academic character, stands by itself among fruitful fields and backed by a chestnut wood, at ten minutes' walk from the crowded streets. It is an imposing edifice--the Basilean convent of St. Adrian, with copious modern additions; the founders may well have selected this particular site on account of its fountain of fresh water, which flows on as in days of yore. One thinks of those communities of monks in the Middle Ages, scattered over this wild region and holding rare converse with one another by gloomy forest paths--how remote their life and ideals! In the days of Fiore (1691) the inmates of this convent still practised their old rites.

The nucleus of the building is the old chapel, containing a remarkable font; two antique columns sawn up (apparently for purposes of transportation from some pagan temple by the sh.o.r.e)--one of them being of African marble and the other of grey granite; there is also a tessellated pavement with beast-patterns of leopards and serpents akin to those of Patir. Bertaux gives a reproduction of this serpent; he a.s.similates it, as regards technique and age, to that which lies before the altar of Monte Ca.s.sino and was wrought by Greek artisans of the abbot Desiderius. The church itself is held to be two centuries older than that of Patir.

The library, once celebrated, contains musty folios of cla.s.sics and their commentators, but nothing of value. It has been ransacked of its treasures like that of Patir, whose _disjecta membra_ have been tracked down by the patience and ac.u.men of Monsignor Batiffol.

Batiffol, Bertaux--Charles Diehl, Jules Gay (who has also written on San Demetrio)--Huillard-Breholles--Luynes--Lenormant. . . here are a few French scholars who have recently studied these regions and their history. What have we English done in this direction?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Such thoughts occur inevitably.

It may be insinuated that researches of this kind are gleanings; that our English genius lies rather in the spade-work of pioneers like Leake or Layard. Granted. But a hard fact remains; the fact, namely, that could any of our scholars have been capable of writing in the large and profound manner of Bertaux or Gay, not one of our publishers would have undertaken to print his work. Not one. They know their business; they know that such a book would have been a dead loss. Therefore let us frankly confess the truth: for things of the mind there is a smaller market in England than in France. _How much smaller_ only they can tell, who have familiarized themselves with other departments of French thought.

Here, then, I have lived for the past few days, strolling among the fields, and attempting to shape some picture of these Albanians from their habits and such of their literature as has been placed at my disposal. So far, my impression of them has not changed since the days when I used to rest at their villages, in Greece. They remind me of the Irish. Both races are scattered over the earth and seem to prosper best outside their native country; they have the same songs and bards, the same hero-chieftains, the same com-bativeness and frank hospitality; both are sunk in bigotry and broils; they resemble one another in their love of dirt, disorder and display, in their enthusiastic and adventurous spirit, their versatile brilliance of mind, their incapacity for self-government and general (Keltic) note of inspired inefficiency.

And both profess a frenzied allegiance to an obsolete tongue which, were it really cultivated as they wish, would put a barrier of triple bra.s.s between themselves and the rest of humanity.

Even as the Irish despise the English as their worldly and effete relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks--even those of Pericles--with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their writers, are "the oldest people upon earth," and their language is the "divine Pelasgic mother-tongue." I grew interested awhile in Stanislao Marchiano's plausibly entrancing study on this language, as well as in a pamphlet of de Rada's on the same subject; but my ardour has cooled since learning, from another native grammarian, that these writers are hopelessly in the wrong on nearly every point. So much is certain, that the Albanian language already possesses more than _thirty different alphabets_ (each of them with nearly fifty letters). Nevertheless they have not yet, in these last four (or forty) thousand years, made up their minds which of them to adopt, or whether it would not be wisest, after all, to elaborate yet another one--a thirty-first. And so difficult is their language with any of these alphabets that even after a five days' residence on the spot I still find myself puzzled by such simple pa.s.sages as this:

. . . Zilji, mosse vet, ce a.s.so mbremie to ngcnrct me iljis, praa gjith e miegculem, mhi siaarr rriij i sgjuat. Nje voogh e keljbur sorrevet te liosta ndjej se i oxtenej e p.i.s.seroghej. Zuu s.h.i.+u menes; ne mee se Ijinaar chish Ijeen pa-shuatur skiotta, e i d.u.c.h.eje per moon.

