Part V - Pastures new

Summary

1897: The call of the Continent

A Shropshire Lad and those poems he kept back had been a volcanic and distressing catharsis. Relaxation and pastures new were now the order of the day and so in the summer of 1897 he toured the Continent for a month, first to Paris for a week, then Rome for three or four days, Naples for ten; then homeward bound – a further four to five days in Rome and one in Paris.

Just after he returned to Highgate in late September, he wrote a letter to his stepmother with his observations on Paris, Naples, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri and Ischia, He had turned out to be an assiduous and committed tourist, writing about places so as to give the reader a very good sense of them in a colourful and literate guidebook sort of way. He had obviously been very taken by the beautiful buildings in Paris, the wildness and picturesqueness of the Bois de Boulogne, and, like most other visitors to Paris, had concluded ‘They make a deal more of their river than we do of ours: it is all edged with handsome quays and crossed with handsome bridges.’ In Naples, where the Scirocco was blowing out of Africa, he reproduced the colours and feel of the landscape, and the active presence and sounds of the volcano:

Here you begin to hear an angry sound such as water will sometimes make in pipes, as if the mountain were gargling, or were trying to talk but had stones in its mouth; which indeed it has. This is the lava boiling inside. The volcano was unusually quiet, so that I was able to go quite to the edge of the crater, which is often impossible. This is a great pit, sending out so much smoke that you can hardly catch a glimpse of the other brim; the sides are ashes with smears of sulphur and of an orange coloured stuff which I believe is arsenic; in the centre there starts up at intervals a tall fountain of red hot stones, which then fall rattling back again into the funnel with a noise like a wave going down the beach.