Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limits of past
adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of what the summer
could be in the south or the south in the summer; but I promptly found
it, for the occasion, a good fortune that my terms of comparison were
restricted. It was really something, at a time when the stride of the
traveller had become as long as it was easy, when the seven-league boots
positively hung, for frequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary,
to have kept one’s self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of
Naples in June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--a
particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as the last
word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after a short
interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm,
bright golden meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too
precious, surely, for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the
faculty of putting together again in an order the sharp minutes and
hours that the wave of time has been as ready to pass over as the salt
sea to wipe out the letters and words your stick has traced in the sand.
Let me, at any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a
sort of sense.
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.