The preceding scrap reminds us of a passage from Alphonse Karr, one of the most quietly-humorous of living French writers, who relates, in one of his quaint, dreamy, desultory books, how a neighbour of his, who lived in a poor thatched cottage on the fringe of a wood, embowered in flowers, shaded by venerable trees, refreshed by the balmiest of breezes, and enlivened by the songs of countless birds, suddenly disappeared from the countryside. Karr, who had long admired the sylvan retreat, and almost envied its occupant, inquired his fate. He had become rich, he was told; a legacy had enabled him to go and live in the town. He could afford to rent two rooms with new furniture and a gaudy paper, and he looked out upon a dirty street, along which omnibuses continually rolled. “Poor rich man!” Karr pitying exclaims. He had whitewashed his wall.
The Roman Ghetto furnishes the theme of one of Mr Story’s longest and most lively chapters; Fountains and Aqueducts, Saints and Superstitions, the Evil Eye, are the titles of three others. He begins his second volume with a vivid and characteristic sketch of the Markets of Rome, which are well worth the attention of foreign visitors, especially of Englishmen, who will find their arrangements, and much of what is there sold, to contrast strikingly with what they are accustomed to in their own country. Carcasses of pigs and goats adorned with scraps of gold-leaf and tinsel, blood puddings of a brilliant crimson, poultry sold by retail—that is to say, piecemeal, so that you may buy a wing, a leg, or even the head or gizzard of a fowl, if so it please you. There is game of all sorts, and queer beasts and fowls of many kinds are also there; the wild boar rough and snarling—the slender tawny deer—porcupines (commonly eaten in Rome)—most of our English game-birds—ortolans, beccaficoes, and a great variety of singing-birds. Passing into the fruit and vegetable market, one comes upon mushrooms of many colours, and some of them of enormous size, most of which would in England be looked upon as sudden death to the consumer, although in Italy they are found both savoury and harmless. “Here are the grey porcini, the foliated alberetti, and the orange-hued ovole; some of the latter of enormous size, big enough to shelter a thousand fairies under their smooth and painted domes. In each of these is a cleft stick, bearing a card from the inspector of the market, granting permission to sell; for mushrooms have proved fatal to so many cardinals, to say nothing of popes and people, that they are naturally looked upon with suspicion, and must all be officially examined to prevent accidents.” Besides the fruits common in England, figs are very abundant, and of many kinds; and when the good ones come in, in September, the Romans of the lower classes assemble in the evenings, in the Piazza Navona, for great feeds upon them. Five or six persons surround a great basket and eat it empty, correcting possible evil results by a glass of strong waters or a flask of red wine. But figs are a wholesome fruit—much more so than one which at Rome, and in many parts of Southern Europe, is the most popular of all—namely, the water-melon. What millions of people, from the Danube’s banks to the Portuguese coast, are daily refreshed the summer through by those huge green gourds, hard and unpromising in outward aspect, but revealing, at stroke of knife, rich store of rosy pulp, dotted with sable seeds! Pesth is a great place for them; and daily, when morning breaks, so long as they are in season, they are to be seen piled, all along the river-side, in heaps like those of shot and shell in an arsenal, only much broader and higher. All through the hot months, in Hungary’s pleasant and interesting capital, few persons think of dining without associating with the more heating viands a moiety or enormous segment of one of those great cold fruits—a strange digestive, as we Northerners should consider it, but found to answer well in sultry climes. At Rome they are equally appreciated, and are set above the choicest grapes. People make parties to go out of the city and eat them; and this was especially the case some years ago, when the authorities forbade their entrance on account of the cholera, but were unable to prevent their extramural consumption. In ordinary times you find heaps of them in the streets, especially in the Piazza Navona, that great mart of fruit and frippery, vegetables, old books, brilliant handkerchiefs, and other finery for the market-women—old iron, old bottles, and rubbish of all kinds—amongst which miscellany the patient investigator may sometimes discover valuable copies of the classic authors and precious antique intagli, to be purchased for a mere song. Here, as the story goes, a poor priest once bought, for a few baiocchi, a large cut-glass bead which took his fancy, and which a friend, more knowing than himself, afterwards discovered to be a diamond of great value, now belonging, we are told, to the Emperor of Russia. The priest disappeared, which leaves any ingenious and inventive writer full liberty to build a romantic tale upon the incident. The natural finale of the affair, Mr Story opines, would have been for the priest to have married the Emperor’s daughter, but his being in orders was an impediment; and so we are justified in presuming