I will only add that the translation of such a pa.s.sage--it contains twenty-eight accents which I have omitted--is mere child's play to its p.r.o.nunciation.

XXIV

AN ALBANIAN SEER

Sometimes I find my way to the village of Macchia, distant about three miles from San Demetrio. It is a dilapidated but picturesque cl.u.s.ter of houses, situate on a projecting tongue of land which is terminated by a little chapel to Saint Elias, the old sun-G.o.d Helios, lover of peaks and promontories, whom in his Christian shape the rude Albanian colonists brought hither from their fatherland, even as, centuries before, he had accompanied the Byzantines on the same voyage and, fifteen centuries yet earlier, the Greeks.

At Macchia was born, in 1814, of an old and relatively wealthy family, Girolamo de Rada, [Footnote: Thus his friend and compatriot, Dr. Michele Marchiano, spells the name in a biography which I recommend to those who think there is no intellectual movement in South Italy. But he himself, at the very close of his life, in 1902, signs himself Ger. de Rhada. So this village of Macchia is spelt indifferently by Albanians as Maki or Makji. They have a fine Elizabethan contempt for orthography--as well they may have, with their thirty alphabets.] a flame-like patriot in whom the tempestuous aspirations of modern Albania took shape. The ideal pursued during his long life was the regeneration of his country; and if the attention of international congresses and linguists and folklorists is now drawn to this little corner of the earth--if, in _1902,_ twenty-one newspapers were devoted to the Albanian cause (eighteen in Italy alone, and one even in London)--it was wholly his merit.

He was the son of a Greco-Catholic priest. After a stern religious upbringing under the paternal roof at Macchia and in the college of San Demetrio, he was sent to Naples to complete his education. It is characteristic of the man that even in the heyday of youth he cared little for modern literature and speculations and all that makes for exact knowledge, and that he fled from his Latin teacher, the celebrated Puoti, on account of his somewhat exclusive love of grammatical rules.

None the less, though con-genitally averse to the materialistic and subversive theories that were then seething in Naples, he became entangled in the anti-Bourbon movements of the late thirties, and narrowly avoided the death-penalty which struck down some of his comrades. At other times his natural piety laid him open to the accusation of reactionary monarchical leanings.

He attributed his escape from this and every other peril to the hand of G.o.d. Throughout life he was a zealous reader of the Bible, a firm and even ascetic believer, forever preoccupied, in childlike simplicity of soul, with first causes. His spirit moved majestically in a world of fervent plat.i.tudes. The whole Cosmos lay serenely distended before his mental vision; a benevolent G.o.d overhead, devising plans for the prosperity of Albania; a malignant, ubiquitous and very real devil, thwarting these His good intentions whenever possible; mankind on earth, sowing and reaping in the sweat of their brow, as was ordained of old.

Like many poets, he never disabused his mind of this comfortable form of anthropomorphism. He was a firm believer, too, in dreams. But his guiding motive, his sun by day and star by night, was a belief in the "mission" of the Pelasgian race now scattered about the sh.o.r.es of the Inland Sea--in Italy, Sicily, Greece, Dalmatia, Roumania, Asia Minor, Egypt--a belief as ardent and irresponsible as that which animates the _Lost Tribe_ enthusiasts of England. He considered that the world hardly realized how much it owed to his countryfolk; according to his views, Achilles, Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Pyrrhus, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate--they were all Albanians. Yet even towards the end of his life he is obliged to confess:--

"But the evil demon who for over four thousand years has been hindering the Pelasgian race from collecting itself into one state, is still endeavouring by insidious means to thwart the work which would lead it to that union."

