The “other” afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include in them,
for that matter, various mornings scarce less charmingly sacred to
memory--were occasions of another and a later year; a brief but all
felicitous impression of Naples itself, and of the approach to it from
Rome, as well as of the return to Rome by a different wonderful way,
which I feel I shall be wise never to attempt to “improve on.” Let
me muster assurance to confess that this comparatively recent and
superlatively rich reminiscence gives me for its first train of
ineffable images those of a motor-run that, beginning betimes of a
splendid June day, and seeing me, with my genial companions, blissfully
out of Porta San Paolo, hung over us thus its benediction till the
splendour had faded in the lamplit rest of the Chiaja. “We’ll go by the
mountains,” my friend, of the chariot of fire, had said, “and we’ll come
back, after three days, by the sea”; which handsome promise flowered
into such flawless performance that I could but feel it to have closed
and rounded for me, beyond any further rehandling, the long-drawn rather
indeed than thick-studded chaplet of my visitations of Naples--from the
first, seasoned with the highest sensibility of youth, forty years ago,
to this last the other day. I find myself noting with interest--and just
to be able to emphasise it is what inspires me with these remarks--that,
in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking,
considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general,
of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful,
a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and
sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease
in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to
add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate,
filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the minor notes
of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here.
Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quiet
and amply interspaced Naples--in tune with itself, no harsh jangle of
_forestieri_ vulgarising the concert. I seemed in fact, under the blaze
of summer, the only stranger--though the blaze of summer itself was,
for that matter, everywhere but a higher pitch of light and colour and
tradition, and a lower pitch of everything else; even, it struck me,
of sound and fury. The appeal in short was genial, and, faring out to
Pompeii of a Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I
can recall, the sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of
the lengthening shadows, absolutely alone. The impression remains
ineffaceable--it was to supersede half-a-dozen other mixed memories, the
sense that had remained with me, from far back, of a pilgrimage always
here beset with traps and shocks and vulgar importunities, achieved
under fatal discouragements. Even Pompeii, in fine, haunt of _all_ the
cockneys of creation, burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as
clear as glass, or as the glow of a pale topaz, and the particular
cockney who roamed without a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on
Roman slabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman void, his
consciousness really at last of some good to him, could open himself
as never before to the fond luxurious fallacy of a close communion, a
direct revelation. With which there were other moments for him not less
the fruit of the slow unfolding of time; the clearest of these again
being those enjoyed on the terrace of a small island-villa--the island
a rock and the villa a wondrous little rock-garden, unless a better term
would be perhaps rock-salon, just off the extreme point of Posilippo
and where, thanks to a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic,
through another sublime afternoon, on the wave of a magical wand. Here,
as happened, were charming wise, original people even down to delightful
amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for
figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on a Renaissance plaque; and
above all, on the part of the general prospect, a demonstration of the
grand style of composition and effect that one was never to wish to see
bettered. The way in which the Italian scene on such occasions as
this seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect _idea_
alone--idea of beauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all
accidents merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and
to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has just
incalculably _been_, remains for ever the secret and the lesson of the
subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the heart of
the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City,
the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands
incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become
of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus,
what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and
floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to
take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, _all_ the
responsibilities.