The Appian Way
From a photograph
II
CADENABBIA-WOERISHOVEN-PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP
Table of Contents Cadenabbia, Lake of Como, August 29, 1894.
I fear the vagabond instinct is the strongest one I have, for I was glad to leave Rome a week ago-to leave my Rome, think of it! with its galleries all to myself, and its churches, and no tourists; still, the fleas had become too vicious, and all the "lame ducks" were upon me-shabby gentlemen attached to the Vatican, seedy artists with portfolios of unsold sketches, decayed gentlewomen professing Dante and lacking pupils-for the foreign colony, by which they live, has dissolved, and we were the last Anglo-Saxons left in town except some young secretaries of the British Embassy.
Unless one has seen the Sistine Chapel at noon on a blazing August day one has not really seen it. The figure of Adam receiving the touch of Life from the Creator is, for me, the highest expression of the art of painting. The hours I spent across the way at the Vatican and St. Peter's made up for any small inconveniences of the heat I may have suffered. If one is to pass a summer in a city instead of in your green Maine woods, many-fountained Rome is the city of all others! There are no mosquitoes,-literally, we have neither a bar nor a netting in the house-the nights are cool, the citizens are too poor to go away in any appreciable number, so there is none of that desolate feeling which makes London a Desert of Sahara in August, and Paris worse. But the heat of the last week of August drove us to the Italian lake country, and here we are at Cadenabbia-from Ca' di Nabbia, house of Nabby, an old woman who once lived in a little hut, or ca', on the shore. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
I am writing before breakfast. Outside my window is the Lake of Como with its mountains. On one side there is deep purple shadow, the other palpitates with light. Soon we shall have coffee and green figs in the pergola below, under the canopy of grape-leaves. Cadenabbia is all villas and hotels; behind, half way up the hill, is the village of Griente, to reach which we climb steep streets of steps paved with round cobbles. Griente is all gray stone, with delicious arches spanning the narrow ways. The syndic's house stands apart; his fat wife and pretty daughter seem always to be sitting sewing before the door. The padre, a dear old man, showed us his garden and called our attention to the trellis he had contrived for his grapes. We must taste his wine, made from these Muscats-made, I warrant, by his own hands. We did taste it and found it excellent.
"Sapete, Signori," he said, "un goccettino di vino e' buona per lo stomaco (Know, Signors, that a little drop of wine is good for the stomach)." St. Paul was of his way of thinking.
J. has been seized with a fury of sketching; he goes every day to Griente and draws and draws! The old women and the children make much of him. Yesterday he heard one boy say to another, "It must be very hard to paint and smoke a pipe at the same time."
"Ma ché!" said the other, "he only does it for bravado!"
The other day he frescoed a lad's nose with vermilion like a Cherokee brave's; since then all the boys in the district torment him for the ends of his pastels.
This is one of the prosperous provinces of Italy. The town of Como has silk manufactories, where the best Italian silk stockings are made and the nicest of the piece silks. There is a feeling of comparative bien être in all classes which adds much to one's own comfort. The flood of travellers that pours through here brings a certain prosperity, though I incline to think it a specious one. Everybody asks, "What would Italy do without the tourists?" Perhaps if the people were not so busy making silly knicknacks to sell to tourists, they would pay more attention to cultivating their land. Improved agricultural methods are what Italy needs above all else; she has the finest soil and climate in Europe; she could supply half the continent with fruit, oil, and wine if she had a little more common sense! I have seen oranges and lemons rotting under the trees at Sorrento, and in Calabria I have seen grapes used to enrich the soil! This is not because the Italians are "lazy"-"lazy Italians!" there never was a more unjust reproach borne by any people-the Italian peasants are the hardest-worked people I know. They tug and toil just to put bread in their mouths; they almost never taste meat. Last Sunday afternoon at the railroad station in Rome the floor and platform were covered with sleeping peasants waiting for the train to take them to their work. Each man carried round his neck seven loaves of coarse bread strung on a piece of rope, his week's rations,-dry bread, with a "finger" of wine to moisten it if he is lucky! It is evident that they are willing to work, and yet Italy is miserably poor! Somebody is blundering somewhere, I am too rank an outsider to know who. Some foreign writers lay every ill Italy endures to the heavy taxes the government has imposed. I am not so sure that what Italy has got in the last quarter century is not worth the price she has paid for it. There are abuses, steals, a bureaucracy, and a prodigious megalomania (swelled head), but the people are learning to read and write!
