Part 2

‘An irrepressible longing. It was first aroused in me, I think, by reading, in tender years, Arnold’s _History of Rome_, whereby I believed as firmly in the Palatine she-wolf, the leap into the Curtian Gulf, the Rape of the Sabine Women, and the nocturnal interviews of Numa and Egeria, as in any of the immediate facts of one’s schoolboy existence; nor did the iconoclastic criticism, with which one perforce made acquaintance later on, in any degree shake that cherished credulity. What romantic prose originated, was consummated by yet more wizard verse. To no mediæval scholar was Virgil more of a magician than to me, and not even Dante would say of him with more truth—

_Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore._

I kept repeating, long before I could translate them into action, the words addressed by Æneas to his immortal Mother, when she appeared to him in the guise of a huntress in the Carthaginian forest, _Italiam quaero patriam_; for already it seemed to be a second fatherland. And when, at length, the moment arrived that the longing could be indulged, the only words I could find to express my joy were—

_Tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas Ostendunt._

‘Stop, stop,’ said Lamia, ‘I wish I understood Latin, but you know I don’t.‘

‘Then,’ he replied, ‘do as I did before I first went to Italy, being then much of the age that you are now. I bought the best Italian grammar I could find, and worked at it as a schoolboy is made to work at the elementary rules of a dead language. I studied the dictionary in like manner; so that, when I went to the new land, I might not long feel quite a stranger there.’

‘The very thing I have been doing, until my brain seems a repository for the various inflections of the subjunctive mood; and, as Veronica corrects my pronunciation, I hope, by the time we reach Latium, to be more or less understanded of the people. But please do not let us concern ourselves with either my shortcomings or my accomplishments; but rather tell me, while I make you some coffee in this windless atmosphere, how you first went to Italy, and when.‘ ‘It is a long story and will occupy some little time.’

‘And so will the making of coffee, if it is to be made properly,’ said Veronica, who had now returned to us, and to whose superior powers Lamia only too willingly surrendered that delicate task.

‘One likes to think,’ he began, ‘that Heaven interests itself in one’s training; and so I used self-flatteringly to conceive that a special care arranged the conditions under which one first beheld the shore of Liguria. I had taken boat at Marseilles direct for Leghorn; and, in ordinary circumstances, we should have passed some thirty-six hours on the open sea, far from sight or surmise of land. It was, therefore, through no intelligent design of one’s own, but through the sheer bounty of the gods, that the engine broke down a few hours after we had left Marseilles, but not so completely but that we could continue our journey. The result was that we had to hug the shore nearly the whole way. It was the September equinox, and the moon was full; so night and day we gazed on that bewitching coast; bay after bay, town after town, village after village, mountain-range after mountain-range, unfolding themselves to my untravelled gaze. In the course of our present journey, we shall pass ever and again through gloomy arcades and narrow ways whose unseemly aspect will probably shock Veronica and perhaps please none of us. But distance, the enchanter, presented them to me then as consisting mainly of granite palaces and marble belfries; and in every fold of every hill nestled villages that seemed built of porphyry, and wherefrom soared, intermediaries between earth and heaven, many-storied _campanili_, whose chimes, as they pealed for _Angelus_ or _Ave Maria_, we could sometimes faintly hear. There was no cloud in the sky, scarce a ripple on the water, nothing but sunlight or moonlight in the air. Sleep would have been a desecration of so ethereal a scene; and I well remember watching the rounded moon wax paler and paler as the morning sun reddened up over the wave, and then sink, as in despair of rivalry, behind the hills.‘ ‘O, I say, it’s boiling!’ said Lamia.

