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Title:      Siren Land
Author:     Norman Douglas
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language:   English
Date first posted:          March 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Siren Land
Author:     Norman Douglas





First published 1911
NEW AND REVISED EDITION
New York: Dodd, Mead & Company 1923
Printed in Great Britain




CONTENTS

I.   SIRENS AND THEIR ANCESTRY
II.  UPLANDS OF SORRENTO
III. THE SIREN ISLETS
IV.  TIBERIUS
V.   THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BLUE GROTTO
VI.  BY THE SHORE
VII. THE COVE OF CRAPOLLA
VIII RAIN ON THE HILLS
IX.  THE LIFE OF SISTER SERAFINA
X.   OUR LADY OF THE SNOW
XI.  ON LEISURE
XII. CAVES OF SIREN LAND
XIII THE HEADLAND OF MINERVA
INDEX  [omitted for this electronic edition]




I. SIRENS AND THEIR ANCESTRY


It was the Emperor Tiberius who startled his grammarians with the
question, what songs the Sirens sang? I suspect he knew more about the
matter than they did, for he was a Siren-worshipper all his life,
though fate did not allow him to indulge his genius till those last
few years which he spent among them on the rock-islet of Capri. The
grammarians, if they were prudent, doubtless referred him to Homer,
who has preserved a portion of their lay.

Whether Sirens of this true kind are in existence at the present day
is rather questionable, for the waste places of earth have been
reclaimed, and the sea's untrampled floor is examined and officially
reported upon. Not so long ago some such creatures were still found.
Jacobus Noierus relates that in 1403 a Siren was captured in the
Zuider Sea.  She was brought to Haarlem and, being naked, allowed
herself to be clothed; she learned to eat like a Dutchman; she could
spin thread and take pleasure in other maidenly occupations; she was
gentle and lived to a great age. But she never spoke. The honest
burghers had no knowledge of the language of the sea-folk to enable
them to teach her their own tongue, so she remained mute to the end of
her days--a circumstance to be regretted, since, excepting in the Arab
tale of "Julnar the Sea-born," little information has been handed down
to us regarding the conversational and domestic habits of mediaeval
Sirens.

In the royal archives of Portugal are preserved the records of a
costly litigation between the Crown and the Grand Master of the Order
of Saint James, as to who should possess the Sirens cast up by the sea
on the Grand Master's shores. The suit ended in the ting's favour: BE
IT ENACTED--THAT SIRENS AND OTHER MARINE MONSTERS EJECTED BY THE WAVES
UPON LAND OWNED BY THE GRAND MASTER SHALL PASS INTO THE POSSESSION OF
THE KING.  This would show that Sirens were then fairly plentiful. And
one of the best authenticated cases is that recorded by the veracious
Captain John Smith--he of Pocahontas fame. "I cannot here omit to
mention," says he, "the admirable creature of God which in the year
1610 I saw with these my own eyes. I happened to be standing, at
daybreak, on the shore not far from the harbour of St. John, when I
observed a marine monster swiftly swimming towards me. Lovely was her
shape; eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, neck, forehead, and the whole
face was as that of the fairest maiden; her hair, of azure hue, fell
over her shoulders...." Altogether, a strange fish. The rest of the
quotation will be found in Gottfried's _Historia Antipodum_.

Consult also Gessner, Rondeletius, Scaliger, and other good folks,
from whose relations it appears evident that Sirens were common enough
in their days and, doubtless for that reason, of little repute; for
whatever is common becomes debased, as the very word "vulgar" proves.
This perhaps helps to explain their fishy termination, for the oldest
Sirens were of bird kind. The change took place, I imagine, about the
time of Saint Augustine, when so many pagan shapes began to affect new
vestments and characters, not always to their advantage. It influenced
even those born in Hellenic waters, whom we might have supposed to
have remained more respectable and conservative than the others.

Thus Theodorus Gaza, whose name is a guarantee of good faith and
intelligence--did he not write the first Greek grammar?--once related
in a large and distinguished company (Pontanus was also present) how
that, after a great storm in the Peloponnesus, a sea-lady was cast up
with other jetsam on the beach. She was still alive and breathing
hard; her face and body were "absolutely human" and not uncomely.
Immediately a large concourse of people gathered round, but her sighs
and heaving breast plainly showed how embarrassed she was by their
vulgar curiosity.  Presently she began to cry outright. The
compassionate scholar ordered the crowd to move away and escorted her,
as best he could, to the water's edge. There, throwing herself into
the waves with a mighty splash, she vanished from sight.  This one,
again, partook rather of the nature of a fish than of a bird.

In Greece, too, Sirens of every kind have ceased to sing.

I remember a long-drawn, golden evening among the Cyclades. A spell
had fallen over all things; the movement of Nature seemed to be
momentarily arrested; there was not a sound below, but, overhead, the
sunbeams vibrated with tuneful melodies, Janko, the fisherman, had
dropped his oars, and our boat, the only moving object in that
preternatural stillness, was drawn by an invisible hand towards the
ruddy pool in the west. But athwart our path lay a craggy islet, black
and menacing against the background of crimson conflagration. Soon it
came in upon us in swarthy confusion of rock and cloven ravine, a few
gleams of emerald in its sheltered recesses.  Here if anywhere,
methought, Sirens might still dwell unmolested. The curly-pated rascal
steered with cunning hand towards a Lilliputian inlet; like a true
Greek, he appreciated curiosity in every form. But he resolutely
refused to set foot on shore. I began my explorations alone,
concluding that he had visited the place before.

