John Richard Greene

“ The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping down from the north. ”

“ It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid. We close it as we close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare of the race. ”

“ It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals," cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and "rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is, has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. ”

“ More and more indeed as he wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. ”

“ The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age—that of its builder, Archbishop Morton—when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. ”

“ The mere break of habit is delightful; it is like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The "lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life. ”

“ In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of "piety." ”

“ Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. ”

“ Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter nights. ”

“ Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the buttercup on to womanhood ”

“ Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like the beginning of a new life. ”

“ The rural quiet and repose of the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose it—hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. ”

“ The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat, a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.
It is this calm monotony of day after day at which [Pg 77] the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order—drives, donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. ”

“ His notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands. The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for bad weather. ”

“ Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. ”

“ The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and vanishes before midday. ”

“ As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival. Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. ”

“ The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has come.
Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to people who are ready to be amused. ”

“ It is easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one [Pg 82] among the pines of San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. ”

“ But even winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white among the olive groves. ”

“ Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of Æneas as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of classic art. ”

“ Like Æneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome. When Æneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from his view. He is [Pg 275] weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world intensity of longing for a settled home. ”

“ An air of slow respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa at £150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there. ”

“ Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn; and the Sunday before they start—generally one of the last Sundays in January—serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness streams out of church into the sunshine. ”

“ The monks were too busy with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn. ”

“ The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline, revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet "pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. ”

“ Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide peace of the world beneath its sway. But the Æneid is no mere outburst of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career as a reconciler and leader of the nations. ”