Of all the excursions I made from Naples—renowned headquarters for excursions—none led me through more elemental highways than that which started from the Aquarium, at a fee of two lire. Doubtless the Aquarium of Naples exists for men of science, but men of art may well imagine it has been designed as a noble poem in colour. Such chromatic splendours, such wondrous greens and browns and reds, subtly not the colour scale of earth, for over all a mystic translucence, a cool suffusion, every hue suffering “a sea change into something rich and strange”! And the form of all these sea-creatures and sea-flowers so graceful, so grotesque, so manifold! “Nature’s plastic hand,” as Dante hath it, works deftly in water. It leaps to the eye that Art has invented scarcely anything, that the art of design in particular is a vast plagiarism. Here be your carpets and your wall-patterns, your frosted glass and your pottery. What Persian rug excels yon lamprey’s skin? My mind goes back to a great craftsman’s studio, stacked with brilliant beetles and dragon-flies—Nature’s feats of bravura—to eke out his inventions. Even the dressmaker, I remember, is the greatest client of the butterfly-net in her quest for delicious colour-blendings. Yet with how few root-ideas Nature has worked; the infinitude of her combinations is purely an affair of arrangement, complicated with secondary qualities of size and colour. Conscious life even at its most complex is a function of four variables: a food apparatus, a breathing apparatus, a circulating apparatus, and a nerve apparatus. With what inimitable ingenuity Nature has rung the changes on these four factors! Her problem has affinities with the task of the inventors of typewriters, who, having to produce the same collision of inked type with blank paper, have found so many ways of achieving it that their machines resemble highly organised creatures of curious conformation, one having no resemblance to another. Some are annular and some are cubical, some have wheels of letters, some have letters that fly singly. ’Tis scarcely credible that they all do the same work. Are not animals machines? said Descartes. But I ask, Are not machines animals? A vision surges up of Venice at night—out of the darkness of the Grand Canal comes throbbing a creature of the Naples Aquarium—all scattered blobs of flame, cohering through a spidery framework. Through the still, dark water it glides, under the still, starry sky, with San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from the voices of Venetians singing as they float past—an impassioned, sad memory, a trilled and fluted song—could one divine behind the fiery sea-dragon the mere steam-launch. Between the laws that fashioned steamboats and those that fashioned the animate world there is no essential difference. The steamboat is not even inanimate, for at the back of it burrows man like a nautilus in its shell, and his living will has had to fight with the same shaping forces as those which mould the entities of the water. The saurian age of the steamboat was the uncouth hollowed trunk, and by slow, patient evolutions and infinite tackings to meet winds and tides, it has come to this graceful, gliding creature that skims in the teeth of the tempest. Denied the mastery of water, man adds a floating form to his own; forbidden the sky, he projects from himself a monstrous aery sac or winged engine; condemned to crawl the earth, he supplements his nerves with an electric motor apparatus. Thus endlessly transformed, Man the Prometheus is also Man the Proteus. Dante praised Nature for having ceased to frame monsters, save the whale and the elephant; he did not remark that Man had continued her work on a substratum of himself.

The forms of the typewriters are even more clearly conditioned by the struggle for life. The early patents are the creatures in possession, and to develop a new type without infringing on their pastures, and risking their claws, a machine is driven into ever-odder contrivances, like creatures that can only exist in an over-crowded milieu by wriggling into some curious shape and filling some forgotten niche. The lust of life that runs through Nature transforms the very dust to a creeping palpitation, fills every leaf and drop of water with pullulating populations. ’Tis an eternal exuberance, a riotous extravagance, an ecstasy of creation. Great is Diana of the Ephesians, for this Diana, as you may see her figured in the Naples Museum, black but comely, is a goddess of many breasts, a teeming mother of generations, the swart, sun-kissed Natura Nutrix, who ranges recklessly from man to the guinea-pig, from the earwig to the giraffe, from the ostrich to the tortoise, from the butterfly to the lizard, from the glued barnacle timidly extending its tentacles when the tide washes food towards its rock, to the ravenous shark darting fiercely through the waters and seizing even man in its iron jaws. Yet they are at best mere variations on the primal theme of heart, brain, lungs, and stomach, now with enchanting grace as in the gazelle, now with barbaric splendour as in the peacock, now with a touch of grotesque genius as in the porcupine. And directly or indirectly all of them pass into one another—in the most literal of senses—as they range the mutual larder of the globe.

’Tis well to remember sometimes that this globe is not obviously constructed for man, since only one-fourth of it is even land, and that in a census of the planet, which nobody has ever thought of taking, man’s poor thousand millions would be out-numbered by the mere ant-hills. And since the preponderating interests numerically of this sphere of ours are piscine, and in a truly democratic world a Fish President would reign, elected by the vast majority of voters, and we should all be bowing down to Dagon, the Aquarium acquires an added dignity, and I gaze with fresh eyes at the lustrous emerald tanks.