Disgusted with the clamorous and intriguing bustle of Naples, he retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia, throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the "facile fatuity" of Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist has called the _function of the real;_ his temperament was not of the kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his life--it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward he loses personal touch with thinking humanity. At Macchia he remained, brooding on Albanian wrongs, devising remedies, corresponding with foreigners and writing--ever writing; consuming his patrimony in the cause of Albania, till the direst poverty dogged his footsteps.

I have read some of his Italian works. They are curiously oracular, like the whisperings of those fabled Dodonian oaks of his fatherland; they heave with a darkly-virile mysticism. He shares Blake's ruggedness, his torrential and confused utterance, his benevolence, his flashes of luminous inspiration, his moral background. He resembles that visionary in another aspect: he was a consistent and pa.s.sionate adorer of the _Ewig-weibliche._ Some of the female characters in his poems retain their dewy freshness, their exquisite originality, even after pa.s.sing through the translator's crucible.

At the age of 19 he wrote a poem on "Odysseus," which was published under a pseudonym. Then, three years later, there appeared a collection of rhapsodies ent.i.tled "Milosao," which he had garnered from the lips of Albanian village maidens. It is his best-known work, and has been translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology, ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals--nothing came amiss to his gifted pen, and he was fruitful, say his admirers, even in his errors, Like other men inflamed with one single idea, he boldly ventured into domains of thought where specialists fear to tread. His biographer enumerates forty-three different works from his pen. They all throb with a resonant note of patriotism; they are "fragments of a heart," and indeed, it has been said of him that he utilized even the grave science of grammar as a battlefield whereon to defy the enemies of Albania. But perhaps he worked most successfully as a journalist. His "Fiamuri Arberit" (the Banner of Albania) became the rallying cry of his countrymen in every corner of the earth.

These multifarious writings--and doubtless the novelty of his central theme--attracted the notice of German philologers and linguists, of all lovers of freedom, folklore and verse. Leading Italian writers like Cantupraised him highly; Lamartine, in 1844, wrote to him: "Je suis bien-heureux de ce signe de fraternite poetique et politique entre vous et moi. La poesie est venue de vos rivages et doit y retourner. . . ."

Hermann Buchholtz discovers scenic changes worthy of Shakespeare, and pa.s.sages of Aeschylean grandeur, in his tragedy "Sofonisba." Carnet compares him with Dante, and the omniscient Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1880--a post card, presumably--belauding his disinterested efforts on behalf of his country. He was made the subject of many articles and pamphlets, and with reason. Up to his time, Albania had been a myth. He it was who divined the relations.h.i.+p between the Albanian and Pelasgian tongues; who created the literary language of his country, and formulated its political ambitions.

Whereas the hazy "Autobiologia" records complicated political intrigues at Naples that are not connected with his chief strivings, the little "Testamento politico," printed towards the end of his life, is more interesting. It enunciates his favourite and rather surprising theory that the Albanians cannot look for help and sympathy save only to their _brothers,_ the Turks. Unlike many Albanians on either side of the Adriatic, he was a p.r.o.nounced Turco-phile, detesting the "stolid perfidy" and "arrogant disloyalty" of the Greeks. Of Austria, the most insidious enemy of his country's freedom, he seems to have thought well.

A year before his death he wrote to an Italian translator of "Milosao"

(I will leave the pa.s.sage in the original, to show his cloudy language):

"Ed un tempo propizio la accompagna: la ricost.i.tuzione dell' Epiro nei suoi quattro vilayet autonomi quale e nei propri consigli e nei propri desideri; ricost.i.tuzione, che pel suo Giornale, quello dell' ottimo A.

Lorecchio--cui precede il principe n.a.z.ionale Kastriota, Chini--si annuncia fatale, e quasi fulcro della stabilita dello impero Ottomano, a della pace Europea; preludio di quella diffusione del regno di Dio sulla terra, che sara la Pace tra gli Uomini."

Truly a remarkable utterance, and one that ill.u.s.trates the disadvantages of living at a distance from the centres of thought. Had he travelled less with the spirit and more with the body, his opinions might have been modified and corrected. But he did not even visit the Albanian colonies in Italy and Sicily. Hence that vast confidence in his mission--a confidence born of solitude, intellectual and geographical.

