that vividly modern and restless place called Naples, can be recaptured
without effort something of the early days of the world, and from the
steamer one steps out of all the responsibilities and codes which the
stupidity and wickedness of mankind have built up, into paganism and
fairyland. The gray walls compounded of priggishness and puritanism (yet
knitted together with the mortar of good intentions and morality) with
which this civilized century has fortressed itself fall as the walls of
Jericho fell at the blast of the trumpet, and there is left sunlight and
sea and the beauty of the seven days of creation, which was pronounced
by God to be good.
The red, waxlike flowers of the pomegranate are in full bloom, and as
evening falls they glow like hot coals over the rough stone walls that
bound the path up to Capri, where the green lizards slip in and out. The
smell of the vines is in the air, heavy and warm, and once or twice as I
walked through the dusky trellises my heart hammered in me, for I knew
that but a little more and I should see Dionysus himself, with the
vine-leaves in his hair, and delicate hand holding the cup that brimmed
with purple; and at noonday often have I all but seen in the
briar-decked clefts of rock the great god Pan himself, to the music of
whose fluting the whole world dances. Up and down their steep paths,
with head erect beneath the wine-jars, walk the maidens of Capri, and
something of Aphrodite lives in their wine-painted faces and moulded
bosoms; and young Apollo, bare-footed and splashed to the knee in the
trodden vats, strips the nut-husks off with his gleaming teeth, and
looks at the passer-by with brown soft eye. He has pushed a pomegranate
flower behind his ear, and his shirt is open, so that the smooth brown
breast is seen. What thoughts fill day by day that gay, lazy Italian
brain? He is not religious, although he goes to Mass most regularly,
for from Mass he passes back again to paganism; and he only goes there
because he is a child and is vaguely afraid--or would be if he did not
go to Mass--of what the priests have told him about a remote bogie--for
so God seems to him--who can make him burn in unquenchable fires if he
does not. Nor does he weary his mind with any question of morality or
code of ethics: the sun is warm to him, or, if the sun be hot, the shade
is cool, and the almond fruit is sweet, and the fumes of the fermenting
vats mysteriously exciting, and the maiden with whom he is in treaty to
wed very fair and loving, and her dowry is good. And for the passer-by
he has his bright smile, and the expression of his hope that I have
enjoyed my bathe. No, he has not bathed to-day, for the work of the
vintage is heavy, and he is paid by the hour. Ah, a cigarette? The
signor is too kind. Will not the signor take his pomegranate flower?
Indeed the signor will.
Day by day this sunny and innocent paganism gets more possession of me,
and day by day the beauty of that which I saw at Bayreuth glows more
brightly. Yesterday, about evening, a sudden summer squall came storming
over from Posillippo, gleaming with lightning and riotous with thunder,
and to me it was Wotan who steered from the north. On Monte Solaro the
Valkyries awaited his coming, and when the whistling winds had passed
away over our heads, while the house shuddered, and the moon again rose
in a velvet sky with stars swarming thick round her, I knew that on the
mountain-top Brunehilde slept within a ring of fire, waiting for the man
who should claim her with his kiss. But the morning again to-day was
very clear and hot, and instead of going up Mount Solaro, as I had
intended, I went, as usual, down to the Bagno, a white pebbly beach with
pockets of sand to lie on. I took with me a basket of figs and a flask
of wine stoppered with vine-leaves, and my friend took a book which we
often read and a straw case of cigarettes. And together we swam through
the chrysoprase of sunlit sea far out to a brown, seaweed-covered rock.
