IN AND ABOUT CAPRI.* • A Lotos-Eatir in Capri. By
Ilan Walters. London : Bentley and S. 1993. the panorama from S. Maria di Soccorso of Capri, or of the WE fear that Mr. Walters' book must, on the whole, be ranked somewhere in he embracing category to be described as guide-book literature. That he himself would not resent the imputation we mayrinfer from his preface, or "Foreword," as he prefers picturesquely, if singularly, to call it, in which he refers the reader to his pocket Guide to Capri, with the name of its Neapolitan, publisher, Farchheim, for any fuller topographical details of the Island of Tiberius which he may feel tempted to ask for. elie himself holds his volume to be but "confused feeding,"—all the more welcome perhaps to the class of vagrants amongst whom he sedulously ranks himself. Well, it is confused, and to the reviewer a little confusing ; while Palms .4ncl Pearls; or, /Scenes in Ceylon, a book we know not, suggests alliterative comments upon the labours of the Lotos.Eater. Capri, it must be said, is the subject of but part Of a digressive book which ranges over many places in the land of fascination which lies round and about Naples. And. the author is by turns geographical and geological, historical and anecdotical, while he breaks out in various places into verse which, for want of further reference, we presume to be his own,.' Pcestum and Amalfi, Ischia and Proeida, and all the magic names of the district, come in for their turn of treatment, and if in one place we are given the history of Maeaniello, the seller of fish, " povero, scalzo, e di bassissima conditione," who was twenty-four years old and married, full of wit and drollery, of a middling stature, and rather thin than fat, with black eyes, and two little brown mustachioes,—in another we are thrilled at some length with the legend of a domestic murder of a peculiarly atrocious kind, which turns out toebe nothing in the world but the plot t of an. old tragedy by illo, the author of George Barnwell. So much does incident peat itself. The text of the earlieir part of the book will be interesting enough to the Capri.tover who has had the tinae and the opportunity to devote; rat all events, a sufficient number of days to a sojourn on 4..e island,—enough to become acquainted with its delightful vaelety of nooks and corners ; to have driven and redriven over iteprie 'solitary road, itself a marvel of construction, which connects the two townships of Capri and Anacapri, the twin-cities of the island (though, according to Mr. Walters, it hal done nothing' to lighten the traditional hatred which exiets between the Capriotes and the Anna- priotes) ; to hav9, explored the villa of Tiberius, and all that appertaineth thireunto ; to have delighted in the white and green Grotto 4 much as in the blue ; to have exhausted the marinas, greq , and small ; to have scaled the heights of Solaro, the °Ile mountain, with the hermit on the way; to have speculqed' on the " formations " to his heart's content ; to have sat and gazed from the lovely Punta di Tragara ; and to have sin ed and lounged away his hour or two at M. Scappa's "fire o'Olock Tea" shop in the very original market- place. He ill remember how be speculated upon the marked difference pf character which distinguishes the sturdy islanders from the loafing lazzaroni across the Bay, and the general air of comfort and prosperity and work which marks the little Tiberian isle, with its own wines and its own harvests, its one little daily boat to connect it with Naples, with all service and all communication suspended except on fine days—no letters, no trouble, no nothing—and pension at the best hotels, excel- lent wine included, at ti fr. a day. "Three-quarters of the Population get their living directly or indirectly from the strangers who visit the island, to the number of some thirty thousand every year,—of whom, however, at least nine-tenths remain. but for two or three hours, arriving by the daily steamer from Naples and Torrent° at noon and departing at three." So goes on the traditional tourist-round. While Torrent° and Castellamare are crowded with sojourners, the large majority are content with just time enough at Capri for one hurried round of the Blue Grotto, when they can do it— very often, even when they reach it, the water is too rough to allow of admission—luncheon at one of the hotels, a per- sonally conducted walk in hot haste (a stumble rather, when the way is considered) up to Villa Tiberius and back again, or a flit to Anacapri in time for the boat's return. And their memory of Capri is like Verdant Green's vista of Oxford's spires and towera—the Blue Grotto and a few etceteras. They have not realised the pretty local proverb, which Mr. Walters fails to quote,—" Don't leave the Blue Grotto without seeing Capri." Almost as well might they be content with an experience of the famous cavern as it appeared in the grounds of the Italian Exhibition at South Kensington some seasons ago, iv really admirable reproduc- tion of the strange interior, with' the additional advantage that from the South Kensington grotto you could get a bird's-eye, or rather a fish's.eye, view of Vesuvius, whereas from the original you cannot.