that some less agreeable means was found of easing him of his jewel, which, when he first possessed it, he took to be a drop from a chandelier, but to which he of course clung with desperate tenacity when enlightened as to the quality of the gem. Rome ought to be a good preserve for fiction-writers, there are so many family histories, traditions, and anecdotes current there, which would serve the novelist’s turn. Edmund About availed himself of one such in his tale of ‘Tolla;’ and another over-true tale was interwoven, not very long since, in a pleasant novelet of Roman life in the pages of this Magazine. Mr Story’s volumes abound in suggestive passages of the kind. If Rome be an admirable residence for an artist (and for some of the reasons why it is so, see the ‘Roba,’ i. p. 66, 67), it ought also to be an excellent one for a writer, were it not that it is found by many unfavourable to mental exertion. This is said to be particularly exemplified in the case of diplomatists, many of whom, after a certain time passed in the Papal capital, are apt to conceive an intense dislike to despatch-writing, and to keep their Governments extremely uninformed concerning the state of the Holy City and the prospects of Pontifical politics. We remember to have been told, when in Rome, the names of more than one foreign minister who had been recalled, it was asserted, for no other reason but that nothing could induce him to write despatches. Rome is certainly one of the places where there is most temptation, at least for one half of the year, to neglect business for pleasure; but there is possibly also something in the climate which disinclines many people to headwork. It is much the fashion to abuse the Roman climate; and this has been done, especially of late, by persons desirous to show that Rome is an undesirable, because a highly insalubrious, capital for united Italy. It is to be feared the grapes are sour, and that the yellow flag now hoisted would be struck at the same time with the French tricolour. Our own experience and observations induce us very much to concur with those passages of Mr Story’s book which relate to this question. “Rome has, with strangers, the reputation of being unhealthy; but this opinion I cannot think well founded—to the extent, at least, of the common belief.” Many maladies, virulent and dangerous elsewhere, are very light in Rome; and for lung complaints it is well known that people repair thither. The “Roman fever,” as it is commonly called (intermittent and perniciosa), is seldom suffered from by the better classes of Romans; and Mr Story (who speaks with authority after his many years’ residence in Rome) believes that, with a little prudence, it may easily be avoided. The peasants of the Campagna are, it is well known, those who chiefly suffer from it, and why? “Their food is poor, their habits careless, their labour exhausting and performed in the sun, and they sleep often on the bare ground or a little straw. And yet, despite the life they lead and their various exposures, they are, for the most part, a very strong and sturdy class.” Mr Story gives it as a fact that the French soldiers who besieged Rome in ‘48, during the summer months, suffered very little from fever, although sleeping out on the Campagna; but they were better clothed and fed, and altogether more careful of themselves, than the native peasants. Generally speaking, the foreigners who visit Rome are less attentive than the Romans to certain common rules for the preservation of health. They eat and drink too much, and of the wrong things. They get hot, and then plunge into cold churches or galleries; whereas an Italian flies from a chill or current of air as from infection. Mr Story gives a few simple rules, by following which he declares you may live twenty years in Rome without a fever. He cautions Englishmen against copious dinners, sherry and brandy, and his own countrymen against the morning-dinner which they call a breakfast; and supplies other useful hints and practical remarks. The subject is one which interests many, and such are referred to the ‘Roba,’ i. p. 156–161, and to the chapter on the Campagna, in which high authorities and ingenious arguments are brought to prove that in old times it was not insalubrious, and that in our own it need not be so. Population and cultivation are perhaps all that are needed to render tracts healthy that now are pestilential, but which assuredly were not so in the time of the ancient Romans, since many of them, we know, were their favourite sites for patrician villas. Much might be done by an intelligent and active government, and especially by a good sanitary commission. There was one clever gentleman who wrote that Rome was ill fitted to be the capital of Italy on account of its deficiency in buildings suitable for government offices! Where good reasons are not to be found silly ones may be resorted to, but they of course only weaken the cause they are intended to prop. And if it were to be urged that all the worst plagues flesh is heir to, combine to render Rome for the present impossible as capital of Italy, the most we could admit, by way of compromise, and borrowing a well-known answer, would be, “non tutti, ma Buona parte.”
CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’
PART XV.
NO. XX.—ON SELF-CONTROL.