The water was very deep round it, and fathoms down something shone very
brightly with wavering, subaqueous gleam, and, half laughing at myself,
I dived and dived--for I knew it was the Rhinegold that shone
there--until I could dive no more. Yet still I could not get deep
enough. Then, having rested, we swam back, and lay on pockets of hot
sand, and drank from the leaf-stoppered bottle, and ate the purple of
the figs; and my friend read in the book which he had brought, beginning
at the seventh chapter, and to this effect:
‘Did I seriously believe that that contemplation of God which is the
prime duty laid on us by religion must, or even could, legitimately give
us any touch of sadness of whatever kind, I would throw religion away as
heedlessly as I throw away the end of a smoked-out cigarette, for I have
no use for it. Yet although on every side, and most of all in every
pulpit, I see the lamentable Puritan jowl, and hear the lamentable
Puritan whine, which bids me look with horror on the sin of the world
and with sorrow on its sufferings, I do not for a moment believe that
this impious gabble is the result of religion, but rather of grossest
irreligion, on the part of its exponents. For me, I know that the
contemplation of God is my duty, and if I make it my whole and
absorbing duty I cannot go very far astray. For above all things is God
love, and above all things is He beauty, and the love which engirdles
Him joins without break to the human love which it is our duty always to
give and take, giving with both hands and taking by the armful. So, too,
His beauty joins without break to the beauty of all He has made, and in
the golden hair of women and in the rose-petal, in the smooth swift
limbs of youth and in the faceted diamond, in the curve of a girl’s lips
and in the rose-flushed clouds, in the blue chalice of the sky of
morning, equally and everywhere must we look for and absorb the beauty
which is implanted there.
‘It is here that Christianity, with its mournful, man-invented morality,
has gone so far astray from its Founder that many Christians turn from
beauty as if beauty was evil, instead of ever seeking it and worshipping
it, find it where they will, until the dross of their gross minds is
burned up in that fine fire. Hence, too, sprang--by “hence,” I mean from
impious Puritanism--such phrases as the “temptations and dangers of
physical beauty,” whereas to the man whose mind is set on God it is by
and through beauty that the uttermost death-stroke is dealt to the
writhing earthworm of carnalism. For the truth is that no beauty of
soul, and no completeness, was ever framed on the mutilation or
starvation of self, and at the Last Day the gray and pallid ascetic will
find that what he thought was virtue, and what he taught as
self-control, was sheer darkness of soul and purblind vision.
‘It is this that must be cast away. We are people that sit in darkness,
content that our religion should make us sad, and as such we have a
lesson humbly to learn from paganism, and in particular from the
paganism of the Greeks, whose hierarchy of gods were enthroned in
brightness, and the name thereof was Beauty. And that Beauty, the search
of which to them was worship and prayer and praise, they found
everywhere: in the sunlight and the blue dome of heaven; in the crisp,
curly acanthus leaf which they set to twine about the capitals of their
marble-hewn columns and on the necks of the vases of the dead; in the
radiance of jewels and in the tragedies of heroes; and above all in the
beauty of the human form. Disfigured and astray their worship often
went, and it wore strange garbs, but through all its sin and its
misconceptions, its thousand errors and distortions, we can see
gleaming, deep below, the bright shining of its truth. And this, to my
mind, gleams less brightly in the sadder worship of to-day.
‘For I doubt very much whether anybody is in the least benefited by the
actual sorrow or repentance of anyone, though no doubt such--especially
to sour and brooding natures--is necessary. But the best repentance, if
one has sufficient vitality, will be momentary, a fiery sword-thrust,
which will leave no ache or throb behind. It is better, I dare say, that
a man should suffer the fires of remorse for years rather than that he
should not suffer them at all, but I think that the man who is capable
of throwing his remorse off and starting fresh and unwounded is the more
Godlike creature, for the reason that it is infinitely better to be
happy and smiling than to go frowning through the world. For sin is
seldom born of a happy impulse, stare as you may, unless from a happy
impulse which has been, so to speak, shut up in the dark and has gone
putrid.
‘And here in this divine place’ (the book I am quoting from was written
at Athens), ‘where beauty is thrown broadcast over all one sees, and
happiness is so easy, it seems to me to follow as a corollary that
things which a Northern and gloomy people consider wrong are less wrong.
For supposing in foggy London every shopkeeper tried to cheat one, one
would say that the middle class was going to the dogs. Quite so--it
would be. But the middle class is not in the least going to the dogs
here. Why not? For a variety of reasons: partly because there is more
sun here and no fog, and because the Parthenon is near at hand. Ah, yes,
indeed it is so: Gaiety covers a multitude of sins, and while they are
covered, Beauty blots them out.
‘O beautiful God of this beautiful world, let me make somebody laugh
to-day. Amen.’
At that point I laughed.
‘So his prayer is heard,’ said my friend. ‘Have you eaten all the figs
while I have been reading?’
