ITALIAN LABOURERS AND ENGLISH ARTISANS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3180, 7 September 1881, Page 4

ITALIAN LABOURERS AND ENGLISH ARTISANS.

, Italy is essentially a pastoral country. Those who would turn it into a manufacturing one'would be Us those who "would turn a taberhaele ol Giotto into a breeding hutch of swine. The people thrive on their pure ambient ah , • they pass their live 3 under their unsullied skies, they lore laughter, sons, and dance, and still with the pipe of Corydon and the smile of Adonis, welcome the harvest night and the vintage morn. Up in the hills and in the green places remote from cities, the old simple, contented pastoral life still prevails, and there the hnsbandman follows Christ and recites Tasso ; maybe he cannot lead the words of either. What of that? Eaoul Rigalt and Passamente, the murderer ProTost, and the murderous Virginie Domaine could all of them read. Were they the better of it ? In its simplicity, its freedom, its purity of family affection, and in its Greek-like habits of husbandry, I believe ■the unspoiled country life of Italy to be the best that remains to humanity on the face of the enrth. When the childish pettifoggers scream with puerile ecstasy at the sight of a tramway, of a steam thresher, they know not all the beauty, content, and pious peace that they destroy, only to enrich some Scotch contractor or some Hebrew usurer Compare the mechanic of Wakefield or Blackburn, with the pall of black soot hung for ever between him and the sun, his superficial repetitions of Darwin and Bradlaugh urged as evidence of an enlightened mind; compare his automatic, hideous, toil, his hard hatred of all classes save his own wilderness of dark, foulecented streets, his stench of smoke, his talk of agnosticism and equality, narrow ac the routine of his life ; his shallow sophisms, his club, his strikes, his tommy-shop ; compare him and these with the Italian laborer of the Liicheso hills, or the Santa Fiora forests, or Viil d' Arno farms—rising to see the glorious sky glow like a summer imsb, dwelling in his wide, stout, stone-built house, old as the troi'B n-round him, following; in their course as the seasons Hian<jc, his manly and healthful labor* mipinir and sowing, and mowing, guidijijj hi* oxen through the vines, having for ever around him the gladdest and most graciom nature. At noomidn sitting down as the patriarch sat amidst his family and laborers to a homely plenty ; at eventide resting to see the youths and maidens dance, and listen to the old pastoral love songs sung to the thrum of the guitar, or the story of the Gerusalemme Libersvta, passed down by word of mouth from sire to son Compare these two lives—they are no fanoy pictures ; you may see either of them any day you will—and tell me whether I am wrong, when I dread as the plague was dreaded of old, the false teachers who, to fill their own purses, tried to persuade the Southern peasant to covet the Northern workmen, who try to say gas is fairer than the sun, &o. Let me give but one example of the delightful intelligence which the m-\v schools nre striving to replace with tlie scientific , smattering of the factory and foundry mechanic, and I will weary you no more. In a letter published in 1859 to the celebrated Tommaseo, Professor Giullianni narrates the story of a woman called Beatrice in the Pistoiese Apenines—a woman he knew well, a poor, hard-working, countrybred creature, who knew not a single letter of the alphabet, but who improvised on the death of her beloved son, in a passion of grief, the most perfeot poem in the always difficult oitave. This woman was but one among others, who all had, in a greater or less degree, this grand poetic faculty and harmony of ear, and who, when asked to teach their poem to a stranger, answered with a smile. " Volefco intfwler lo mio 'mpirars ? Andar per o Rtiirmene a zappurre." What can the communal schools substitute for that, one-half-i<o ennobling, so inspiriting, so sublime as those natural bursts of song amidst the soltitudes of the everlasting hills ? —The Tillage Commune, by Ouida.