The barren, sterile emotions which Art gives us, though they have the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of Life itself, that tree of sweet and bitter fruits, bear with them the inherent defects of their unreality; and whereas there is hardly an emotion of Life which does not leave us stronger and more vivified, there is hardly an emotion of Art where one’s senses are stirred, not by actual events of joy or sorrow, but the imagined scenes thereof, which does not leave us flat and unbraced in proportion as the emotion excited has been keen. Love and death, the two great motifs on which the drama of Life is based, whether they are whispered on the shivering strings, or piped on remote flutes, or thundered with the blast of trumpets and the clash of cymbals, leave us, when such actual experience has touched us, the richer for it, and stronger and more vivified. But such is not the case in the reflection of experience which Art gives us; vivid it may be—so vivid, indeed, that reality after it seems shadow-like and unreal—but its life is temporary. We thrill with ecstasies that are not really ours; our soul, in its secret place, sickens with sin or withers with renunciations which are not its own; and when the mimic spectacle is over, and we wake from the storms or sunshine of a coloured dream to a gray morning, and have to take up again the dispiriting thread of uneventful hours, it is with an intolerable sense of flatness that we at first look out over the undistinguished landscape of life. For a week, perhaps, or a fortnight, we have agonized with the throes of Titans; monstrous joys and sorrows have been our portion, and for the monstrous we take up again the minute. We have been burning with alien fires and passions not our own: the temptation of Kundry has shaken us; the sorrow of Wotan, as wide as the world and as bitter as the sea, has for the time been ours; we have been laid to sleep on a mountain-top, like Brunehilde, and, like Siegfried, have dreamed in the green shade of woods until the voice of Nature has become intelligible, and the twittering of birds articulate through the murmur of the forest. The quintessence of human emotion, in all its terror and beauty, has shaken and enthralled us. Then—then the curtain came down, and we go out again into the real world, which for the time Art has rendered shadow-like, where a hundred petty duties await us, in no way refreshed or strung up for their accomplishment, but impatient, irritated, and bored.

Such, at least, were my own feelings when on a morning I awoke and remembered (what at first seemed incredible) that there was to be no opera that day, and that the curtain was down on the stage at Bayreuth for two years. The little backwater of a town, which on arrival had seemed so instinct with such sweet repose and tranquillity, was insupportable: its tranquillity was the stagnation of decay; its repose a creeping death-trance, with gray nightmare to ride its rest. Instead of finding that the fiery dreams of the last fortnight had gilded its streets and woven themselves into its gardens and trellises, it appeared to me merely the most dismal little sun-baked suburb I had ever seen. A glorious lamp had burned there, but the lamp was quenched, and instead of a reflection of its light lingering there, there was only a smell of oil. But the immediate and vital question was what to do and where to go. I could not imagine myself finding existence tolerable anywhere, and least of all, perhaps, could I imagine myself back in England in my own quiet little house in the country town, since for the time being, at any rate, all the minute pleasures which had built up that delightful life and made it so full of happiness were incomprehensible. Not long ago a quiet morning of work, with glances into the garden to see what new plant had flowered, a game of golf over the breezy down, the face of a friend, the hundred details of my life which I have tried to describe in these pages, were overflowingly sufficient to make me more than content. But now there was exasperation in the very multitude of them. And all the time there were, so to speak, images of glorious brightness shut away in some dark place of my brain. The Valkyries were there and Parsifal, Hans Sachs, mellow and unembittered, looked on the love of others and smiled, and Walter sang of spring-time, and everywhere was melody.

Here, if you please, is egotism in excelsis, for I solemnly told myself that, instead of going back home like a sober and average person, I was bound—no less—to go somewhere and to do something by which I could the more fully apprehend and crystallize these images; and the grounds on which I put this to myself—that is my only excuse—were genuine. For I believe that one of the main duties of man to God and to himself is to realize beauty and understand it, and that one of his main duties to his neighbour is to produce beauty in some shape or form, moral, mental, or physical—if, indeed, there is any real difference between them. The last fortnight had given me new material; that part of me which is capable in its small way of feeling beauty had been shown wonderful things. If I went back home to the ordinary routine of daily life, I felt that I should not only do my part in it exceedingly ill, but also that the monotony and triviality of it would tarnish and dull the brightness of my new possessions. In other words, I began—a solemn prig—to think about my artistic temperament, and make plans for its well-being. And that confession made—in the hope that Qui s’accuse s’excuse in some small degree—the mind-narrative can go on its way. My body—after an effusion of telegrams—sped South to the house of a friend in Capri, where it arrived two days later.