I hope everybody knows that, in making coffee, that is exactly what it should not be allowed to do; and I fear Lamia had a malicious pleasure in finding Veronica for once at fault. I cannot but suppose that Veronica had heard the foregoing story many times before, but she catches fire so readily from any one’s enthusiasm for Italy, that she had almost allowed the coffee to do the same. But she so deftly rescued it from hurt, that, unheeding of Lamia’s exclamation, he went on:

‘I saw, what we shall not see, many a form of half-mysterious loveliness flit by me under flowing veil down the steps of narrow streets in the Ligurian Capital,—for we touched for a few hours at Genoa,—and heard, what we shall not hear, jovial-looking monks vociferating Vespers in the Baptistery at Pisa; and then, Lamia, then! I was borne, I scarce know how, along _Val d’ Arno_ through unending vineyard-avenues that seemed to have dyed the leaves with the colour of their purple fruit, and amongst which sun-bronzed youths, who appeared to disport rather than to toil, were singing love-songs to gaily-kirtled maidens. The fawn-coloured _bovi_ oscillated homeward to the wine-vat, dragging after them the grape-piled _carri_ with their wooden wheels; children and lizards, seemingly of kindred race, twisted in and out among the workers; and, stately of stature and sober of mien, dark-haired matrons stood outside their spacious but unluxurious homes, plaiting straw with rhythmically-moving fingers that never seemed to tire. Then came hills more rounded, softer declivities, a gradual narrowing of the plain, a forest of domes, belfries, and towers, and I was in Florence.‘

‘Why was your visit so brief?’

‘You ask why. Can one give a reason for anything one does in one’s youth? Only I remember, as I reluctantly quitted it, I vowed to return to it ere long.‘

‘And you kept your vow,’ said Veronica.

‘I remember,’ said Lamia.

‘You remember what?’ I asked. ‘You must have been in your cradle.’

‘Then I suppose,’ she replied, ‘I was extraordinarily precocious.

‘The sickle hath performed its work, The storm-gusts sweep the aspens bare, Careering clouds and shadows mirk Cow the disheartened air.

‘No swallow circles round the roof, No chirp redeems the dripping shed; The very gables frown reproof, “Why not already fled?”‘

‘Lamia is very unmerciful,’ said the Poet, ‘and does not allow one to forget the sins of one’s youth. But it is quite true that, before the leaves had fallen, one was again on one’s way to Italy; not along this sybaritic coast, but through the austere gorges, now green, now gray, of the Simplon. When, having left the summit behind us, we zigzagged downward, the mountains began to wear a gentler aspect, the vegetation seemed more ample and more unrestrained, the air more soft, the sky farther off and more ethereal; and suddenly I caught sight of a huge granite cross, on the outstretched arms of which was deeply cut the word _Italia_! I trembled with delight; and, from that hour to this, the word “Italy” has never lost its magic. On we deviously descended, past slopes of intermittent chestnut groves whose leaves, fantastically faded, had not yet fallen, till my driver exclaimed, “Eccolo! Signore!” and there basked Baveno by the edge of the lake in the setting sun, and the Borromean Islands seemed rather floating in the air than resting on the water. It was a true Saint Luke’s summer, where all things seemed stationary in a season of arrested change before the winter winds should arise and everything pass away. I have never again seen Nature in a mood of such absolute abstraction and self-contemplation; and she communicated to one’s spirit her own autumnal detachment from the seasons that are feverish with growth, and the seasons that are shaken by decay.‘

The description of suspended animation in the natural world seemed to infect us with a kindred tranquillity, and for awhile there followed it a sympathetic silence.

‘I know,’ said Lamia at length, ‘your aversion to the curiosity of the interviewer. But is it permissible to ask if it might not be worth while to record some such reminiscences as you have just recited; in a word,—do not be angry with me,— to do what so many other people have done, and to write an autobiography?’

‘I have written it,’ he said.

‘And when shall you publish it?’

‘Dear Lamia, it is published already.‘ ‘I do not understand,’ she said, ‘for certainly it is unknown to me.’

‘I fancy not,’ he replied. ‘Indeed, I gather that you have paid me the compliment of reading much of it more than once.’

As Lamia still seemed puzzled, Veronica broke in with a slight touch of impatience:

‘You are scarcely as intelligent as usual, Lamia. Surely what he means you to understand is that a man’s works are his autobiography.‘

‘Exactly. But enough surely—perhaps somewhat too much—of that subject; and our little horses are ringing a carillon with their bells, as if to remind us it is time we were again on our way.’

‘One moment,’ said Lamia, raising her hand deprecatingly. ‘Before we quit this first fair spot of rest in Southern air, grace must be said for our _al fresco_ repast. You know what form we like that grace to take. Be it as brief as you will, but it must be in verse.’

