I like to walk upon the encircling ridge behind Sorrento, which commands
both bays. From there I can look down upon the Isles of the Sirens. The
top is a broad, windy strip of pasture, which falls off abruptly to the
Bay of Salerno on the south: a regular embankment of earth runs along
the side of the precipitous steeps, towards Sorrento. It appears to be
a line of defence for musketry, such as our armies used to throw up:
whether the French, who conducted siege operations from this promontory
on Capri, under Murat, had anything to do with it, does not appear.
Walking there yesterday, we met a woman shepherdess, cowherd, or
siren--standing guard over three steers while they fed; a scantily-clad,
brown woman, who had a distaff in her hand, and spun the flax as she
watched the straying cattle, an example of double industry which the
men who tend herds never imitate. Very likely her ancestors so spun
and tended cattle on the plains of Thessaly. We gave the rigid woman
good-morning, but she did not heed or reply; we made some inquiries as
to paths, but she ignored us; we bade her good-day, and she scowled
at us: she only spun. She was so out of tune with the people, and the
gentle influences of this region, that we could only regard her as an
anomaly,--the representative of some perversity and evil genius, which,
no doubt, lurks here as it does elsewhere in the world. She could not
have descended from either of the groups of the Sirens; for she was not
fascinating enough to be fatal.
I like to look upon these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren
and desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of
the Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to
dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens sat
on flowery meads by the shore and sang, and are vulgarly supposed to
have allured passing mariners to a life of ignoble pleasure, and then
let them perish, hungry with all unsatisfied longings. The bones of
these unfortunates, whitening on the rocks, of which Virgil speaks, I
could not see. Indeed, I think any one who lingers long in this region
will doubt if they were ever there, and will come to believe that the
characters of the Sirens are popularly misconceived. Allowing Ulysses
to be only another name for the sun-god, who appears in myths as Indra,
Apollo, William Tell, the sure-hitter, the great archer, whose arrows
are sunbeams, it is a degrading conception of him that he was obliged to
lash himself to the mast when he went into action with the Sirens, like
Farragut at Mobile, though for a very different reason. We should be
forced to believe that Ulysses was not free from the basest mortal
longings, and that he had not strength of mind to resist them, but must
put himself in durance; as our moderns who cannot control their desires
go into inebriate asylums.
Mr. Ruskin says that “the Sirens are the great constant desires, the
infinite sicknesses of heart, which, rightly placed, give life, and,
wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens,
one noble and saving, as the other is fatal.” Unfortunately we are
all, as were the Greeks, ministered unto by both these groups, but can
fortunately, on the other hand, choose which group we will listen to the
singing of, though the strains are somewhat mingled; as, for instance,
in the modern opera, where the music quite as often wastes life away,
as gives to it the energy of pure desire. Yet, if I were to locate the
Sirens geographically, I should place the beneficent desires on this
coast, and the dangerous ones on that of wicked Baiae; to which group
the founder of Naples no doubt belonged.
Nowhere, perhaps, can one come nearer to the beautiful myths of Greece,
the springlike freshness of the idyllic and heroic age, than on this
Sorrentine promontory. It was no chance that made these coasts the home
of the kind old monarch Eolus, inventor of sails and storm-signals.
On the Telegrafo di Mare Cuccola is a rude signal-apparatus for
communication with Capri,--to ascertain if wind and wave are propitious
for entrance to the Blue Grotto,--which probably was not erected by
Eolus, although he doubtless used this sightly spot as one of his
stations. That he dwelt here, in great content, with his six sons and
six daughters, the Months, is nearly certain; and I feel as sure that
the Sirens, whose islands were close at hand, were elevators and not
destroyers of the primitive races living here.
It seems to me this must be so; because the pilgrim who surrenders
himself to the influences of these peaceful and sun-inundated coasts,
under this sky which the bright Athena loved and loves, loses, by and
by, those longings and heart-sicknesses which waste away his life, and
comes under the dominion, more and more, of those constant desires
after that which is peaceful and enduring and has the saving quality of
purity. I know, indeed, that it is not always so; and that, as Boreas is
a better nurse of rugged virtue than Zephyr, so the soft influences
of this clime only minister to the fatal desires of some: and such are
likely to sail speedily back to Naples.
The Sirens, indeed, are everywhere; and I do not know that we can go
anywhere that we shall escape the infinite longings, or satisfy them.
Here, in the purple twilight of history, they offered men the choice
of good and evil. I have a fancy, that, in stepping out of the whirl of
modern life upon a quiet headland, so blessed of two powers, the air and
the sea, we are able to come to a truer perception of the drift of
the eternal desires within us. But I cannot say whether it is a subtle
fascination, linked with these mythic and moral influences, or only the
physical loveliness of this promontory, that lures travelers hither, and
detains them on flowery meads.