Hence that ultra-terrestrial yearning which tinges his apparently practical aspirations.

He remained at home, ever poor and industrious; wrapped in bland exaltation and oblivious to contemporary movements of the human mind.

Not that his existence was without external activities. A chair of Albanian literature at San Demetrio, inst.i.tuted in 1849 but suppressed after three years, was conferred on him in 1892 by the historian and minister Pasquale Villari; for a considerable time, too, he was director of the communal school at Corigliano, where, with characteristic energy, he set up a printing press; violent journalistic campaigns succeeded one another; in 1896 he arranged for the first congress of Albanian language in that town, which brought together delegates from every part of Italy and elicited a warm telegram of felicitation from the minister Francesco Crispi, himself an Albanian. Again, in 1899, we find him reading a paper before the twelfth international congress of Orientalists at Rome.

But best of all, he loved the seclusion of Macchia.

Griefs cl.u.s.tered thickly about the closing years of this unworldly dreamer. Blow succeeded blow. One by one, his friends dropped off; his brothers, his beloved wife, his four sons--he survived them all; he stood alone at last, a stricken figure, in tragic and sublime isolation.

Over eighty years old, he crawled thrice a week to deliver his lectures at San Demetrio; he still cultivated a small patch of ground with enfeebled arm, composing, for relaxation, poems and rhapsodies at the patriarchal age of 88! They will show you the trees under which he was wont to rest, the sunny views he loved, the very stones on which he sat; they will tell you anecdotes of his poverty--of an indigence such as we can scarcely credit. During the last months he was often thankful for a crust of bread, in exchange for which he would bring a sack of acorns, self-collected, to feed the giver's pigs. Dest.i.tution of this kind, brought about by unswerving loyalty to an ideal, ceases to exist in its sordid manifestations: it exalts the sufferer. And his life's work is there. Hitherto there had been no "Albanian Question" to perplex the chanceries of Europe. He applied the match to the tinder; he conjured up that phantom which refuses to be laid.

He died, in 1903, at San Demetrio; and there lies entombed in the cemetery on the hill-side, among the oaks.

But you will not easily find his grave.

His biographer indulges a poetic fancy in sketching the fair monument which a grateful country will presently rear to his memory on the snowy Acroceraunian heights. It might be well, meanwhile, if some simple commemorative stone were placed on the spot where he lies buried. Had he succ.u.mbed at his natal Macchia, this would have been done; but death overtook him in the alien parish of San Demetrio, and his remains were mingled with those of its poorest citizens. A microcosmic ill.u.s.tration of that clannish spirit of Albania which he had spent a lifetime in endeavouring to direct to n.o.bler ends!

He was the Mazzini of his nation.

A Garibaldi, when the crisis comes, may possibly emerge from that tumultuous horde.

Where is the Cavour?

XXV

SCRAMBLING TO LONGOBUCCO

A driving road to connect San Demetrio with Acri whither I was now bound was begun, they say, about twenty years ago; one can follow it for a considerable distance beyond the Albanian College. Then, suddenly, it ends. Walking to Acri, however, by the old track, one picks up, here and there, conscientiously-engineered little stretches of it, already overgrown with weeds; these, too, break off as abruptly as they began, in the wild waste. For purposes of wheeled traffic these picturesque but disconnected fragments are quite useless.

Perhaps the whole undertaking will be completed some day--_speriamo!_ as the natives say, when speaking of something rather beyond reasonable expectation. But possibly not; and in that case--_pazienza!_ meaning, that all hope may now be abandoned. There is seldom any great hurry, with non-governmental works of this kind.

It would be interesting if one could learn the inner history of these abortive transactions. I have often tried, in vain. It is impossible for an outsider to pierce the jungle of sordid mystery and intrigue which surrounds them. So much I gathered: that the original contract was based on the wages then current and that, the price of labour having more than doubled in consequence of the "discovery" of America, no one will undertake the job on the old terms. That is sufficiently intelligible.