‘We are not in Sicily,’ he said, ‘nor am I Theocritus. But Veronica asked me the other day if I could give her some idea of the short pastoral idylls written two thousand years ago, which not all of us can read, but of which all of us have heard. I am not so presumptuous as to suppose I have succeeded in responding adequately to her wish; but perhaps our almost Sicilian surroundings, and the indulgent temper of the hour, may confer on the attempt something of the appropriateness it would otherwise lack.

‘Shepherd swains that feed your flocks ‘Mong the grassy-rooted rocks, While I still see sun and moon, Grant to me this simple boon: As I sit on craggy seat, And your kids and young lambs bleat, Let who on the pierced pipe blows Play the sweetest air he knows. And, when I no more shall hear Grasshopper or chanticleer, Strew green bay and yellow broom On the silence of my tomb; And, still giving as you gave, Milk a she-goat at my grave. For, though life and joy be fled, Dear are love-gifts to the dead.’[1]

[1] The Poet has since told me that these lines are a free paraphrase of an idyll by Leonidas of Tarentum, who lived in the time of Pyrrhus.

Then up we got, and onward we went, past rocks, and waves, and arbutus, and white heath,—not the white heath of home, but towering and flowering fifteen or even twenty feet into the air,—and _Cineraria maritima_, and Bacchic ivy, groups of eucalyptus and acacia, and glimpses of hill and sky, with here and there a hurrying zigzag torrent. What seaweed there was, was golden, and the surging and swirling of the silvery water over and among it and the red rocks was strangely beautiful. The liliputian waves kept coming on and breaking, as in any other sea, but never advancing. As Lamia said, what motion there was seemed purposeless motion, resembling the sport of children rather than the work of grown-up people. But her greatest delight was yet to come; for, late that afternoon, she beheld the first orange-grove glittering and glistening on the sunny outskirts of a gray-roofed little town, whose bright green _jalousies_ more than relieved what would otherwise have seemed its somewhat sombre aspect. Thoughtful Veronica made her take the seat in the carriage where she might command them best, and her spoken raptures were what we all, though more travelled than she, silently felt.

‘O, the Garden that you love is nothing, nothing, nothing, compared with this, which is not a garden at all, but a fairy grove of light and lustre. Do let us stop and pluck some of the golden fruit!’

‘Better not,’ said Veronica, ‘for doing so might dissipate your dream. They are lovely to look at, but indifferent to the taste. Neither is it their best season. Wait to gather oranges till, if ever, you are at Sorrento in the heart of May.’

‘Yes,’ said the Poet, ‘these are well enough; but they are a feeble imitation of their fellows in the real South, the true Ausonia.’

Lamia was as ready to believe everything she was told as to admire everything she saw; and her only lament was that, even though moving at a leisurely pace, beautiful scene after beautiful scene was withdrawn from her gaze along that winding road, almost before she could really behold it.

There came a stage in our journey which, as you may suppose, was not by any means one of a single day, when I felt certain a question would arise likely to lead to some difference of opinion, and I was curious to see how it would arrange itself. But, like Lamia herself, who was the person mainly interested, I carefully avoided all allusion to it. She, with infinitely more tact, as becomes a woman, kept gradually and dexterously leading up to it, while seeming to be quite unconscious of it, and indeed as if moving in quite an opposite direction.

‘Now,’ said Veronica, with that perfect freedom from afterthought or unspoken inner thought so characteristic of her, ‘now we turn inland and ascend. Say good-bye to the coast-line, which you will not see again till we reach the summit.’

‘And say good-bye likewise,’ added the Poet, ‘to the Provençal tongue, that seems to bear much about the same relation to French that the Venetian dialect bears to Italian, and to have retained the indefinable charm of flowers, perfume, and poetry that hovered round the cradle of modern verse, and has been handed down to us from the lips of lovely ladies and obeisant troubadours.’

Lamia showed no appreciation of these observations, as I could well perceive, and went on inwardly concerting a well-calculated strategy of her own.

‘How long will it take us,’ she asked, with apparent unconcern, ‘to reach the summit?’

‘Perhaps a couple of hours.‘ ‘And to descend?’

