Another thing that is very curious in Italy is that children of both sexes do not play together. It is true that no particular effort is made to keep them apart when they are very young, but there is no more unusual sight in Italy than a boy from ten to fourteen with a girl of the same age, unless it is to see a young man with a young woman who is not his wife. There is no open and fraternizing relationship between the sexes. If you say in Italy that a young woman is the amica or friend of a man, you mean what is signified in French by chère amie. In certain parts of Italy, and particularly in the South, the position of women in society and in relationship to men savors very much of the Oriental.
Every one is agreed that play does two things for the young child—it promotes its physical welfare and it facilitates its budding imagination. More than this, it contributes materially to its education and, particularly, it develops its constructive faculties. It teaches older children and youths who participate in games of skill and control the principles of give and take, bear and forbear, and it shows them how to be victors without arrogance and losers without venom. It instils principles of honesty, favors frankness and directness, and generally paves the way for successful dealing with their fellows socially, commercially, and politically in mature life. When one considers the pains and money that are expended in our own country and in England to teach young people how to play, it is astonishing how apathetic the Italians have been toward the matter.
My belief is that Italy is awakening to the fact that play is one of the most important factors in the development of the people, and if this war had not come on I should most likely not have had occasion to make these observations and to draw conclusions from them. I am told that a few years ago they began to have mixed schools, that is, schools where children of both sexes are assembled during school hours, and in many cities there were stadia where sports of all sorts were encouraged and fostered.
There are many factors that have tended to impede the development of play in this country and the recognition of its importance, but aside from that there is something in the Italian temperament or nature that is antipathic to the play instinct and inimical to sports. Pedagogy has recognized its importance but it has not succeeded in promoting and developing it.
I have often wondered whether the suppression of the play instinct practically to the point of abnegation is not manifest in the energies and success of a people. Aside from the field of mechanical application as represented by that in the profession of engineering, I do not know of any realm in which the Italian of the past three or four generations has signally distinguished himself. There have been poets, artists, architects, physicians, priests, statesmen, philosophers, explorers, or interpreters of life and events whose names have taken permanent places in the world. I mean to say that in this period there have been many Italians who have attained eminence and earned immortality, but there has been no one from whom an epoch dates: no Pasteur, no Deisler, no Thompson, no Devries, no Stanley, no Edison, no Langley, no Wright, no Morgan, no Eddy—to enumerate only a few of those that are legitimately put in the class of supermen.
This paucity of genius may be no more than a coincidence, but it strikes me, nevertheless, as extraordinary that a country which has enjoyed freedom as this country has for the past fifty years, has not manifested the fruits of its liberation from tyranny and oppression such as were manifested in France after the French Revolution, when once its devastation had been cured.
If the child is father to the man, it stands to reason that indulgence and training during childhood will manifest their effect during maturity, and success in any activity of human life stands in direct relation to imagination or vision and industry. It likewise follows that if we neglect to facilitate the development of the former and to develop the appetite for and form the habit of the latter during the early years of life, it is too much to expect the display of them in later years. It is quite possible, it seems to me, that the reputation for lack of directness in their dealings with the peoples of other nationalities, their circuitousness in the business affairs of life, their secrecy or lack of frankness and candor, their ceremoniousness, their failure to cement a solid friendship with other nations of Europe, may, in some measure at least, be linked up with the suppression of the play instinct in childhood and the subservient place which they have given to women.
[CHAPTER XVII
"IF A MAN WALKETH IN THE NIGHT, HE STUMBLETH BUT IF HE WALKETH IN THE DAY HE SEETH THE LIGHT OF THIS WORLD"]
My morning walks take me the length of the Janiculum. In the early light of these autumn days Rome and its settings take on an expression of seductive resignation due largely to the clouds which rob it of that glare which is the most trying feature of summer in Rome. The clouds permit streams of light to filter through, as if from a monstrous search-light, especially over the Castelli Romani and the Alban Hills. Ordinarily Monte Cavo is on the horizon line, but to-day, after the sun had been nearly an hour on its diurnal way, hundreds of parallel bundles of light were directed perpendicularly upon it, so that another chain of mountains came into view beyond, and the decaying villa surmounting it seemed to be in a valley atop of a mountain peak backed by other peaks. The way from my villino to St. Peter's is past the Garibaldi monument, and I am well acquainted with the countenances of his generals and his guard, whose life-size busts in marble flank the monument in long, parallel rows, constituting an alley leading up to it. If their effigies do them justice, they were fine-looking, intelligent, and resolute.