35. Oil Painting: Lago Tom, Piora, Val Leventina. 1877.
Ch. vi. in Alps and Sanctuaries is headed “Piora.” “Piora in fact is a fine breezy upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it.” Butler thought he knew what went on in Piora and, as he proceeds through the valley, he says: “Here I heard that there were people, and the people were not so much asleep as the simple peasantry of these upland valleys are expected to be by nine o’clock in the evening. For now was the time when they had moved up from Ronco, Altanca, and other villages in some numbers to cut the hay, and were living for a fortnight or three weeks in the chalets upon the Lago di Cadagna. As I have said, there is a chapel, but I doubt whether it is attended during this season with the regularity with which the parish churches of Ronco, Altanca, etc., are attended during the rest of the year. The young people, I am sure, like these annual visits to the high places, and will be hardly weaned from them. Happily the hay will always be there, and will have to be cut by someone, and the old people will send the young ones.”
The foregoing passage throws light upon that other passage in Life and Habit, ch. ii., about S. Paul, which concludes thus: “But the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and wine—the true grace he drove out into the wilderness—high up,
it may be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in her ill report.”
After Ernest has received Alethea’s money, and while he and Edward Overton are returning from Christina’s funeral, in ch. lxxxiv. of The Way of All Flesh, he tells his godfather his plans for spending the next year or two. He has formed a general impression that the most vigorous and amiable of known nations—the modern Italians, the old Greeks and Romans, and the South Sea Islanders—have not been purists. He wants to find out what such people do; they are the practical authorities on the question—What is best for man?
“Let us,” he says, “settle the fact first and fight about the moral tendencies afterwards.”
“In fact,” said I laughingly, “you mean to have high old times.”
“Neither higher nor lower,” was the answer, “than those people whom I can find to have been the best in all ages.”
Accordingly Ernest left England and visited “almost all parts of the world, but only staying in those places where he found the inhabitants unusually good-looking and agreeable.” “At last in the spring of 1867 he returned, his luggage stained with the variation of each hotel advertisement ’twixt here and Japan. He looked very brown and strong, and so well-favoured that it almost seemed as if he must have caught some good looks from the people among whom he had been staying.”
We are not told what particular countries Ernest went to; Japan is mentioned, but less because Ernest went there than because the name of a distant place was wanted to justify and complete the echo of the description of Sir Walter Blunt in I. Hen. IV. i. 64: