Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to the full
all the charming _riguardi_--to use their own good word--in which our
friends _could_ abound, was, that afternoon, in the extraordinary temple
of art and hospitality that had been benignantly opened to me. Hither,
from three o’clock to seven, all the world, from the small in particular
to the smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, and here, from the
first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks of purple wine
were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, the thirsty, they were
three hundred, they were unending; but the draughts they drank were
neither countable nor counted. This boon was dispensed in a long,
pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the blue
of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in,
between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and
Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the
middle of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the
long arm of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida,
the stricken Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grand air of
it all was in one’s very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too
numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with
every brown, mild figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of
the great flask, every shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding
its touch to the impression. What was the secret of the surprising
amenity?--to the essence of which one got no nearer than simply by
feeling afresh the old story of the deep interfusion of the present with
the past. You had felt that often before, and all that could, at the
most, help you now was that, more than ever yet, the present appeared
to become again really classic, to sigh with strange elusive sounds of
Virgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows how little they would in truth
have had to say to it, but we yield to these visions as we must, and
when the imagination fairly turns in its pain almost any soft name is
good enough to soothe it.
It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secret of
the amenity was “style”; for what in the world was the secret of style,
which you might have followed up and down the abysmal old Italy for so
many a year only to be still vainly calling for it? Everything, at any
rate, that happy afternoon, in that place of poetry, was bathed and
blessed with it. The castle of Barbarossa had been on the height behind;
the villa of black Tiberius had overhung the immensity from the right;
the white arcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet
old “piece” of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust,
some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble
image, some bronze that had roughly resisted. Our host, if we came to
that, had the secret; but he could only express it in grand practical
ways. One of them was precisely this wonderful “afternoon tea,” in which
tea only--_that_, good as it is, has never the note of style--was not to
be found. The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough,
and the extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this,
it may be asked, was the element of “horror” that I have spoken of as
sensible?--what obsession that was not charming could find a place in
that splendid light, out of which the long summer squeezes every secret
and shadow? I’m afraid I’m driven to plead that these evils were exactly
in one’s imagination, a predestined victim always of the cruel, the
fatal historic sense. To make so much distinction, how much history had
been needed!--so that the whole air still throbbed and ached with it,
as with an accumulation of ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless,
condemning them to blanch for ever in the general glare and grandeur,
offering them no dusky northern nook, no place at the friendly fireside,
no shelter of legend or song.
V
My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white
galleries--and how he understood the effect and the “value” of
whiteness!--two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the
Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom he had found
himself justified in trusting to deal with their problem honourably
and to bring forth something as different as possible from the usual
compromise of commerce. They had brought forth, in especial, for him, a
copy of the young resting, slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure
delight to live with, and they had come over from Naples on St. Antony’s
eve, as they had done the year before, to report themselves to their
patron, to keep up good relations, to drink Capri wine and to join
in the tarantella. They arrived late, while we were at supper; they
received their welcome and their billet, and I am not sure it was not
the conversation and the beautiful manners of these obscure young men
that most fixed in my mind for the time the sense of the side of life
that, all around, was to come out strongest. It would be artless,
no doubt, to represent them as high types of innocence or even of
energy--at the same time that, weighing them against _some_ ruder folk
of our own race, we might perhaps have made bold to place their share
even of these qualities in the scale. It was an impression indeed never
infrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these days, first have felt
the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend at Sorrento--a
friend who had good-naturedly “had in,” on his wondrous terrace, after
dinner, for the pleasure of the gaping alien, the usual local quartette,
violins, guitar and flute, the musical barber, the musical tailor,
sadler, joiner, humblest sons of the people and exponents of Neapolitan
song. Neapolitan song, as we know, has been blown well about the world,
and it is late in the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. That,
however, was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on the
Sorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of the present
outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it has been a tradition,
in intercourse, positively to please.
The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barber and
tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend’s company,
was something that could be trusted to make the brooding tourist brood
afresh--to say more to him in fact, all the rest of the second occasion,
than everything else put together. The happy address, the charming
expression, the indistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in
short, of vulgarity and brutality--these things easily became among
these people the supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopes
and fears as to the place that, with the present general turn of affairs
about the globe, is being kept for them. They are perhaps what the races
politically feeble have still most to contribute--but what appears to
be the happy prospect for the races politically feeble? And so the
afternoon waned, among the mellow marbles and the pleasant folk---the
purple wine flowed, the golden light faded, song and dance grew free and
circulation slightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained and
finally was exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song, and
nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation--the former,
in the piazzetta, were to come later; it was civilisation and amenity. I
took in the greater picture, but I lost nothing else; and I talked with
the contadini about antique sculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse;
and I had plenty to think of. So it was I was quickened to remember
that we others, we of my own country, as a race politically _not_
weak, had--by what I had somewhere just heard--opened “three hundred
‘saloons’” at Manila.