“Corinthian capitals?” Sir Richmond considered it and laughed cheerfully. “I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of thing.”
“The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument!” said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. “It gave me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might understand English.”
The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. “When one is travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me for everything in Europe that I don’t want and have no sort of use for. It isn’t a bad sort of capital in its way, florid and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;—and that a whole continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get past it!...”
“It’s the classical tradition.”
“It puzzles me.”
“It’s the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed spread by the Romans all over western Europe.”
“And it smothers the history of Europe. You can’t see Europe because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can’t sit down. ‘The empire, gentlemen—the Empire. Empire.’ Rome itself is perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round stupid arches as though it couldn’t imagine that you could possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter’s and that frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes on.”
“AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS,” said Dr. Martineau.
“This Roman empire seems to be Europe’s first and last idea. A fixed idea. And such a poor idea!... America never came out of that. It’s no good-telling me that it did. It escaped from it.... So I said to Belinda here, ‘Let’s burrow, if we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus weeds got hold of us.’”
“I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly Corinthian, something called the Capitol,” Sir Richmond reflected. “And other buildings. A Treasury.”