The beauty of Italy is so proper and Church of England that you are looked upon as a dissenter if you do not rhapsodize about it.  But it disappoints me to feel obliged to follow the multitude like a flock of sheep and to take the dust of those feeble-minded tourists who have preceded me and set the pace.  There is nothing in the scenery of all Italy to shock your love of beauty from the staid to the original.  There is nothing to give your sensitive soul little shivers of surprise.  There is nothing to make you hesitate for fear you ought not to admire; you know you ought.  You feel obliged to do so because everybody has done it before you, and you will be thought queer if you don’t.  There is a gentle, pretty-pretty haze of romance over Italian scenery which is like reading fairy-tales after having devoured Carlyle.  It is like hearing Verdi after Wagner.  The East has my real love.  I find that I cannot rave over a pink and white china shepherdess when I have worshipped the Venus of Milo.

XIII

NAPLES

The point of view is always the pivot of recollection.  How ought one to remember a place?  There are a dozen ways of enjoying Naples, and twenty ways of being miserable in America.  Or turn it the other way, it makes no difference.  It depends upon one’s self and the state of the spleen.  Before I came to Europe I remember often to have been disgusted with persons who recalled Germany by its beer and Spain by its fleas, or those who said:  “Cologne!  Oh yes; I remember we got such a good breakfast there.”

Ah, ha!  It is so easy to sniff when one is mooning in imagination over cathedrals, but I have since taken back all those sniffs.  I did not realize then the misery of standing on one foot all the morning in tombs, and on the other all the afternoon in museums, and then of going home to sleep on an ironing-board.  Now I, too, think gratefully of the Bay of Naples as being near that good bed, and of the Pyramids as being near the excellent table of Shepheard’s.  Why not?  Can one rave over Vesuvius on an empty stomach, or get all the beauty out of Sorrento with a backache?  One must be well and have good spirits when one travels.  It is not so essential merely to be comfortable, although that helps wonderfully.  But even to get soaking wet could not utterly spoil the road to Posilipo.  What a heavenly drive!  Although I think with more fondness of scaling the heights of Capri in a trembling little Italian cab, not because both views were not divinely beautiful, but because when in Capri my clothes were not damply sticking to me, and I had no puddle of water in each shoe.  As I look back I believe I could write specific directions from personal experience on “How to be Happy when Miserable.”  Jimmie always bewails the fact that the American girl lives on her nerves.  “Goes on her uppers” is his choice phrase.  Nevertheless, it pulled us through many a mental bog while travelling so continuously.