Here in this remote island, separated by a few leagues of sea only from that vividly modern and restless place called Naples, can be recaptured without effort something of the early days of the world, and from the steamer one steps out of all the responsibilities and codes which the stupidity and wickedness of mankind have built up, into paganism and fairyland. The gray walls compounded of priggishness and puritanism (yet knitted together with the mortar of good intentions and morality) with which this civilized century has fortressed itself fall as the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of the trumpet, and there is left sunlight and sea and the beauty of the seven days of creation, which was pronounced by God to be good.

The red, waxlike flowers of the pomegranate are in full bloom, and as evening falls they glow like hot coals over the rough stone walls that bound the path up to Capri, where the green lizards slip in and out. The smell of the vines is in the air, heavy and warm, and once or twice as I walked through the dusky trellises my heart hammered in me, for I knew that but a little more and I should see Dionysus himself, with the vine-leaves in his hair, and delicate hand holding the cup that brimmed with purple; and at noonday often have I all but seen in the briar-decked clefts of rock the great god Pan himself, to the music of whose fluting the whole world dances. Up and down their steep paths, with head erect beneath the wine-jars, walk the maidens of Capri, and something of Aphrodite lives in their wine-painted faces and moulded bosoms; and young Apollo, bare-footed and splashed to the knee in the trodden vats, strips the nut-husks off with his gleaming teeth, and looks at the passer-by with brown soft eye. He has pushed a pomegranate flower behind his ear, and his shirt is open, so that the smooth brown breast is seen. What thoughts fill day by day that gay, lazy Italian brain? He is not religious, although he goes to Mass most regularly, for from Mass he passes back again to paganism; and he only goes there because he is a child and is vaguely afraid—or would be if he did not go to Mass—of what the priests have told him about a remote bogie—for so God seems to him—who can make him burn in unquenchable fires if he does not. Nor does he weary his mind with any question of morality or code of ethics: the sun is warm to him, or, if the sun be hot, the shade is cool, and the almond fruit is sweet, and the fumes of the fermenting vats mysteriously exciting, and the maiden with whom he is in treaty to wed very fair and loving, and her dowry is good. And for the passer-by he has his bright smile, and the expression of his hope that I have enjoyed my bathe. No, he has not bathed to-day, for the work of the vintage is heavy, and he is paid by the hour. Ah, a cigarette? The signor is too kind. Will not the signor take his pomegranate flower? Indeed the signor will.

Day by day this sunny and innocent paganism gets more possession of me, and day by day the beauty of that which I saw at Bayreuth glows more brightly. Yesterday, about evening, a sudden summer squall came storming over from Posillippo, gleaming with lightning and riotous with thunder, and to me it was Wotan who steered from the north. On Monte Solaro the Valkyries awaited his coming, and when the whistling winds had passed away over our heads, while the house shuddered, and the moon again rose in a velvet sky with stars swarming thick round her, I knew that on the mountain-top Brunehilde slept within a ring of fire, waiting for the man who should claim her with his kiss. But the morning again to-day was very clear and hot, and instead of going up Mount Solaro, as I had intended, I went, as usual, down to the Bagno, a white pebbly beach with pockets of sand to lie on. I took with me a basket of figs and a flask of wine stoppered with vine-leaves, and my friend took a book which we often read and a straw case of cigarettes. And together we swam through the chrysoprase of sunlit sea far out to a brown, seaweed-covered rock. The water was very deep round it, and fathoms down something shone very brightly with wavering, subaqueous gleam, and, half laughing at myself, I dived and dived—for I knew it was the Rhinegold that shone there—until I could dive no more. Yet still I could not get deep enough. Then, having rested, we swam back, and lay on pockets of hot sand, and drank from the leaf-stoppered bottle, and ate the purple of the figs; and my friend read in the book which he had brought, beginning at the seventh chapter, and to this effect:

‘Did I seriously believe that that contemplation of God which is the prime duty laid on us by religion must, or even could, legitimately give us any touch of sadness of whatever kind, I would throw religion away as heedlessly as I throw away the end of a smoked-out cigarette, for I have no use for it. Yet although on every side, and most of all in every pulpit, I see the lamentable Puritan jowl, and hear the lamentable Puritan whine, which bids me look with horror on the sin of the world and with sorrow on its sufferings, I do not for a moment believe that this impious gabble is the result of religion, but rather of grossest irreligion, on the part of its exponents. For me, I know that the contemplation of God is my duty, and if I make it my whole and absorbing duty I cannot go very far astray. For above all things is God love, and above all things is He beauty, and the love which engirdles Him joins without break to the human love which it is our duty always to give and take, giving with both hands and taking by the armful. So, too, His beauty joins without break to the beauty of all He has made, and in the golden hair of women and in the rose-petal, in the smooth swift limbs of youth and in the faceted diamond, in the curve of a girl’s lips and in the rose-flushed clouds, in the blue chalice of the sky of morning, equally and everywhere must we look for and absorb the beauty which is implanted there.

