The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

Oscar Wilde remarks with truth: Nature is not man's lacquey, and has no
preoccupation about his more commonplace comforts.  These he gives
himself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things
carefully provided by self-love?  But when that farouche Nature, who
has never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of
hinting his wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of his
form and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes lets
him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him suspect
further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand--then man
becomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness, and a
favour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewith his
tailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool.

BY THE RAILWAY SIDE

My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires
brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods.  I
had come out of Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep
country with its profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with
olive-trees, between the flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the
country through the which there sounds the twanging Genoese language, a
thin Italian mingled with a little Arabic, more Portuguese, and much
French.  I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous
in its vowels set in emphatic l's and m's and the vigorous soft
spring of the double consonants.  But as the train arrived its noises
were drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I was not to hear again
for months--good Italian.  The voice was so loud that one looked for the
audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done to
every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity?  The
tones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often
passion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to
make good judges think it a mere counterfeit.  Hamlet, being a little
mad, feigned madness.  It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry,
so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form.  Thus
even before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they were
spoken by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is
convincing in elocution.
When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting
blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of the
type that grows stout and wears whiskers.  The man was in bourgeois
dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small station
building, shaking his thick fist at the sky.  No one was on the platform
with him except the railway officials, who seemed in doubt as to their