the leading citizen of the town. In a region where petty politics hold sway and political honors are too much esteemed, the scholar, who has nothing to do with politics, is revered as the wise man of the community. The people do not understand his work nor the contents of his museum. But if any one of them finds a vase or a terra-cotta head when he is plowing or digging, he carries it to the scholar proudly with an air of great mystery and importance. He knows all about it, they seem to say. And moreover he, who understands and cherishes these mysterious objects even when they are broken to pieces, meets them on an even footing and concerns himself with their affairs-their crops, their children, their beasts, and that greatest of burdens, their taxes. He is vitally interested in their schools; he helps them in their perennial struggle against malaria; he discusses with them their grievances against the Government; and they know that he writes articles for the newspapers in which he attempts to enlighten their representatives in Parliament about their needs and their sufferings and to question the wisdom of pouring money into Africa when the South lacks roads and the land is arid for lack of irrigation. Above all, he is not an importation from some center of learning but a native of the place. He lives on the small estate owned by his family for generations. His son is studying in Naples to go on with the same work in the same spot. From his few acres he makes a comfortable living for which his stipend from the Government would not suffice. He is one of them in his manner of life, with a superiority of knowledge which they respect. He, on his side, understands the people and he loves the children. His manner of life is theirs, yet with a difference. The brightest garden in the town is his. He knows every flower of the countryside; he is familiar with the green valleys that are concealed among the mountains; he has climbed the highest peaks; he is in love with Calabria. He has his own grievances, to be He talked of the difficulty of living at such a distance from the world, in a deserto di cultura, in poverty of the means of study, with no money for excavations, with none to sympathize with him in his work. He lamented that the railroad service is so deplorable as to make the single line along the coast of little value to the country, and that the interior, which is rich in resources and mar sure. velous for its beauty, is unknown or forgotten. Yet he speaks with pride of "my Calabria”. Knowing its record from pre-historic times to the present, he is proud of its history; having explored its deepest recesses, he is proud of its beauty; believing that his people are capable of hard work, if given a fair chance, he is proud of its potential power. He is not lightly optimistic about the future. He does not share the world's illusion that Southern Italy is a land favored by nature, sacred to the goddess of fertility, blessed by benign Demeter with abundant crops and sprinkled with flowers by Persephone, and that its degradation is due to the Bourbons and Barons and the relaxing influences of the climate. He knows only too well that the struggle for life on that southern coast has been a bitter one from time immemorial, because of the construction of the land and the atmospheric conditions. winter rains and the summer droughts he counts as more important than the periodic destruction of earthquakes and volcanoes, and he does not doubt that malaria was the determining cause of the short life of Greek civilization in Italy. The Some of these things he told us sadly, while we walked with him toward the foundations of a Greek temple at some distance from the town. And then his face changed suddenly and a light came into it as always happened when he was intent on some project —while he pronounced his belief that modern science can reverse the conditions and stamp out the disease. The artificial lake that is under construction, like the new reservoir of Sardinia, which will conserve the water of the mountains and turn it to irrigation and electrical power; the hundreds of new schools that are being opened; the mountain colonies where children are rescued from malarial districts and taught how to live; the agricultural colonies where boys are being trained to better methods of farming; he pointed to these signs that the tide is turning and that in the future the Calabrian peasant will not be driven to emigrate nor be found battering, as he does now, at the closed door of the once free and hospitable United States of America. "And why was this not done long ago?" I asked. "After all, you have a representative government. Has the proud Calabrian stock not made its voice heard in the Parliament?" "Politics!" he replied. "Politics, Signora, and a misunder standing that dates from the time of the Risorgimento. If the fastest engine in the world is expected to run with the slowest, neither one will be quite satisfied with the result." He stopped to tell me the name of a wildflower I had picked and then went on: "Garibaldi saw that it would not work. Many others saw it. But Italian Unity was a great idea and every practical consideration had to give way to that. And when you think that Northern Italy led all of Europe in the development of communal life, and that feudalism held out longest in Southern Italy, you can understand that the difficulties were great. The North began everything the North demanded everything—and the South has had to pay out of all proportion to its resources for the sake of our ideal, a united Italy. My friend from Rome, who was always looking beyond any situation to its larger aspect, remarked, characteristically: "The fastest engine almost went to destruction, along with the rest of modern civilization. Surely, if there is any place