‘Yes; but don’t be unhappy. Remember it is your duty to be happy. You
may have the last cigarette. No--we’ll toss for it.’
‘I’ll be shot if we do!’ said he.
‘Well, I’ll cut it in half.’
‘So that neither of us gets any,’ said he. ‘Give it me;’ and he very
rudely snatched at it. Here ensued a scuffle, and, the bowels of the
cigarette being scattered about the beach, neither of us got any, and
the occasion gave rise to moral reflections. Also immoral ones. Then
peace and plenty descended in the shape of a friend also coming down to
bathe with a supply of fresh tobacco, and the sun was warm again and the
sea blue. Then my friend (whom I must call Toby, because he objects to
his real name being known, saying that I am certain to keep all the
beautiful remarks for myself and give him all the idiocy) held forth:
‘The man is shallow,’ he said; ‘it is only a gospel of surfaces he
preaches, and you think it profound merely because he loads it with
grave words. I have done for years exactly what he preaches: I have
succeeded in being always happy and usually gay, and I spend my whole
life in looking for what I consider beautiful. Yet what did you call me
last night? A second-hand sensualist, I think.’
‘Very likely. That is because you are not strenuous. Your pursuit of
beauty must be passionate, and the pursuit must be an act of worship.
Your pursuit of beauty is not an act of worship; it is more like sucking
sweets.’
Toby laughed loudly and idiotically.
‘Or eating all the figs,’ said he, and the discussion ended.
It is close on noon, and only the faintest breeze is stirring. The bay
is silent and waveless, except that at intervals a ripple falls like the
happy sigh of some beautiful basking creature on to the hot, white
pebbles of the beach. There, like a living sapphire, lies the dear sea,
the thing in this world I love best and understand best, though I do not
understand it at all. Never have I seen it so luminous as it is to-day;
you would say that the sunlight of centuries had been lit in its depths.
Gray rocks run out from the precipitous land, fringed with seaweed, and
under the water the seaweed shows purple. A brown-sailed fishing-boat
lies becalmed a mile out, and across the bay Naples sparkles white and
remote, and only the thin line of smoke streaming upwards from Vesuvius
speaks of the fierce and everlasting stir of forces which underlie the
world. In the thickets which come down to the water’s edge of this
tideless sea there is now no sound of life, though an hour ago they were
resonant with the whirring of the cicalas. The lizards have crept out in
the stillness and bask on the white stones, as still as if once more
Orpheus charmed them; and high above me a hawk, with wings motionless,
floats slowly, in seeming sleep, down some breeze in the upper air.
And what if my nameless author is right? What if--this is the
upshot--happiness is our first duty? It is certainly not true that if
you are good you are happy; but may it not be true that by being happy
you are in some degree good? The Puritan interpretation of Christianity
has had a fair trial, and, indeed, it seems to have made but a poor job
out of it. What is the result of all these sadnesses and renunciations?
Nothing but starved lives and unrealized ideals. Such self-denial is
touching, beautiful in theory, and based, of course, on Christ’s
teaching. But it is based awry if it brings sadness with it, if it sees
in beauty only a lure to lead the soul astray, rather than the signpost
which points by no winding road, but a royal highway, straight to God.
And that road resounds with praise, and the birds of St. Francis sit in
the pleasant boughs of the trees that grow beside it, and the dear saint
smiles at them, and says: ‘Sing, my sisters, and praise the Lord.’ And
at his bidding they fill their throats with bubbling song, and thank God
for their warm feathers and the green habitations He has builded for
them. Then St. Francis, so the legend tells us, sits down at table with
St. Blaise and others, the friends of St. Francis, and feeds his dear
birds, so that they become very strong. That saint is more to my mind
than that foolish fellow Stylites, or the dour St. Bernard, who, being
plagued with the flies on a hot day, excommunicated them, and they all
dropped down dead. For love, joy, and peace are the gifts of the Spirit,
but we are too much given to let the joy take care of itself, to check
it even, as if salvation was clothed in sackcloth.