‘To descend where?’ asked Veronica, who, I think, began to suspect what was fermenting in Lamia’s mind.

‘Anywhere,’ answered Lamia. ‘I mean where we reach, as you said, the coast-line again.’

‘An hour perhaps,’ I said.

Then followed a short interval of silence or truce, broken by Lamia, who, far too strategic to attack the question in front, was now evidently meditating a flank movement which interested me greatly.

‘Do you remember my once saying that I wished I were a poet?’

‘Dear Lamia, I can only say to you, as one so often has to write to unknown correspondents who send one verse, the intention of which is better than its execution,—

‘To have the great poetic heart Is more than all poetic fame.‘

‘But, when one has neither,’ she replied, bringing her forces rapidly into action, and resolved at all costs to turn Veronica’s position, ‘it is so nice and so advantageous to be taken about by one who has both.’

To the Poet himself, I am sure, this seemed rather wide of the mark; but it was just one of those complimentary exaggerations which Lamia invariably employs when she wants to propitiate Veronica.

‘By one who has both,’ she went on, ‘and accordingly is everywhere vouchsafed a welcome not only for himself, but for all who travel in his train. It was not _very_ comfortable last night at that picturesque _locanda_; and I confess I am looking forward to the prosaic domestic comforts that are promised us this evening.’

I confess I did not follow the workings of her mind, and almost began to suspect that I had imputed to her a design of which she was innocent. But I was quickly confirmed again in my original surmise.

‘Was this country very different when you saw it first from what it is now?’

‘Well, yes, and no,’ replied the Poet, falling into the trap. ‘Different where Pleasure and Fashion have invaded it: not different where Nature maintains her native dominion. Along the road, then the only one, we are now ascending, nothing seems to be altered. What change _has_ taken place you will perceive very shortly, when we arrive at the summit. Then one looked down only on the austere towers and jutting promontory of a rock-bound sea-moated Principality. Now,—but never mind!’

‘But I _do_ mind. I am greatly interested in these changes.’ Then suddenly, ‘Veronica! Has it not struck you that we shall arrive at our journey’s end to-day in the middle of the afternoon, when you know you never like guests to present themselves? Do you not think it would be better if we got there towards tea-time?‘

‘Yes, I think it would; and we can easily loiter along the road.’

‘Dear Veronica!’ said Lamia in her most impulsive accents and her most irresistible manner, ‘_do_ let us loiter _there_ then, if only for an hour!’

‘Where?’ said Veronica.

‘O, you know what I mean. _There!_’

‘But we should have to retrace our steps.‘ ‘A couple of miles only,’ I said, seizing the opportunity to curry favour with Lamia.

‘It is odious,’ said Veronica.

‘It certainly is,’ added the Poet; ‘the most offensive place I know.’

‘It was not _Spiaggiascura_, was it!’ exclaimed Lamia in a tone of pathetic tenderness I never heard equalled, laying her hand gently on the Poet’s arm. ‘If it was, of course, I will not ask it.’

‘No, it was not Spiaggiascura,’ he replied. ‘Better to think of that as a name that has no local habitation.’

Lamia had conquered. That last inimitable touch of pathos, which was moreover, I am sure, entirely sincere, had disarmed Veronica’s scruples and the Poet’s fastidiousness. By the time three more hours had gone by, we had seen it all, and were sitting under a brown awning, partaking of iced coffee to the strains of a Hungarian band.

‘I am afraid I rather like it,’ said Lamia.

‘Why should you not?’ said the Poet.

‘Not the gambling, surely?’ asked Veronica.

‘Not the gambling, dear Veronica, so long as I have you at my side to buttress my somewhat shaky virtue.’ Then turning to me, ‘You know, of old, that I have low tastes.’

‘Well,’ observed the Poet, ‘I confess that an earnest desire to be indulgent to whatever is human has never succeeded in eradicating the feeling that gambling is the lowest of all human diversions; and, though here you need neither share nor even see it unless you wish, it seems to me to cast its ignoble shadow over the entire place, and to dethrone it from the majestic position with which Nature originally invested it. It has infected the architecture, vulgarised the sea-front, corrupted the very air, and exercised a malefic influence on manners.’

