archaeologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to
the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred
years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of
time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its
name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real
ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later
Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into
decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two
Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that
Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period
which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer
one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the
Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.
A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent
cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose
fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls
are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken
chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by _debris_, and two
semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the
furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity
which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the
excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely
pathetic that it must tell its own tale:--"Welcome into Hades, O noble
deities--dwellers in the Stygian land--welcome me too, most pitiful of
men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death
sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now
I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my
parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth
year, and--wretched I--I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but
I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more."
Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human
sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a
slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern
deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.
Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later
silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the
rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo
antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and
from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each
monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a
mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is
erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know
when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the
evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local
topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the
"Insula Capreae cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of
the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the
Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri
to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed
a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century.
The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate
of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income,
the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who
settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and
September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed
out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the
mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the
Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and
the two mediaeval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the
name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the
sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem
marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every
raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the
fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of
the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction.
But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to
give a special archaeological interest to the little rock-refuge of
Capri.
THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.
III.
The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly
into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief
and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The
stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in
November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a
fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an
English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the
summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the
Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has
almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom
cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping
down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the
difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little
piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a
delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under
the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the
brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit,
women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the
birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay
is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in
English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman
prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne
with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows
he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he
smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and
the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the
cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will
pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so
instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little
parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily
brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist;
he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to
Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and
has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to
Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the
procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to
the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.
What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to
see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra
employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the
African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the
island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the
great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn;
and the Sunday before they start--generally one of the last Sundays in
January--serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak
the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and
high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness
streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the
"Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but
all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles
of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by
rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and
then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments
of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but
the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure
to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the
Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four
elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic,
wonderful"--somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic
land--comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown
of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is
the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the
mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the
"Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and
graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty
of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour
of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman
who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore,
the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish
are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who
gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island.
And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside
our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our
Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from
Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the
vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have
'bombi'--not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug
of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of
the Municipio."
On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love
of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face
might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector,
but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore,
and she is _my_ protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic
by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the
opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of
money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is
correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore;
and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty
soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the
Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her
hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon
colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the
enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff
copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the
rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now
lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the
narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the
hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the
Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the
sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without
which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in
the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries
of terror and delight.
Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a
strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that
coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the
fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless
drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but
biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and
often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands,
the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters
of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too
by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to
the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to
tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings
will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which
he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in
life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining
coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and
where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor
who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with
the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to
accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one
resource is the coral-fishery.
The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young
fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former
years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal
begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents
of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the
favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with
cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it,
the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted
room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to
the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence,
in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a
given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress"
breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good
repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments
pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the
families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in
and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which
was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with
the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised
spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still
pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments--the
"spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of
their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of
pearls; the gold chain or lacetta, worn fold upon fold round the neck;
the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of
heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her
betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the
proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer
incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane"
in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence
of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls
it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in
fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed
and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all
a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints
of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage
the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions
which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams
in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest
in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the
bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter
across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a
universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the
close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as
he leads his bride to her home.
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN
_With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological
Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d._
MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
"I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it
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There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and
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of W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford._
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LL.D., &c. &c._
"Rightly taken, the History of England is one of the grandest human
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contrast to the confused and proe-scientific talk so common in most of
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displace."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
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| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the |
| original document have been preserved. |
| |
| Typographical errors corrected in the text: |
| |
| Page 62 Crecy changed to Crecy |
| Page 184 Crecy changed to Crecy |
| Page 186 Liege changed to Liege |
| Page 230 enterprize changed to enterprise |
| Page 237 liker changed to like |
| Page 243 Eigi changed to Rigi |
| Page 291 adminstrative changed to administrative |
| Page 302 immedietely changed to immediately |
| Page 374 connexion changed to connection |
| Page 404 Apennine changed to Apennines |
| Page 419 maccaroni changed to macaroni |
| Page 421 maccaroni changed to macaroni |
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