Ah, here is indeed a Fish President, the shell-fish that presided over the world’s destinies; the little murex that was the source of the greatness of Tyre, and the weaver of its purpureal robes of empire. Hence the Phoenician commerce, Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the alphabet in which I write.

Not only is colour softened by a sea change, but in this cool, glooming, and glittering world the earth-creatures seem to have been sucked down and transformed into water-creatures. There are flowers and twigs and green waving grass that seem earth-flowers and twigs and grass transposed into the key of water.

Only, these flowers and grasses are animal, these coralline twigs are conscious; as if water, emulous of the creations of earth and air, strove after their loveliness of curve and line, or as if the mermaidens coveted them for their gardens. And there are gemmed fishes, as though the mines of Ind had their counterpart in the forces producing these living jewels. And there are bird-like fishes with feathery forms, that one might expect to sing as they cleave the firmament of water: some song less troubling than the Lorelei’s, with liquid gurgles and notes of bubbling joy. And the sea, not content to be imitative, has added—over and above its invention of the fish—to the great palpitation of life; priestly forms, robed and cowled, silver-dusty pillars, half-shut parasols. Even the common crab is an original; a homely grotesque with no terraceous or aerial analogue, particularly as it floats in a happy colour-harmony with a brown or red sponge on its back, a parasite literally sponging upon it. But though you may look in vain for mermaid or Lorelei, naiad or nymph, there is no reason in Nature why all that poets feigned should not come into being. The water-babe might have been as easily evolved as the earth-man, the hegemony of creation might have been won by an aquatic creature with an accidental spurt of grey matter, and the history of civilisation might have been writ in water. The merman is a mere amphibian, not arrived. The gryphon and the centaur are hybrids unborn. ’Tis just a fluke that these particular patterns of the kaleidoscope have not been thrown. We may safely await evolutions. The winged genius of the Romans, frequent enough on Pompeian frescoes, may even be developed on this side of the skies, and we may fly with sprouted wings and not merely with detachable. Puck and Ariel perchance already frisk in some Patagonian forest, Caliban may be basking in forgotten mud. Therefore, poets, trust yourself to life and the fulness thereof. Whether you follow Nature’s combinations or precede them, you may create fearlessly. From the imitatio NaturÆ you cannot escape, whether you steal her combinations or her elements.

Shelley sings of “Death and his brother Sleep,” but gazing at this mystic marine underworld of the Naples Aquarium, I would sing of Life and his brother Sleep. For here are shown the strange beginnings of things, half sleep, half waking: organisms rooted at one point like flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and consciousness—the not missing link between animal and vegetable life. What feeling comes to trouble this mystic doze, stir this comatose consciousness? The jelly-fish that seems a mere embodied pulse—a single note replacing the quadruple chord of life—is yet a complex organism compared with some that flit and flitter half invisibly in this green universe of theirs: threads, insubstantialities, smoke spirals, shadowy filaments on the threshold of existence, ghostly fibres, flashing films, visible only by the beating of their white corpuscles. ’Tis reading the Book of Genesis, verse by verse. And then suddenly a hitherto unseen entity, the octopus, looses its sinuous suckers from the rock to which its hue protectively assimilates—a Darwinian observation Lucian anticipated in his “Dialogue of Proteus”—and unfolding itself in all its manifold horror, steals upon its prey with swift, melodramatic strides.

From the phantasmal polyzoa to these creatures of violent volition how great the jump! Natura non facit saltum, forsooth! She is a veritable kangaroo. From the unconscious to the conscious, from the conscious to the self-conscious, from the self-conscious to the over-conscious, there’s a jump at every stage, as between ice and water, water and steam. Continuous as are her phases, a mysteriously new set of conditions emerges with every crossed Rubicon. Dante, in making the human embryo pass through the earlier genetic stages (“Purgatory,” Canto XXV), seems curiously in harmony with modern thought, though he was but reproducing Averroes.

But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a vegetable. Still linked with the world of sleep through the mechanic processes of nutrition, respiration, circulation, consciously alive only in his higher centres, man tends ever to drowse back to the primal somnolence. Moving along the lines of least resistance and largest comfort, he steeps himself in the poppies of custom, drinks the mandragora of ready-made morals, and sips the drowsy syrups of domesticity, till he has nigh lapsed back to the automaton. But ever and anon through the sluggish doze stirs the elemental dream, leaps the primeval fire, and man is awake and astir and athrill for crusades, wars, martyrdoms, revolutions, reformations, and back in his true biological genus.

Not only in man appears this contest of life and sleep: it runs through the cosmos. There is a drag-back: the ebb of the flowing tide. How soon the forsaken town returns to forest! Near the Roman Ghetto you may note how the brickwork of the wall of the ancient Theatre of Marcellus has relapsed to rock; man’s touch swallowed up in the mouldering ruggedness, the houses at the base merely burrowed, the abodes of cave-dwellers.