Heart of Man. George Edward Woodberry
eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race has splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down into the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The men will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaks not of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but of the destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. There is, as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate and better-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among them suffering is widespread. Three thousand years of human life, and this the result! Yet I see many indications of a brave patriotism in the community, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, to stimulate, to encourage—the spirit of free and united Italy awakening here, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promised blessings. And for a sign there stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village yonder a statue of Garibaldi.
VI
The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. It is not spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers—not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it—but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying of the smooth deep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats, weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: and always I bring back something for memory, something unforeseen.
I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. It is blessed not to know what the gods will give. I remember once in other days I left the beach of Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came by a country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow—a figure out of old Italian pictures, some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. I have forgotten how the isles of the Sirens looked, but that boy's face I shall never forget. It is such moments that give the Italy of the imagination its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A day or two ago, when the bright weather began, I was threading the rough edge of a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a little farther on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; but straightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like a flash—eccola the country of Theocritus!
I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one learns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments, manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and ruins—this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but though I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my reward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except that stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred physical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily be more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our possession may be an important part of life. I think none can fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, until he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very great. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed how subtly Dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of nature. I own to believing that Virgil's storms never blew on the sea until once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came a storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted—such masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these—a revelation of the wrath of colour! The waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms." Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the children of Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by showers of iron hail."
I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further fiume freddo, the cold stream—"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,"—each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.
On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I