Happiness is a home product. We cannot import it into ourselves, nor by
multiplying our pleasures can we come one whit nearer to it. But by
being dull, by being slow to perceive, or having perceived to receive,
we can, and we often do, succeed in closing the doors of our souls to
it. Yet, though it comes not from without, nor is it the sum or product
of any pleasures, our soul must sit with doors and windows open to catch
if it be but one-millionth of the myriad sweet and beautiful things that
stir and shine about us, or else, as in the darkness and stagnation of
some closed house, dust and airlessness overlay us. For there is nothing
in the world, except only that which the sin and folly of man have
wrought, which is not wholesome and innocent. It is our grossness which
makes things gross, our rebellion which makes us say that in beauty
there lurk any seeds or germs that can ripen into or go to form anything
that is not beautiful.
‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and love is duty:
What further can be sought for or declared?’
* * * * *
Seraphina and Francesco, with outside help when they want it, are the
domestic staff of Toby’s house. They are engaged to be married, and, in
fact, the marriage is going to come off in three months’ time.
Domestically speaking, this is an ideal arrangement, because if
Seraphina’s work happens on any day to be heavy (she cooks, though I
cannot call her a cook) Francesco delights to help her; while, on the
other hand, if her work is light, she lends her aid in the cleaning and
embellishment of the house, for thus she is with her _promesso_. And in
the evening, as often as not, when their work is finished, they stroll
and sit in the garden as we do, and with a little encouragement join in
our talk, and tell us the strange legends of the saints common to this
countryside, or with bated breath speak of the days of the Emperor
Tiberius, who still is the bogie of the island, so that a mother even
to-day, if a child is troublesome, warns it that Tiberius is coming.
High on the eastward end of Capri stand the ruins of one of his palaces;
the walls are built to the sheer edge of the precipitous rock, and it
was from here that he used to hurl down his victims when he was
satiated with them, flinging them headlong, a glimmer of white limbs
that turned over and over in the air till they splashed on the rocks
three hundred feet below. Round this crag still hovers some poisonous
breath of crime; sudden shrieks are heard of nights, so Francesco says,
and shadows pace in the shadows. Here, too, that dark soul used to walk
up and down in his corridor of mirrors, so that he could see that none
came up behind him with the assassin’s knife; weary of life, he yet
clung to it with a maniac force; longing for death, he fenced himself
from it with a thousand guards. ‘And on us,’ said Francesco, when he
told us of these things, with the poet that lurks in the Italian blood
suddenly inspiring his tongue--‘on us, signor, those same stars look
down that beheld Tiberius. Yet they do not care.’
In this manner we were sitting in the garden on the evening of the day
which I have been speaking of. There had been some small _festa_ in the
town, and Seraphina, to make herself the more comely in her lover’s
eyes, had put on, when her kitchen work was over, her _festa_ clothes,
even though they would only glimmer for an hour in the dusk, before she
went to bed. Her olive skin, flushed with the warm tints of wind and
sun, was dusky in the moonlight, and her brown eyes, underneath her
thin, straight eyebrows, were big and soft, as if made of velvet. But
all the gaiety of the South was set in her laughing mouth, and her teeth
were a band of ivory in the red of pomegranate. Her arms were bare above
the elbows almost to the shoulder, and beneath the smooth satiny skin,
as she moved them in Southern gesticulation at some story she was
telling us, I could see the swift and supple play of the muscles. Round
us the night was pricked with a thousand remote stars, and the warm,
languid air stirred in the bushes and sighed among the vineyards like a
lingering caress. Now and then a handful of hot air would be tossed over
us from the veranda, where the sun had grilled the flagstones all the
afternoon; now and then a breath of coolness--a handful of air that had
been shaded all day by the thick vine-leaves--stirred from its place and
refreshed us. Below gleamed the lights of Capri, and the murmur of the
town stole softly to us, or a gay stanza would be flung into the air
from some homeward-going peasant as he passed up the cobbled ways. To
the north a great emptiness of gray showed where the Gulf of Naples
basked beneath the moon, and high up on the horizon a thin necklace of
light lying along the edge of the sea showed the town. This hour of warm
night, especially with such a setting, is, to my mind, the most animal
of all. In the moon-dusk a thousand subtle scents and hints float round
one, not consciously perceived, but exciting to the primeval animal
instincts which æons of evolution have not yet eradicated from our
nature; and at such an hour the beast within us, prowling, predatory,
hot on its slinking errands, is more than ever dominant.
