I.

We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.

Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island, dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now, alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of the cliff.

The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points of scenery, but its huge ma.s.s serves as an admirable shelter to Capri below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this s.p.a.ce is practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is packed into so small a s.p.a.ce. The visitor who lands from Naples or Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau crowned with the grey ma.s.s of a convent, and then plunges over crag and cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of Castiglione with its crown of mediaeval towers, lead up the eye to the huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of cloud.

Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone; slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus; olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and vast fingers of rock with the dark ma.s.s of the carouba flinging its shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges over the tumbled mountain ma.s.ses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast where the haze hides the temples of Paestum; at another the Bay of Naples opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across twenty miles of clear air.

The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pa.s.s by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of "studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer, the ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and Jerusalem.

For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of amus.e.m.e.nts of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"

cruising round the huge ma.s.ses of the Faraglioni as they rise like giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and "rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is, has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap; coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and tempest and the Madonna's help--make up group after group of Caprese life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.

Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the Riviera with no little grat.i.tude may still shrink from the memory of its sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along the sh.o.r.e will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day.

The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air--the dust of the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing--may perhaps account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is, that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar.

Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as the wind veers round to the west.

CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.

II.

Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck.

Hill-side and valley are filled with a ma.s.s of _debris_ that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of a.r.s.enals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century. The main archaeological interest of the island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the huge ma.s.ses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible to a.s.sign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The smallness of the s.p.a.ce--for the lower part of the island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for believing that anything of importance was added after the death of Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.

We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the great strife between the h.e.l.lenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The h.e.l.lenic victory of c.u.mae however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city"

rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it had pa.s.sed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome.

The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the G.o.ddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian sh.o.r.e. A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its sh.o.r.es.

It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than of the first that Capri is destined to be a.s.sociated. While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople, became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate, Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it.

What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning to Rome.

Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort which Roman luxury created round the sh.o.r.es of the Bay of Naples. From its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisae, the white line of Neapolis, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm them. The taste of Tiberius was as coa.r.s.e as the taste of his fellow Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiae--the drunkards wandering along the sh.o.r.e, the songs of the revellers, the drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of noisy girls, the coa.r.s.e jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which strewed the water--were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of Suetonius alone. But in all this ma.s.s of gossip there is little that throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on, the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground was mainly of his own creation.

It would of course be impossible to pa.s.s in review the numberless sites where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the sh.o.r.e, some placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the sh.o.r.e, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.

By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is historically a.s.sociated. Through the nine terrible months during which the conspiracy of Seja.n.u.s was in progress, he never left, Seutonius tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Ma.s.sa lies across the blue reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Paestum, runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.

In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiae; it was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations with the coa.r.s.e revels which are laid to his charge. Each pa.s.sage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty almost perfect arches.

The importance of these remains has long been understood by the 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 a.s.sociated 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 n.o.ble 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 c.u.m monasterio St. Stefani" had pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sive and numbed till the cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will pa.s.s, 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 ma.s.s 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 l.u.s.tily, 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 pa.s.ses 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 acc.u.mulate 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 emba.s.sy," 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 pa.s.ses 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 "amba.s.sadress"

breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments pa.s.s 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 amba.s.sadress 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 ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.s 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-gla.s.s, 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 ma.s.s 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.

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