‘It is here that Christianity, with its mournful, man-invented morality, has gone so far astray from its Founder that many Christians turn from beauty as if beauty was evil, instead of ever seeking it and worshipping it, find it where they will, until the dross of their gross minds is burned up in that fine fire. Hence, too, sprang—by “hence,” I mean from impious Puritanism—such phrases as the “temptations and dangers of physical beauty,” whereas to the man whose mind is set on God it is by and through beauty that the uttermost death-stroke is dealt to the writhing earthworm of carnalism. For the truth is that no beauty of soul, and no completeness, was ever framed on the mutilation or starvation of self, and at the Last Day the gray and pallid ascetic will find that what he thought was virtue, and what he taught as self-control, was sheer darkness of soul and purblind vision.

‘It is this that must be cast away. We are people that sit in darkness, content that our religion should make us sad, and as such we have a lesson humbly to learn from paganism, and in particular from the paganism of the Greeks, whose hierarchy of gods were enthroned in brightness, and the name thereof was Beauty. And that Beauty, the search of which to them was worship and prayer and praise, they found everywhere: in the sunlight and the blue dome of heaven; in the crisp, curly acanthus leaf which they set to twine about the capitals of their marble-hewn columns and on the necks of the vases of the dead; in the radiance of jewels and in the tragedies of heroes; and above all in the beauty of the human form. Disfigured and astray their worship often went, and it wore strange garbs, but through all its sin and its misconceptions, its thousand errors and distortions, we can see gleaming, deep below, the bright shining of its truth. And this, to my mind, gleams less brightly in the sadder worship of to-day.

‘For I doubt very much whether anybody is in the least benefited by the actual sorrow or repentance of anyone, though no doubt such—especially to sour and brooding natures—is necessary. But the best repentance, if one has sufficient vitality, will be momentary, a fiery sword-thrust, which will leave no ache or throb behind. It is better, I dare say, that a man should suffer the fires of remorse for years rather than that he should not suffer them at all, but I think that the man who is capable of throwing his remorse off and starting fresh and unwounded is the more Godlike creature, for the reason that it is infinitely better to be happy and smiling than to go frowning through the world. For sin is seldom born of a happy impulse, stare as you may, unless from a happy impulse which has been, so to speak, shut up in the dark and has gone putrid.

‘And here in this divine place’ (the book I am quoting from was written at Athens), ‘where beauty is thrown broadcast over all one sees, and happiness is so easy, it seems to me to follow as a corollary that things which a Northern and gloomy people consider wrong are less wrong. For supposing in foggy London every shopkeeper tried to cheat one, one would say that the middle class was going to the dogs. Quite so—it would be. But the middle class is not in the least going to the dogs here. Why not? For a variety of reasons: partly because there is more sun here and no fog, and because the Parthenon is near at hand. Ah, yes, indeed it is so: Gaiety covers a multitude of sins, and while they are covered, Beauty blots them out.

‘O beautiful God of this beautiful world, let me make somebody laugh to-day. Amen.’

At that point I laughed.

‘So his prayer is heard,’ said my friend. ‘Have you eaten all the figs while I have been reading?’

‘Yes; but don’t be unhappy. Remember it is your duty to be happy. You may have the last cigarette. No—we’ll toss for it.’

‘I’ll be shot if we do!’ said he.

‘Well, I’ll cut it in half.’

‘So that neither of us gets any,’ said he. ‘Give it me;’ and he very rudely snatched at it. Here ensued a scuffle, and, the bowels of the cigarette being scattered about the beach, neither of us got any, and the occasion gave rise to moral reflections. Also immoral ones. Then peace and plenty descended in the shape of a friend also coming down to bathe with a supply of fresh tobacco, and the sun was warm again and the sea blue. Then my friend (whom I must call Toby, because he objects to his real name being known, saying that I am certain to keep all the beautiful remarks for myself and give him all the idiocy) held forth:

‘The man is shallow,’ he said; ‘it is only a gospel of surfaces he preaches, and you think it profound merely because he loads it with grave words. I have done for years exactly what he preaches: I have succeeded in being always happy and usually gay, and I spend my whole life in looking for what I consider beautiful. Yet what did you call me last night? A second-hand sensualist, I think.’