left behind and not yet blighted by the evils of industrialism, we ought to cherish it. We might make of that slower engine a more perfect instrument." "Precisely!" he exclaimed. "Ah! Signorina, I believe you share my devotion to Calabria, though you belong to Piedmont. It is unusual. Calabria is looked down upon by the Northerners. Yet we gave Italy her name and some of her most valued possessions. Do you know that just up there in those hills the learning of the Greeks was preserved when Rome was in the hands of the barbarians? The forest of Vallombrosa grew from seeds carried by the monks from our immemorial forest, the Sila; and in the same way ancient learning preserved in those hills by Boëtius and Cassiodorus was transferred to Saint Benedict's monastery for the future enlightenment of the world. You will see a monastery church when you climb to that hill town which is a Roman basilica and a Norman church in one. It is typical.' He was revealing wider and wider circles of interest. But I was sure that we had not yet touched the centre of his enthusiasm. I was still wondering why he seemed so young and so serene. I knew that he had lived and suffered; he had lost three sons. What was the secret? I wondered. What was the vital flame that kept him so alive and so alert and interested in everything? If it was the love of knowledge or of art, that must be starved in so dull a place. He had given no proof of any special talent; he had no reputation in the outside world. He seemed to have no overmastering imagination which might have transformed the routine of his small duties. I could not attribute the mysterious something that shone from his eyes to supreme domestic happiness. There must be something else. It was clear that he was not working for his own pleasure and ambition. One of his projects was the foundation of a GreekItalian College in a remote mountain settlement where the Greek language survives. He had made a study of the local idiom and convinced himself that it was not the dialect of a late immigration but a lineal descendant of the language of Pythagoras, the great philosopher and teacher of Magna Græcia. It was his idea that a college for the study of Greek literature and art in a region where so much of the language was a living thing would make the past one with the present. "Without the past," he would say, "and without hope for the future, humanity cannot exist. And what better thing could we do for the youth of today? It is a time of rebellion and discontent. Religion and philosophy no longer speak with authority to the conscience. There is a void in the life of the ideal. How better can we fill the void than by nourishing our youth upon the words and ideas of the greatest minds that ever expressed the aspirations of the human race?" He was aflame with his idea. The real man was speaking. But it was while he was showing us the treasures of the museum— and that only on our second visit-that I discovered his secret. It seemed a poor little collection at the first glance. Nothing stood out as supremely beautiful. There was nothing to compare with the marbles from Greek colonies in Italy which I had seen in Rome and Naples. One of the lesser rooms in any of the great museums would have matched this whole exhibit for interest and importance. But as the scholar talked of this mutilated statue, with its perfect lines, and of that fragment of a vase, representing a Dionysiac festival, and of that terra-cotta statuette between delicately carved Ionic columns, and that head of Demeter on a coin, I began to realize that the museum was rich in one respect and that made all the difference to the scholar; it was rich in its significance. It had the power to evoke a vision. The vision was evoked from the very earth on which we stood. For it was the site of one of the colonies of ancient Greece which sent philosophies and codes of law and the earliest forms of the drama to Athens and athletes and statues to Olympia, while they trafficked with the East and the West and exchanged grain for the products of Grecian art. In the neighborhood of this ugly town stood a world-famous temple, where travellers from the Ionian Sea paused in their journey and wealthy citizens brought, as votive offerings, the work of sculptors and painters and carvers in gold and ivory. "Here," said the scholar, "the genius of Greece was fused with the Italian genius, and art and philosophy, beauty and religion, raised the human spirit in a transcendent triumph of nature and imagination. I have collected these things myself. In solitude and silence, sustained by a passionate faith in the beauty and mystery of a marvellous past, I have restored to the light of the sun the Hellenic dreams of Italy." For him the He dreamed Grandiose, it sounded, and out of all proportion to the results of his work. But for the scholar it was the truth. few tombs he had found spoke a mystical language. of what still lay hidden, waiting for him to find it. of what had been as he rejoiced in the actual beauty of his few treasures. He dreamed of a new era when his people should return to their heritage. He was not A wanderer between two worlds; one dead, The other powerless to be born. He was busy at the daily task of transplanting the seed of the old world into the spirit of the new. But there is a curious thing about the scholar. With all of his hopes and dreams, he never makes known any of this to the outside world. Very few people come to this part of Italy. It is forgotten by tourists; by scholars it is studied chiefly in absentia. A famous Italian archeologist who has made out a whole theory about the Orphic rites from the inscriptions found there has never visited Calabria. But this man, who is studying Magna Græcia on one of the most interesting sites, never publishes anything. He |