Soon Toby got up, stretching himself.
‘Mail-day to-morrow,’ he said, ‘and I have two letters to write. Just
get me some paper and envelopes, Francesco; there were none this
morning.’
Francesco jumped up.
‘Eh, signor, I forgot,’ he said; ‘there are none in the house. I will
run over to Capri; the shops are still open. Two minutes only;’ and he
vaulted over the wall into the road.
Toby strolled towards the house.
‘Are you coming in?’ he said to me over his shoulder.
‘Yes, in ten minutes,’ I answered, and he disappeared.
Seraphina rose also, resting her weight for a moment on her arm.
‘It is good beneath the stars in the evening, is it not?’ she said. ‘I
must go in. Happy dreams, signor!’
‘No; tell me one more story about Tiberius,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Surely the signor is like a child,’ she said: ‘he is so fond of
stories. Will he not tell me an English story for a change?’
‘About what?’
‘About yourself or your friends--about your customs in England. I like
the ways of English folk;’ and she sat down again close to me,
eager-eyed, with smiling mouth.
Suddenly it seemed to me that the whole spirit of all I saw and felt
was changed. The soft, innocent Southern night was alive with voices. No
longer did a child sit by me, but a woman--dark-eyed like a stag,
intoxicating to the sense. Passion and desire, those headlong twins,
rushed down on me, with arms intertwined and purple-stained mouth,
chanting with a meaning that was new to me, ‘All is beauty, and knowing
this is love; and love----’ There she sat, exquisite, trembling between
girlhood and womanhood, the eternal riddle of life, to solve which men
have gladly died, and lightly dismissed honour, like a stale piece of
unlikely gossip. But----
‘It is mail-day to-morrow,’ I said, and I heard how unsteady was my
voice; ‘I also have letters to write.’
She rose at once.
‘Good-night, signor,’ she said, and turned to go to the house.
As she got further on her way, I think I would have given all I had for
her to turn back again, so that I might say--well, nothing particular,
but just let her guess, no more, that---- But she did not turn.
So, then, what of my gospel about beauty? It remains exactly where it
was, true, I believe, in every respect. Only in me, at any rate, there
lurks the beast. To-night he growled and pulled at his chain.
OCTOBER
I am come back again to the level uneventfulness of these pleasant days
with a great sense of having ‘come home’ continually with me. This
little stuccoed house with its little garden has become to me my
_angulus terræ_; the deep vibration of ‘home,’ incommunicable, and to
many unmeaning, is here; I can no longer imagine myself permanently
anywhere else. All day long I continually find, as it were, intimate
glances: the line of the downs, a group of trees, or a corner of my own
room catches my eye as one catches the eye of a friend across a roomful
of acquaintances. That glance says nothing in particular--it only means
‘I am I, you are you’--but it is only between friends that such a glance
can ever pass; soul beckons to soul with gesture invisible to others,
and a smile answers it, for it is friends who are our anchor in this
swift-rushing stream of days and years: secure there, though time
eddies in froth and flying spray about our bows, it does not whirl us
away, straw and flotsam, down the racing flood. And above us, when we
look up from our anchorage through the flying wrack of storm-cloud and
torn fringes of wind-swept vapour, there glimmer the steadfast and
immutable stars.
I left Capri, as you will have guessed, somewhat in a hurry; in fact, I
firmly and speedily ran away as hard as I could. All September, so I see
now, I had been living in the flimsiest paradise of a fool. I had
thought it was possible to detach one’s self so utterly from the joys
and frailties of the human race that one could take any liberties one
chose, look at and live in beauty, and cease to be man. Then suddenly
the flesh twitched me, and like the flowers of Klingsor’s garden my
sexless paradise fell in red ruin of autumn leaf about my ears. For me,
anyhow, such a paradise was not possible, and I had--only just--the
sense to see that it was better to live decently and dully
than--otherwise.
So I took ship at Naples and came home by sea, for why one should shut
one’s self up in a grilling box of scarlet velvet and grind along a
steel path to the din of rolling wheels, when the divine waterways are
at the door, is more than I ever could imagine. Two moments of the
voyage I shall never forget.