That reminds me of what I heard Sir William Vernon Harcourt say at a luncheon in Rome. Some one asked where he was staying. "I am stopping at the Hotel Royal opposite to the Ministry of Finance," he said. "Strange that Italy should have the largest finance building in the world and the smallest finances!" The folly of putting up these mammoth public buildings, these dreadful monuments to Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour, and the other great men who brought about the Risorgimento, is appalling; but Italy is realizing her mistakes; she is learning at an astonishing rate.
Woerishoven, Bavaria, September 20, 1894.
I have been banished by bronchitis from the Eden, Cadenabbia, and have come to Father Kneipp's Water-Cure, near Munich, although it is a little late in the season to take the "cure." It is de rigueur before seeing Father Kneipp to consult a regular practitioner, who pronounces whether or no you are a fit subject; people with weak hearts are not allowed to take the cure. I paid a small sum, became a member of the Kneipp Verein, received a blank-book-in which the medico wrote out a diagnosis-and a ticket stating the hour of my appointment with "the Pfarrer," as Father Kneipp is called. I arrived a little before time at an immense barrack of a place like the waiting-room at a railroad station. The door to the consulting-room was guarded by two functionaries who read aloud our numbers as our turn came, looking carefully at the tickets before letting any one enter.
"Einundzwanzig!" (twenty-one), and I passed into the long room and stood before Father Kneipp, like a prisoner at the bar. He is one of the most powerful-looking men I have ever seen; his eyes pierced me through and through. I handed him the book with the diagnosis. He read it, grunted, ruminated, bored me with a second auger glance, then dictated my course of treatment to one of his secretaries, a callow cherico who sat beside him at a long table with three or four other men.
I found out afterwards that they were young doctors studying his methods. Father Kneipp spoke to me rather sharply, going directly to the point. Never mind what he said, I deserved it, I shall not forget it, and, like Dr. Johnson, "I think to mend!" "Come again in a fortnight," he said suddenly. The consultation was over and I was ushered out. I had not reached the door when "Zweiundzwanzig," a crippled boy, a far more interesting case than mine, came in.
Father Kneipp dislikes women, ladies especially, me in particular, because no one had warned me not to wear gloves, a veil, and a good bonnet. If I had put an old shawl over my head and looked generally forlorn, he would have been kinder. Isn't that dear? His benevolence is of the aggressive type; he grudges time spent on rich people,-is only reconciled to them, in fact, because they offer up gifts in return for health, and in this way a great sanitarium has grown up where the prince is nearly as well treated as the peasant-but it is the peasant folk, his own people, that the Pfarrer loves! This is the only truly democratic community I have ever lived in,-a pure democracy governed by a benevolent despot! The despot is past seventy years old; he has an aldermanic figure, a rough peasant head, and extraordinary bristling white eyebrows, standing out a good two inches from his pent-house brows. His coloring is like an old English country squire's,-brick-red skin, bright blue eyes, and silver hair. He is a prelate; so his rusty black cassock is piped with purple silk, and he wears a tiny purple skull-cap. His two inseparables were with him, a long black cigar and a white Spitz dog....
The fortnight is almost up, the cough gone, the vitality come. Yesterday I went to hear one of the Father's health talks in the big, open hall, free to all. Good, practical common sense was what he gave us, nothing new or startling,-just the wholesome advice of a very wise old man. Enthusiasm and common sense are his weapons. After it was over we waited to see him come out. A group of bores hung on to him; one sentimentalist caught his hand and tried to kiss it, which so enraged the Pfarrer that he gave the fellow a slap!
Such people! If you...
