I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on scaling
the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made out at a point
much nearer its summit than its base the gleam of a dizzily-perched
white sea-gazing front which I knew for my particular landmark and which
promised so much that it would have been welcome to keep even no
more than half. Let me instantly say that it kept still more than it
promised, and by no means least in the way of leaving far below it the
worst of the outbreak of restorations and breweries. There is a road at
present to the upper village, with which till recently communication was
all by rude steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling on
the flints; one of those fine flights of construction which the
great road-making “Latin races” take, wherever they prevail, without
advertisement or bombast; and even while I followed along the face of
the cliff its climbing consolidated ledge, I asked myself how I could
think so well of it without consistently thinking better still of
the temples of beer so obviously destined to enrich its terminus. The
perfect answer to that was of course that the brooding tourist is never
bound to be consistent. What happier law for him than this very one,
precisely, when on at last alighting, high up in the blue air, to
stare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced little by little the
beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, reserved for himself,
and took in the stupendous picture? For here above all had the thought
and the hand come from far away--even from _ultima Thule_, and yet were
in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that
the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of the
place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual perspective as a
remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. If what had finally,
with infinite patience, passion, labour, taste, got itself done there,
was like some supreme reward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect
after long delays, was it not verily in _ultima Thule_ that the vow
would have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enough
nursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give, you must
doubtless either be a rare _raffine_ or a rare genius, a sophisticated
Norseman or just a Gabriele d’ Annunzio.
All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and the
following, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrous cluster and
dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries, arbours, arcades,
long white ambulatories and vertiginous points of view. The greatest
charm of all perhaps was that, thanks to the particular conditions, she
seemed to abound, to overflow, in directions in which I had never yet
enjoyed the chance to find her so free. The indispensable thing was
therefore, in observation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard,
to recognise that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the same stroke,
it was immensely suggestive. It dropped into one’s lap, naturally, at
the end of an hour or two, the little white flower of its formula: the
brooding tourist, in other words, could only continue to brood till he
had made out in a measure, as I may say, what was so wonderfully the
matter with him. He was simply then in the presence, more than ever yet,
of the possible poetry of the personal and social life of the south, and
the fun would depend much--as occasions are fleeting--on his arriving
in time, in the interest of that imagination which is his only field
of sport, at adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this, his
obscure and special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on the morrow,
with the long, human hum of the bright, hot day and filled up the golden
cup with questions and answers. The feast of St. Antony, the patron of
the upper town, was the one thing in the air, and of the private beauty
of the place, there on the narrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias
and above the blue gulfs, all comers were to be made free.