‘Very likely. That is because you are not strenuous. Your pursuit of beauty must be passionate, and the pursuit must be an act of worship. Your pursuit of beauty is not an act of worship; it is more like sucking sweets.’

Toby laughed loudly and idiotically.

‘Or eating all the figs,’ said he, and the discussion ended.

It is close on noon, and only the faintest breeze is stirring. The bay is silent and waveless, except that at intervals a ripple falls like the happy sigh of some beautiful basking creature on to the hot, white pebbles of the beach. There, like a living sapphire, lies the dear sea, the thing in this world I love best and understand best, though I do not understand it at all. Never have I seen it so luminous as it is to-day; you would say that the sunlight of centuries had been lit in its depths. Gray rocks run out from the precipitous land, fringed with seaweed, and under the water the seaweed shows purple. A brown-sailed fishing-boat lies becalmed a mile out, and across the bay Naples sparkles white and remote, and only the thin line of smoke streaming upwards from Vesuvius speaks of the fierce and everlasting stir of forces which underlie the world. In the thickets which come down to the water’s edge of this tideless sea there is now no sound of life, though an hour ago they were resonant with the whirring of the cicalas. The lizards have crept out in the stillness and bask on the white stones, as still as if once more Orpheus charmed them; and high above me a hawk, with wings motionless, floats slowly, in seeming sleep, down some breeze in the upper air.

And what if my nameless author is right? What if—this is the upshot—happiness is our first duty? It is certainly not true that if you are good you are happy; but may it not be true that by being happy you are in some degree good? The Puritan interpretation of Christianity has had a fair trial, and, indeed, it seems to have made but a poor job out of it. What is the result of all these sadnesses and renunciations? Nothing but starved lives and unrealized ideals. Such self-denial is touching, beautiful in theory, and based, of course, on Christ’s teaching. But it is based awry if it brings sadness with it, if it sees in beauty only a lure to lead the soul astray, rather than the signpost which points by no winding road, but a royal highway, straight to God. And that road resounds with praise, and the birds of St. Francis sit in the pleasant boughs of the trees that grow beside it, and the dear saint smiles at them, and says: ‘Sing, my sisters, and praise the Lord.’ And at his bidding they fill their throats with bubbling song, and thank God for their warm feathers and the green habitations He has builded for them. Then St. Francis, so the legend tells us, sits down at table with St. Blaise and others, the friends of St. Francis, and feeds his dear birds, so that they become very strong. That saint is more to my mind than that foolish fellow Stylites, or the dour St. Bernard, who, being plagued with the flies on a hot day, excommunicated them, and they all dropped down dead. For love, joy, and peace are the gifts of the Spirit, but we are too much given to let the joy take care of itself, to check it even, as if salvation was clothed in sackcloth.

Happiness is a home product. We cannot import it into ourselves, nor by multiplying our pleasures can we come one whit nearer to it. But by being dull, by being slow to perceive, or having perceived to receive, we can, and we often do, succeed in closing the doors of our souls to it. Yet, though it comes not from without, nor is it the sum or product of any pleasures, our soul must sit with doors and windows open to catch if it be but one-millionth of the myriad sweet and beautiful things that stir and shine about us, or else, as in the darkness and stagnation of some closed house, dust and airlessness overlay us. For there is nothing in the world, except only that which the sin and folly of man have wrought, which is not wholesome and innocent. It is our grossness which makes things gross, our rebellion which makes us say that in beauty there lurk any seeds or germs that can ripen into or go to form anything that is not beautiful.

* * * * *

Seraphina and Francesco, with outside help when they want it, are the domestic staff of Toby’s house. They are engaged to be married, and, in fact, the marriage is going to come off in three months’ time. Domestically speaking, this is an ideal arrangement, because if Seraphina’s work happens on any day to be heavy (she cooks, though I cannot call her a cook) Francesco delights to help her; while, on the other hand, if her work is light, she lends her aid in the cleaning and embellishment of the house, for thus she is with her promesso. And in the evening, as often as not, when their work is finished, they stroll and sit in the garden as we do, and with a little encouragement join in our talk, and tell us the strange legends of the saints common to this countryside, or with bated breath speak of the days of the Emperor Tiberius, who still is the bogie of the island, so that a mother even to-day, if a child is troublesome, warns it that Tiberius is coming. High on the eastward end of Capri stand the ruins of one of his palaces; the walls are built to the sheer edge of the precipitous rock, and it was from here that he used to hurl down his victims when he was satiated with them, flinging them headlong, a glimmer of white limbs that turned over and over in the air till they splashed on the rocks three hundred feet below. Round this crag still hovers some poisonous breath of crime; sudden shrieks are heard of nights, so Francesco says, and shadows pace in the shadows. Here, too, that dark soul used to walk up and down in his corridor of mirrors, so that he could see that none came up behind him with the assassin’s knife; weary of life, he yet clung to it with a maniac force; longing for death, he fenced himself from it with a thousand guards. ‘And on us,’ said Francesco, when he told us of these things, with the poet that lurks in the Italian blood suddenly inspiring his tongue—‘on us, signor, those same stars look down that beheld Tiberius. Yet they do not care.’

