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.