But this much
is, I think, certain, that after a comparatively advanced standard of
culture has once been attained, music is the readiest if not the only
key which admits to the yet narrower circle of the highest imaginative
thought. On the occasion for travel afforded him by his honeymoon, an impulse
which he could not at the time explain, but which after-events have
convinced me was the haunting suggestion of the _Gagliarda_, drove him
to visit the scenes mentioned so often in Temple's diary. He had always
been an excellent scholar, and a classic of more than ordinary ability. Rome and Southern Italy filled him with a strange delight. His education
enabled him to appreciate to the full what he saw; he peopled the stage
with the figures of the original actors, and tried to assimilate his
thought to theirs. He began reading classical literature widely, no
longer from the scholarly but the literary standpoint. In Rome he
spent much time in the librarians' shops, and there met with copies
of the numerous authors of the later empire and of those Alexandrine
philosophers which are rarely seen in England. In these he found a new
delight and fresh food for his mysticism. Such study, if carried to any extent, is probably dangerous to the
English character, and certainly was to a man of Maltravers's romantic
sympathies. This reading produced in time so real an effect upon his
mind that if he did not definitely abandon Christianity, as I fear he
did, he at least adulterated it with other doctrines till it became to
him Neo-Platonism. That most seductive of philosophies, which has
enthralled so many minds from Proclus and Julian to Augustine and the
Renaissancists, found an easy convert in John Maltravers. Its passionate
longing for the vague and undefined good, its tolerance of æsthetic
impressions, the pleasant superstitions of its dynamic pantheism, all
touched responsive chords in his nature. His mind, he told me, became
filled with a measureless yearning for the old culture of pagan
philosophy, and as the past became clearer and more real, so the present
grew dimmer, and his thoughts were gradually weaned entirely from all
the natural objects of affection and interest which should otherwise
have occupied them. To what a terrible extent this process went on, Miss
Maltravers's narrative shows. Soon after reaching Naples he visited the
Villa de Angelis, which Temple had built on the ruins of a sea-house of
Pomponius. The later building had in its turn become dismantled and
ruinous, and Sir John found no difficulty in buying the site outright. He afterwards rebuilt it on an elaborate scale, endeavouring to
reproduce in its equipment the luxury of the later empire. I had
occasion to visit the house more than once in my capacity of executor,
and found it full of priceless works of art, which, though neither so
difficult to procure at that time nor so costly as they would be now,
were yet sufficiently valuable to have necessitated an unjustifiable
outlay. The situation of the building fostered his infatuation for the past. It
lay between the Bay of Naples and the Bay of Baia, and from its windows
commanded the same exquisite view which had charmed Cicero and Lucullus,
Severus and the Antonines. Hard by stood Baia, the princely seaside
resort of the empire. That most luxurious and wanton of all cities of
antiquity survived the cataclysms of ages, and only lost its civic
continuity and became the ruined village of to-day in the sack of the
fifteenth century. But a continuity of wickedness is not so easily
broken, and those who know the spot best say that it is still instinct
with memories of a shameful past. For miles along that haunted coast the foot cannot be put down except on
the ruins of some splendid villa, and over all there broods a spirit of
corruption and debasement actually sensible and oppressive. Of the dawns
and sunsets, of the noonday sun tempered by the sea-breeze and the shade
of scented groves, those who have been there know the charm, and to
those who have not no words can describe it. But there are malefic
vapours rising from the corpse of a past not altogether buried, and most
cultivated Englishmen who tarry there long feel their influence as did
John Maltravers. Like so many _decepti deceptores_ of the Neo-Platonic
school, he did not practise the abnegation enjoined by the very cult he
professed to follow. Though his nature was far too refined, I believe,
ever to sink into the sensualism revealed in Temple's diaries, yet it
was through the gratification of corporeal tastes that he endeavoured
to achieve the divine _extasis_; and there were constantly lavish and
sumptuous entertainments at the villa, at which strange guests were
present. In such a nightmare of a life it was not to be expected that any mind
would find repose, and Maltravers certainly found none. All those cares
which usually occupy men's minds, all thoughts of wife, child, and home
were, it is true, abandoned; but a wild unrest had hold of him, and
never suffered him to be at ease. Though he never told me as much, yet
I believe he was under the impression that the form which he had seen
at Oxford and Royston had reappeared to him on more than one subsequent
occasion. It must have been, I fancy, with a vague hope of "laying" this
spectre that he now set himself with eagerness to discover where or
how Temple had died. He remembered that Royston tradition said he had
succumbed at Naples in the plague of 1752, but an idea seized him that
this was not the case; indeed I half suspect his fancy unconsciously
pictured that evil man as still alive. The methods by which he
eventually discovered the skeleton, or learnt the episodes which
preceded Temple's death, I do not know. He promised to tell me some
day at length, but a sudden death prevented his ever doing so. The
facts as he narrated them, and as I have little doubt they actually
occurred, were these: Adrian Temple, after Jocelyn's departure, had
made a confidant of one Palamede Domacavalli, a scion of a splendid
Parthenopean family of that name. Palamede had a palace in the heart of
Naples, and was Temple's equal in age and also in his great wealth. The
two men became boon companions, associated in all kinds of wickedness
and excess. At length Palamede married a beautiful girl named Olimpia
Aldobrandini, who was also of the noblest lineage; but the intimacy
between him and Temple was not interrupted. About a year subsequent to
this marriage dancing was going on after a splendid banquet in the great
hall of the Palazzo Domacavalli. Adrian, who was a favoured guest,
called to the musicians in the gallery to play the "Areopagita" suite,
and danced it with Olimpia, the wife of his host. The _Gagliarda_ was
reached but never finished, for near the end of the second movement
Palamede from behind drove a stiletto into his friend's heart. He had
found out that day that Adrian had not spared even Olimpia's honour.