Chương Chương 32 · Chapter XXXII

. Chapter XXXII

Egypt was charming—a green strip of carpet and walking up and down

it four sorts of animals and one sort of man. Fielding’s business

took him there for a few days. He re-embarked at Alexandria—bright

blue sky, constant wind, clean low coast-line, as against the

intricacies of Bombay. Crete welcomed him next with the long snowy

ridge of its mountains, and then came Venice. As he landed on the

piazzetta a cup of beauty was lifted to his lips, and he drank with

a sense of disloyalty. The buildings of Venice, like the mountains

of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the right place, whereas

in poor India everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the

beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without

form, how can there be beauty? Form stammered here and there in a

mosque, became rigid through nervousness even, but oh these Italian

churches! San Giorgio standing on the island which could scarcely

have risen from the waves without it, the Salute holding the

entrance of a canal which, but for it, would not be the Grand

Canal! In the old undergraduate days he had wrapped himself up in

the many-coloured blanket of St. Mark’s, but something more precious

than mosaics and marbles was offered to him now: the harmony

between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the

civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable

form, with flesh and blood subsisting. Writing picture post-cards

to his Indian friends, he felt that all of them would miss the joys

he experienced now, the joys of form, and that this constituted a

serious barrier. They would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not

its shape, and though Venice was not Europe, it was part of the

Mediterranean harmony. The Mediterranean is the human norm. When

men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or

the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and

extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest

experience of all. Turning his back on it yet again, he took the

train northward, and tender romantic fancies that he thought were

dead for ever, flowered when he saw the buttercups and daisies of

June.

PART III: TEMPLE