“He who desires to influence others must learn to command himself,” is an old aphorism, on which, perhaps, something new may be said. In the ordinary ethics of the nursery, self-control means little more than a check upon temper. A wise restraint, no doubt; but as useful to the dissimulator as to the honest man. I do not necessarily conquer my anger because I do not show that I am angry. Anger vented often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.
A hasty temper is not the only horse that runs away with the charioteer on the Road of Life. Nor is it the most dangerous, for it seldom runs away far. It gives a jerk and a shake; but it does not take the bit between its teeth, and gallop blindly on, mile after mile, in one obstinate direction towards a precipice. A hasty temper is an infirmity disagreeable to others, undignified in ourselves—a fault so well known to every man who has it, that he will at once acknowledge it to be a fault which he ought to correct. He requires, therefore, no moralising essayist to prove to him his failing, or teach him his duty. But still a hasty temper is a frank offender, and has seldom that injurious effect either on the welfare of others, or on our own natures, mental and moral, which results from the steady purpose of one of those vices which are never seen in a passion.
In social intercourse, if his character be generous and his heart sound, a man does not often lose a true friend from a quick word. And even in the practical business of life, wherein an imperturbable temper is certainly a priceless advantage, a man of honesty and talent may still make his way without it. Nay, he may inspire a greater trust in his probity and candour, from the heat he displays against trickiness and falsehood. Indeed there have been consummate masters in the wisdom of business who had as little command of temper as if Seneca and Epictetus had never proved the command of temper to be the first business of wisdom. Richelieu strode towards his public objects with a footstep unswervingly firm, though his servants found it the easiest thing in the world to put him into a passion. Sometimes they did so on purpose, pleased to be scolded unjustly, because sure of some handsome amends. And in treating of self-control, I am contented to take that same Richelieu, the Cardinal, as an illustration of the various and expansive meaning which I give to the phrase. Richelieu did not command his temper in the sphere of his private household: he commanded it to perfection in his administration of a kingdom. He was cruel, but from policy, not from rage. Among all the victims of that policy, there was not one whose doom could be ascribed to his personal resentments. The life of no subject, and the success of no scheme, depended on the chance whether the irritable minister was in good or bad humour. If he permitted his temper free vent in his household, it was because there he was only a private individual. There, he could indulge in the luxury of ire without disturbing the mechanism of the state. There, generous as a noble and placable as a priest, he could own himself in the wrong, and beg his servants’ forgiveness, without lowering the dignity of the minister, who, when he passed his threshold, could ask no pardon from others, and acknowledge no fault in himself. It was there where his emotions were most held in restraint,—there where, before the world’s audience, his mind swept by concealed in the folds of its craft, as, in Victor Hugo’s great drama, L’Homme Rouge passes across the stage, curtained round in his litter, a veiled symbol of obscure, inexorable, majestic fate,—it was there where the dread human being seemed to have so mastered his thoughts and his feelings, that they served but as pulleys and wheels to the bloodless machine of his will,—it was there that self-control was in truth the most feeble. And this apparent paradox brings me at once to the purpose for which my essay is written.
What is Self? What is that many-sided Unity which is centred in the single Ego of a man’s being? I do not put the question metaphysically. Heaven forbid! The problem it involves provokes the conjectures of all schools, precisely because it has received no solution from any. The reader is welcome to whatever theory he may prefer to select from metaphysical definitions, provided that he will acknowledge in the word Self the representation of an integral individual human being—the organisation of a certain fabric of flesh and blood, biassed, perhaps, originally by the attributes and peculiarities of the fabric itself—by hereditary predispositions, by nervous idiosyncrasies, by cerebral developments, by slow or quick action of the pulse, by all in which mind takes a shape from the mould of the body;—but still a Self which, in every sane constitution, can be changed or modified from the original bias, by circumstance, by culture, by reflection, by will, by conscience, through means of the unseen inhabitant of the fabric. Not a man has ever achieved a something good or great, but will own that, before he achieved it, his mind succeeded in conquering or changing some predisposition of body.
True self-control, therefore, is the control of that entire and complex unity, the individual Self. It necessitates an accurate perception of all that is suggested by the original bias, and a power to adapt and to regulate, or to oppose and divert, every course to which that bias inclines the thought and impels the action.
For Self, left to itself, only crystallises atoms homogeneous to its original monad. A nature constitutionally proud and pitiless, intuitively seeks, in all the culture it derives from intellectual labour, to find reasons to continue proud and pitiless—to extract from the lessons of knowledge arguments by which to justify its impulse, and rules by which the impulse can be drilled into method and refined into policy.