Italian Hours/The Saint's Afternood and Others, part I
Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, and
indeed the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creation
of the friend who had offered me hospitality, and whom, more
almost than I had ever envied anyone anything, I envied the
privilege of being able to reward a heated, artless pilgrim with
a revelation of effects so incalculable. There was none but the
loosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing little boat,
which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer beneath the
prodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that does
most, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making the
Bay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in the
grand style. There was only, above and below, through the blue of
the air and sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and crags
and buttresses, a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchant
outline and the more comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh,
not lost, I assure you--to sit and meditate, even moralise, on
the empty deck, while a happy brotherhood of American and German
tourists, including, of course, many sisters, scrambled down into
little waiting, rocking tubs and, after a few strokes, popped
systematically into the small orifice of the Blue Grotto. There
was an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view in that
receptacle, the daily "psychological" moment during which it must
so often befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to
find himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of them
should come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea is
not a little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as the
wave rises over the aperture, there is the most encouraging
appearance that they perfectly may not. There it is. There is no
more of them. It is a case to which nature has, by the neatest
stroke and with the best taste in the world, just quietly
attended.
Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about itself, Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and see why; and yet, while you roast a little under the awning and in the vaster shadow, it is not because the trail of Tiberius is ineffaceable that you are most uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in Italy to-day ramifies further and bites perhaps even deeper; a proof of which is, precisely, that his eclipse in the Blue Grotto is inexorably brief, that here he is popping out again, bobbing enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly back. The spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has a broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up, supremely expressive as it is of the well-known "love that kills," of Germanicus's fatal susceptibility. If I were to let myself, however, incline to that aspect of the serious case of Capri I should embark on strange depths. The straightness and simplicity, the classic, synthetic directness of the German passion for Italy, make this passion probably the sentiment in the world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in the largest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably marked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seated itself to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its own loud accents; it breaks out in the folds of the hills and on the crests of the crags into every manner of symptom and warning. Huge advertisements and portents stare across the bay; the acclivities bristle with breweries and "restorations" and with great ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to add that some such general consciousness as this may well oppress, under any sky, at the century's end, the brooding tourist who makes himself a prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, "behind." It is behind, in the track and the reaction, that he least makes out the end of it all, perceives that to visit anyone's country for anyone's sake is more and more to find some one quite other in possession. No one, least of all the brooder himself, is in his own.