Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. Samuel Butler
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on the same wall. I should have been much surprised, if I had not already found out how many families return to these parts with children to whom English is the native language. Many as are the villages in the Canton Ticino in which I have sat sketching for hours together, I have rarely done so without being accosted sooner or later by some one who could speak English, either with an American accent or without it. It is curious at some out-of-the-way place high up among the mountains, to see a lot of children at play, and to hear one of them shout out, “Marietta, if you do that again, I’ll go and tell mother.” One English word has become universally adopted by the Ticinesi themselves. They say “waitee” just as we should say “wait,” to stop some one from going away. It is abhorrent to them to end a word with a consonant, so they have added “ee,” but there can be no doubt about the origin of the word. [41]
When we bear in mind the tendency of any language, if it once attains a certain predominance, to supplant all others, and when we look at the map of the world and see the extent now in the hands of the two English-speaking nations, I think it may be prophesied that the language in which this book is written will one day be almost as familiar to the greater number of Ticinesi as their own.
I may mention one other expression which, though not derived from English, has a curious analogy to an English usage. When the beautiful children with names like Handel’s operas come round one while one is sketching, some one of them will assuredly before long be heard to whisper the words “Tira giù,” or as children say when they come round one in England, “He is drawing it down.” The fundamental idea is, of course, that the draughtsman drags the object which he is drawing away from its position, and “transfers” it, as we say by the same metaphor, to his paper, as St. Cecilia “drew an angel down” in “Alexander’s Feast.”
A good walk from Dalpe is to the Alpe di Campolungo and Fusio, but it is better taken from Fusio. A very favourite path with me is the one leading conjointly from Cornone and Dalpe to Prato. The view up the valley of the St. Gothard looking down on Prato is fine; I give a sketch of it taken five years ago before the railway had been begun.
The little objects looking like sentry boxes that go all round the church contain rough modern frescoes, representing, if I remember rightly, the events attendant upon the Crucifixion. These are on a small scale what the chapels on the sacred mountain of Varallo are on a large one. Small single oratories are scattered about all over the Canton Ticino, and indeed everywhere in North Italy by the roadside, at all halting-places, and especially at the crest of any more marked ascent, where the tired wayfarer, probably heavy laden, might be inclined to say a naughty word or two if not checked. The people like them, and miss them when they come to England. They sometimes do what the lower animals do in confinement when precluded from habits they are accustomed to, and put up with strange makeshifts by way of substitute. I once saw a poor Ticinese woman kneeling in prayer before a dentist’s show-case in the Hampstead Road; she doubtless mistook the teeth for the relics of some saint. I am afraid she was a little like a hen sitting upon a chalk egg, but she seemed quite contented.
Which of us, indeed, does not sit contentedly enough upon chalk eggs at times? And what would life be but for the power to do so? We do not sufficiently realise the part which illusion has played in our development. One of the prime requisites for evolution is a certain power for adaptation to varying circumstances, that is to say, of plasticity, bodily and mental. But the power of adaptation is mainly dependent on the power of thinking certain new things sufficiently like certain others to which we have been accustomed for us not to be too much incommoded by the change—upon the power, in fact, of mistaking the new for the old. The power of fusing ideas (and through ideas, structures) depends upon the power of confusing them; the power to confuse ideas that are not very unlike, and that are presented to us in immediate sequence, is mainly due to the fact of the impetus, so to speak, which the mind has upon it. We always, I believe, make an effort to see every new object as a repetition of the object last before us. Objects are so varied, and present themselves so rapidly, that as a general rule we renounce this effort too promptly to notice it, but it is always there, and it is because of it that we are able to mistake, and hence to evolve new mental and bodily developments. Where the effort is successful, there is illusion; where nearly successful but not quite, there is a shock and a sense of being puzzled—more or less, as the case may be; where it is so obviously impossible as not to be pursued, there is no perception of the effort at all.
Mr. Locke has been greatly praised for his essay upon human understanding. An essay on human misunderstanding should be no less interesting and important. Illusion to a small extent is one of the main causes, if indeed it is not the main cause, of progress, but it must be upon a small scale. All abortive speculation, whether commercial or philosophical, is based upon it, and much as we may abuse such speculation, we are, all of us, its debtors.
Leonardo da Vinci says that Sandro Botticelli spoke slightingly of landscape-painting, and called it “but a vain study, since by throwing a sponge impregnated with various colours against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it, which may appear like a landscape.” Leonardo da Vinci continues: “It is true that a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots according to the disposition of mind with which they are considered; such as heads of men, various animals, battles, rocky scenes, seas, clouds, words, and the like. It may be compared to the sound of bells which may seem to say whatever we choose to imagine. In the same manner these spots may furnish hints for composition, though they do not teach us how to finish any particular part.” [46] No one can hate drunkenness more than I do, but I am confident the human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination—imagination being little else than another name for illusion. As for wayside chapels, mine, when I am in London, are the shop windows with pretty things in them.
The flowers on the slopes above Prato are wonderful, and the village is full of nice bits for sketching, but the best thing, to my fancy, is the church, and the way it stands, and the lovely covered porch through which it is entered. This porch is not striking from the outside, but I took two sketches of it from within. There is, also, a fresco, half finished, of St. George and the Dragon, probably of the fifteenth century, and not without feeling. There is not much inside the church, which is modernised and more recent than the tower. The tower is very good, and only second, if second, in the upper Leventina to that of Quinto, which, however, is not nearly so well placed.
The people of Prato are just as fond of cherries as those of Primadengo, but I did not see any men in the trees. The children in these parts are the most beautiful and most fascinating that I know anywhere; they have black mouths all through the month of July from the quantities of cherries that they devour. I can bear witness that they are irresistible, for one kind old gentleman, seeing me painting near his house, used to bring me daily a branch of a cherry-tree with all the cherries on it. “Son piccole,” he would say, “ma son gustose”—“They are small, but tasty,” which indeed they were. Seeing I ate all he gave me—for there was no stopping short as long as a single cherry was left—he, day by day, increased the size of the branch, but no matter how many he brought I was always even with him. I did my best to stop him from bringing them, or myself from eating all of them, but it was no use.
Here is the autograph of one of the little black-mouthed folk. I watch them growing up from year to year in many a village. I was sketching at Primadengo, and a little girl of about three years came up with her brother, a boy of perhaps eight. Before long the smaller child began to set her cap at me, smiling, ogling, and showing all her tricks like an accomplished little flirt. Her brother said, “She always goes on like that to strangers.” I said, “What’s her name?” “Forolinda.” The name being new to me, I made the boy write it, and here it is. He has forgotten to cross his F, but the writing is wonderfully good for a boy of his age. The child’s name, doubtless, is Florinda.
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