|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Book, page 361 / 392 it here, was quite as good. So was the story of William Harvey, "_the girt big Somersetshire man_" and what he did in a fight with Spanish Pilots in the Bilbao River. Of this story, told to me in the broadest Somersetshire dialect by a Somersetshire boatman who was present at the fight, I cannot resist quoting one passage: "They were all dressed in white and fighting with their long knives. But William Harvey, who was six feet six high, got hold of the axe we always kept on deck for cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over with that. And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the bodies into the water." Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: "And she never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own mother." The personal pronouns are slightly mixed, but the story might well develop like a Greek play. Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four most beautiful human beings seen by me in the course of my life. Strangest of all, and perhaps most beautiful of all, using beauty in rather a strained sense, was the man alluded to in my dedication,--the man my wife and I saw in the Jews' Garden at Jahoni. We were resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only be described in the famous words, "Beauty that shocks you." Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not, obtain any information. The creature was like the figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this amazing being. Far more really beautiful, far more interesting, and far more impressive was a woman whom I and my younger brother met with in a tram-car outside the Porta del Popolo in Rome. Up till then I had spent much time in wondering why the Italian population had declined in the matter of good-
|
Knowledgerush Search
|
|
Contact Us
| Privacy Statement & Terms of Use
|