In the South Seas, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet,
Fertile the isle, the temple much suprassing
The common praise it bears.
—The Winter’s Tale, III.i

What now is Oceania, was then the South Seas, and Stevenson made several stays among the island groups, as told by the book’s full title:

In the South Seas
Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in
The Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands
In the Course of Two Cruises, on the Yacht ‘Casco’ (1888) and the Schooner ‘Equator’ (1889)

The Marquesas are still the Marquesas, but the Paumotus are also now the Tuamotus (formerly French Polynesia), and the Gilberts are now Kiribati. Even by 1888 the old way of life was passing because of contact with European and Chinese traders in weapons, opium, and other sundries.

What Stevenson may have lacked in anthropological training is compensated by the eye of a storyteller. The island paradises aren’t so heavenly, and probably never were. Cannibalism (feasting on “long pig”) had only just passed away, and may just have gone into hiding.

French Polynesia is governed by a rational bureaucracy, or tries to be. The Gilberts salute the Queen across the water, and some take RLS to be her son.

Beach bums wash up and stay a while, but never make out well. One Englishman fell for an island queen, who wouldn’t consider the “naked” look of the untattoed. So, he submitted himself to the painful art out of affection. “The fickle fair one could never behold him from that day except with laughter. For my part, I could never see the man without a kind of admiration; of him it might be said, if ever of any, that he had loved not wisely, but too well.”

In the Paumotus, RLS studies life on an atoll, where a calm lagoon is sheltered from the rough ocean waves. The food is monotonously coconut-based, and fish are notoriously undependable. A fish may be deadly in the lagoon but nutritious if caught just out to sea; or healthy eating on this island, but poisonous on the next. Even the native islanders are helpless to judge away from their own place.

The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Laudat, amat, cantat nostros mea Roma libellos . . .
(All Rome is mad about my book . . . .)
Martial, Epigrams VI, 60

How does the son of Puritans understand Italy and Rome? Circa 1850, there was much to despise–uncomfortable paving stones, bad food and wine (!), an evil government, ruins without hope. This romance concerns a “faun,” Donatello, son of a noble Tuscan family, with a resemblance to the marble faun of Praxitiles, and Donatello’s three friends, two American (Hilda and Kenyon), and the mysterious Miriam. Hilda and Miriam are painters, and Kenyon is a sculptor, all come to Rome for inspiration. Miriam’s past has caught up with her, and makes the story move. One of the group commits a murder, another is an accomplice of sorts, and a third is a witness. Kenyon is not involved in the death, so he and the reader have to work out what happened and to whom. Donatello, Miriam, and Hilda all have to deal with their own mistakes and sins.

The fifth main character is Italy itself, mainly Rome, but also Tuscany, where Donatello has his family estate. A reserved bottle of the estate’s famous white wine, called Sunshine, is an eyeopener of sorts for Kenyon. That word sunshine comes back several times in later parts of the story. 

There might be a sixth main character, which would be the Church, if that can be separated from Italy in the experience of Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon. The women are sympathetic to it, though resisting full incorporation. Hilda’s apartment is in a building dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and part of Hilda’s rent involves keeping a devotional flame alight. Miriam goes further and nearly swims the Tiber (or does she finally? the ending is unclear). Donatello, from the land of Saint Francis, chooses a life of penitence. Kenyon thinks most of it appalling (especially the famous Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione), but is attracted in spite of himself. The Marble Faun is precedent for the essays by the other New Englanders, Henry James in Italian Hours and Henry Adams in his tour guide, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

Hawthorne may have been the first to make this observation about the Church: “All this,” thought the sculptor, “is a most forcible emblem of the different aspect of religious truth and sacred story, as viewed from the warm interior of belief, or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”