Of the curious tradition about the gradually sinking island which one gathers on the spot, certainly of much verisimilitude when compared with existing facts, which tell us that the Blue Grotto was a lofty cavern. which formed a kind of smoking-room for Tiberius in the parallel of his nicotian hours, and that the famous little doorway by which the boat enters it was an arched window high in air, and of stories thereon dependent, Mr. Walters tells us nothing Nor does he speak of the theory which disconnects Capri altogether from the volcanic circle of the mainland, per- petually menacing new destrnction from its Vesuvian capital, and makes it, it is said, a residence quite secure from the con- vulsions which devastate Ischia, even at so short a distance off. But he has collected theories of much geologic learning we doubt not, from the proper authorities, which will be better studied from his own pages than any transcript of ours. Enough that he tells us that the island is formed mainly of limestone strata from the tertiary period, covered in many places by a deposit of volcanic cinders and pozzuolanas under- lying the surface-soil (the latter is a ferruginous ash used in England for the making of fine mortar and cement), originally deposited in a red-hot state. These he conceives to have been transported originally "from the mouth of the vast crater now covered by the placid waters of the Bay of Naples, to which the name Cratere is still frequently given." Geology and the character of the coast, he reminds us, seem to point to Capri as one part of the Sorrentine peninsula, insulated, perhaps, at the same time and by the same convulsion as Ischia and Procida, which one looks on from her shores. Strabo has written of that separation as an authentic fact; Strabo, who wrote in his day of Vesuvius as covered "with beautiful meadows except on the top, which is mostly level, but quite sterile, with an appearance of ashes, showing rugged rocks of sooty consistency and colour, as if they had been burned with fire. From which one might conclude that the mountain had once burned and possessed fiery abysses, and had become extinguished when the material was spent." And since then what has happened? Cities destroyed by the awaking of those once abysses, buried for years to be un- buried again in death ; civilisations and religions flourishing and decayed, one to transform the face and story of the world, but not to touch the nature of that volcanic ground and those unfathomable waters. Science to speculate and Nature to appal, and. man to wonder and suffer and inquire,—How old. in all her terrors is the world P Mr. Walters has a good deal of fun to show in the lightening of some of his exegetic pages, as when he gives us a quaint little anecdote to account for the mixed racial characteristics of the Oapriotes, which, after much ethnological speculation of remote periods, connects certain aspects of them with the visit of an Irish regiment towards the close of the last cen- tury; or when inspired by the temptation of excavation, he digs vigorously on his own account on a likely spot, till he comes upon a fragment of the Daily Telegraph with the report of a dynamite outrage : and he has a good eye for a fine view, which enables him to reveal for us some of the features of superb outlook from exquisite Amalfi, perhaps the most entire and perfect of all the chrysolites of the Mediterranean tiara. And he is an interesting guide, too, in the ever-attractive legends of that strange and terrible Tiberius. Unable to deny the leading features of the repulsive story, he is still unwilling to believe the man as black as he has been painted, and likes us to recur to the better days before the ten years' sojourn at Capri. As an Emperor he had done much for Rome, and given to his people the best of his strength and thought. And full, indeed, of suggestion and reflection is this passage as it stands " In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caner the word of God came unto John, the son of Zecharias, in the wilderness.' That was in the second year of the Emperor's sojourn in Capri ; some years later followed the Crucifixion, of which announce- ment must have come in due course to Tiberius at the Villa Jovis. As I pace the grass-grown courts of that wonderful ruin, I re- member that he who used to dwell within its walls was the ruler whose friendship this timid Pilate feared to forfeit, 'If thou let this Man go, thou art not Caisar's friend,'—the morose and melancholy being who, moved by the remorseful record of his procurator, came, as Tertullian bears witness, to be so convinced of the dignity of the Nazarene, that he willed to enrol Him among the gods, and forbade any hand to be laid on those who believed in Him."
What an extraordinary approximation of time that was, and always will be, in the minds of so vast a multitude of men to out-reason reason. "The world," in its own sense, was always small. In the third year of Tiberius, who was its head-centre, that world was at about its worst and most "civilised." Its most corrupted centre was about Naples. And Capri was Tiberius' lair. And the word of God went out into the out- lying Roman wilderness. The whole of that "coincident accident" has so much in its significance, that earlier religions, co-existent but undiscovered races and lands, previous and later "discoveries," progresses and sciences and supersti- tions—the very wrongs to be committed in its name—seem all as nothing to the central fact.
We have been too much tempted by the engrossing theme to be able to dwell at more length upon Mr. Walters' book, with its pleasant engravings to recall the fascinating places with which it deals. It is what he meant it,—desultory but attraotive reading. He tells again the thrice-told tale of the earthquake at Casamiociola. Has he ever heard it in all its siinplicity from the lips of the chief sufferer, the dear old English landlady of the Quisisana Hotel at Castellamare ? He takes us to La Cava, where he has a funny mystery of his own to tell us of, which he describes as "the smallest adven- ture ever chronicled;" he has a seductive chapter on the Littus Veneris to write for us—with Posilipo and BaiEe and Pozzuoli—and a happy desdiption of the tramcars at Virgil's Tomb as the meeting of Prose and Poetry. And he has, we regret to say, the stereotyped confession of the idler to end with, thia he loves a mountain best from the bottom. From Lowell downwards, how many of our penmen have of late been tempted into that quotation We thank Mr. Walters much for recalling us to " CapreEe," though, indeed, we may uot bring ourselves to love it best in a book.
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