‘And it has certainly spoilt the looks of the men and women,’ said Lamia. ‘I never saw so many ugly people as round those fascinating tables.’

‘Gambling would make any one ugly,’ said Veronica.

‘Then I will never gamble,’ said Lamia.

‘Let us leave this,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘and sit among the flower-beds, somewhat too artificial though I allow they are.’

‘They look combed and curled,’ said Lamia. ‘I am sure I am quite as natural as they are.’

‘Dante had so exhaustive an imagination,’ observed the Poet, when we had shifted our position, ‘that it is not easy to suggest any form of repugnant penalty not to be met with in the _Divine Comedy_. But I think what is colloquially called a Hell might be added to his repulsive Circles. What Lamia said just now is strikingly true. The place has a malign effect on people’s appearance. Look at those respectable persons—for I am sure they are such—trying to appear almost the reverse. Great-granddaughters of the Pilgrim Fathers are collected here, just as cold no doubt as their grandmothers, but striving to seem otherwise. Looking back to those years when I first wandered along this lovely region, when this place had neither existence nor name, I cannot but regret the simplicity that has passed away. Nor can I think it is well for the idlers of material civilisation to parade their opulent _ennui_ before a primitive people whom they will probably end by infecting with their restlessness and their discontent.‘

‘I can see,’ said Lamia, ‘this is my first and last visit to this vicious Circle.’

‘Come, then,’ he answered, rising, and we all did the same, ‘and see how unnecessarily intolerant one can be, and how narrow is the slip of territory that modern pleasures have filched from peasant life and rustic toil. In a few minutes we shall be among the olive woods. Are we not there already? See! bare-headed women are washing the clothes of their husbands and children in the Grima. Look there, beyond! The goats are clambering up the precipitous slopes, and browsing on the myrtle. What now do we behold through sunny openings in dense dark foliage? Meditating mountains and laughing sea. Let us recant all we have said. There is room enough in this large world for everybody, and manifestly quite enough for us. Man has wrung from Nature a slight concession along the coast, but here, as everywhere, the Hinterland belongs to Heaven.’

There was little exaggeration in the words. An ascent as easy as it was brief carried us beyond the sights and sounds of what Veronica had, with just alliteration, stigmatised as ‘cosmopolitan canaille,’ and shortly we were sitting on myrtle-cushioned boulders, and gazing out, through gaps in the silvery foliage of the olive-trees, at a sea unchanged since the days when Hercules is reputed to have traversed it.

‘Yes,’ said Lamia penitently; ‘I own this is better than the chink of five-franc pieces, the lavishly gilded ceilings, and the hungry faces fastened on the gyrations of a whirligig. Yet, the rooms are crowded, and we have the woods to ourselves. The perversity that governs the lives of so many of us is, I have often felt, a strong argument against Free Will; and never seemed it more so than here where, in the most enchanting spot I have as yet beheld, men and women are most artificial, and most intent on the ugliest of pursuits.’

Thereupon—for have you not remarked that the oldest subjects of discourse are precisely those which best preserve their freshness?—the conversation, in this mountain solitude, began to travel, if somewhat discursively, over trite ground, in the course of which Lamia rather ingeniously suggested that, as with every other human faculty, our will is partly free, in part under the sway of necessity. The discussion, if discussion it can be called, was confined to three of us; for the Poet remained a silent listener.

‘Have you nothing,’ said Veronica at length, ‘to contribute to our deliberations? Can you not give us any help in our perplexity?’

‘I almost think I can,’ he said, ‘but not by any formal dialectic. Yet is not a universal conviction, of which it is impossible for human beings to divest themselves, as convincing as the most logical demonstration? Once after listening, by no means for the first time, to the arguments you have yet again been urging, there came to me the following reflections:—

FREE WILL AND FATE

I

‘You ask me why I envy not The Monarch on his throne. It is that I myself have got A Kingdom of my own: Kingdom by Free Will divine Made inalienably mine, Where over motions blind and brute I live and reign supreme, a Sovereign absolute.

II

‘Ebbing and flowing as the seas, And surging but to drown, Think you that I will pass to these My Sceptre and my Crown? Unto rebel passions give Empire and prerogative? They are attendants in my train, To come when I command, and crouch as I ordain.

III