There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature
in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.
In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in
Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysées. That passion with which
Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen
Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him.
He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of
Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumière.' One would say that the moonlight
shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no
more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the
Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of
legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never
felt its _hysterica passio_; he has never known its eternal youth, he
has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass
as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields.
But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake
hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and
talk with him at the cafés, and the legations, and the public gardens,
he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.
One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don
Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his
gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish
noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but
Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a
youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English
public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and _sècheresse de
coeur_ of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of
rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his _début_ in
speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult
to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which
are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the
qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make
him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from
meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated
as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the
utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity,
lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part
from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his
history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have
previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more
natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and
those who surround him, and the crafty _affaristi_ who get him into
their meshes of speculation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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