In this manner we were sitting in the garden on the evening of the day which I have been speaking of. There had been some small festa in the town, and Seraphina, to make herself the more comely in her lover’s eyes, had put on, when her kitchen work was over, her festa clothes, even though they would only glimmer for an hour in the dusk, before she went to bed. Her olive skin, flushed with the warm tints of wind and sun, was dusky in the moonlight, and her brown eyes, underneath her thin, straight eyebrows, were big and soft, as if made of velvet. But all the gaiety of the South was set in her laughing mouth, and her teeth were a band of ivory in the red of pomegranate. Her arms were bare above the elbows almost to the shoulder, and beneath the smooth satiny skin, as she moved them in Southern gesticulation at some story she was telling us, I could see the swift and supple play of the muscles. Round us the night was pricked with a thousand remote stars, and the warm, languid air stirred in the bushes and sighed among the vineyards like a lingering caress. Now and then a handful of hot air would be tossed over us from the veranda, where the sun had grilled the flagstones all the afternoon; now and then a breath of coolness—a handful of air that had been shaded all day by the thick vine-leaves—stirred from its place and refreshed us. Below gleamed the lights of Capri, and the murmur of the town stole softly to us, or a gay stanza would be flung into the air from some homeward-going peasant as he passed up the cobbled ways. To the north a great emptiness of gray showed where the Gulf of Naples basked beneath the moon, and high up on the horizon a thin necklace of light lying along the edge of the sea showed the town. This hour of warm night, especially with such a setting, is, to my mind, the most animal of all. In the moon-dusk a thousand subtle scents and hints float round one, not consciously perceived, but exciting to the primeval animal instincts which Æons of evolution have not yet eradicated from our nature; and at such an hour the beast within us, prowling, predatory, hot on its slinking errands, is more than ever dominant.

Soon Toby got up, stretching himself.

‘Mail-day to-morrow,’ he said, ‘and I have two letters to write. Just get me some paper and envelopes, Francesco; there were none this morning.’

Francesco jumped up.

‘Eh, signor, I forgot,’ he said; ‘there are none in the house. I will run over to Capri; the shops are still open. Two minutes only;’ and he vaulted over the wall into the road.

Toby strolled towards the house.

‘Are you coming in?’ he said to me over his shoulder.

‘Yes, in ten minutes,’ I answered, and he disappeared.

Seraphina rose also, resting her weight for a moment on her arm.

‘It is good beneath the stars in the evening, is it not?’ she said. ‘I must go in. Happy dreams, signor!’

‘No; tell me one more story about Tiberius,’ I said.

She laughed.

‘Surely the signor is like a child,’ she said: ‘he is so fond of stories. Will he not tell me an English story for a change?’

‘About what?’

‘About yourself or your friends—about your customs in England. I like the ways of English folk;’ and she sat down again close to me, eager-eyed, with smiling mouth.

Suddenly it seemed to me that the whole spirit of all I saw and felt was changed. The soft, innocent Southern night was alive with voices. No longer did a child sit by me, but a woman—dark-eyed like a stag, intoxicating to the sense. Passion and desire, those headlong twins, rushed down on me, with arms intertwined and purple-stained mouth, chanting with a meaning that was new to me, ‘All is beauty, and knowing this is love; and love——’ There she sat, exquisite, trembling between girlhood and womanhood, the eternal riddle of life, to solve which men have gladly died, and lightly dismissed honour, like a stale piece of unlikely gossip. But——

‘It is mail-day to-morrow,’ I said, and I heard how unsteady was my voice; ‘I also have letters to write.’

She rose at once.

‘Good-night, signor,’ she said, and turned to go to the house.

As she got further on her way, I think I would have given all I had for her to turn back again, so that I might say—well, nothing particular, but just let her guess, no more, that—— But she did not turn.

So, then, what of my gospel about beauty? It remains exactly where it was, true, I believe, in every respect. Only in me, at any rate, there lurks the beast. To-night he growled and pulled at his chain.