It was no Siren islet. It was an islet of fleas. I picked them off my
clothes in tens, in hundreds, in handfuls. Never was mortal nearer
jumping out of his skin. Janko was surprised and shocked.

Now, whether these fleas had inhabited the island from time
immemorial, being degenerate descendants of certain heroic creatures
that sailed thither in company of Jason and his Argonauts, or had been
left there by shipwrecked mariners of modern days; how it came about
that they multiplied to the exclusion of every other living thing;
what manner of food was theirs--whether, anthropophagous-wise, they
preyed upon one another or had learned to content themselves with the
silvery dews of morning, like Anacreon's cicada, or else had acquired
the faculty of long fasting between rare orgies such as they enjoyed
on that afternoon: these and other questions have since occurred to me
as not unworthy of consideration.  Mr. Hudson, in his _La Plata_, has
vexed himself with similar problems. But at that moment I was far too
busy to give any thought to such matters.

Ay, they have deserted Greece, the Sirens. It was never more than a
half-way house to them.  But they stayed there long enough to don new
clothes and habits. Nothing indeed ever entered that little country
but came out rejuvenated and clarified. A thousand turbid streams,
pouring into Hellas from every side, issued thence grandly, in a calm
and transparent river, to fertilise the world. So it was with the
Sirens. Like many things, they were only an importation, one of the
new ideas that, following the trade routes, crept in to feed the
artistic imagination of the Greeks.  Now that we know a little
something of the ancient civilisations of countries like Egypt and
Phoenicia that traded with Greece, we can appreciate the wonderful
Hellenic genius for borrowing and adapting. Hermes, the intelligent
thief, is a typical Greek. For whatever they stole or
appropriated--religions, metals, comforts of life, architecture,
engineering--they stole with exquisite taste; they discarded the dross
and took only what was of value.  All traces of the theft quickly
vanished; it looked absurd, as Monsieur du Presle has pointed out, to
acknowledge indebtedness to others for things which they might as well
have invented themselves.  For the rest, the stolen material was
re-modelled till its original creator could hardly have recognised it.
The grotesque, the cruel, became humane.  Borrowed gods of frantic
aspect put on fair and benignant faces. And every item was forthwith
stamped with the hall-mark of Hellas: temperance.  All these _objets
de vertu_ have been handled a good deal since those days; they were
sadly knocked about in the uproarious Middle Ages; but this hall-mark
in not thumbed away: connoisseurs know it.

I question whether Phorcus himself, the father of the Sirens--or was
it Achelous? these old family histories are delicate ground--would
have recognised his girls again. How did they look on entering Greece?
Ask Messieurs Weicker, Schrader, De Petra, Corcia, Klausen, and their
colleagues.  They will tell you everything, for they have performed
the unknightly task, suggested by Anaxilas, of "plucking the Sirens."
In the interests of anatomy it was no doubt desirable, since it
enabled them to count the vertebra; and teeth, and perhaps to decide
whether the Sirens were really cannibals or not; artists and poets
complain of unnecessary mutilation. Dreamers are always complaining.
How they looked? They were the personification of sultry dog-days when
Sirius (whence their name) burns fiercely in the parching firmament;
they were vampires, demons of heat, of putrefaction, of voluptousness,
of lust.  But Hellas clothed them anew in virginal hearts and garments
and sent them westward--in bad company to be sure, for it seems they
travelled with the Teleboeans or Taphians, incorrigible cutthroats and
cattle-stealers. It must have been something like "the Baby and the
Burglar."

Yes; from the minute specialised researches of scholars it is quite
clear that the Sirens were nowise indigenous to Greece; they belonged
to wilder, non-Hellenic cycles, "remaining," says Butcher, "as foreign
words borrowed into a language, but never wholly nationalised." Like
other animistic conceptions common to many seas and lands, they
drifted into Hellas and were _deodorised_. Our familiar Sirens are not
demons of putrefaction; they are creatures full of charm and go to
prove the humanising influence of the Greeks; not of the Greek crowd,
as is sometimes inferred (for a more intemperate set of bigots and
ruffians never breathed), but only of its teachers, who resented
ugliness as a sin and ever held up to them the ideal of
ncmesis--measure.

Homer began the work, and nothing is more true than that saying of
Herodotus, that "Homer arranged the generations of the gods." The
_Odyssey_, which sweeps along its current the legend-wrecks of
multitudinous extra-Hellenic races, has wafted down to us a fragment
of the foreign and cannibalistic old Siren-lore---

  In verdant meads they sport, and wide around
  Lie human bones, that whiten all the ground;
  The ground polluted floats with human gore,
  And human carnage taints the dreadful shore....

but there is no further elaboration of this ungracious aspect; on the
contrary, their song, which follows, is conceived in the true spirit
of beauty and quite at variance with this primeval picture of crude
bloodthirstincss. A characteristic hellcnisa-tion, caught in the act.
This first step inwards purification accomplished, later poets and
philosophers dwelt ever more on the human attributes of the Sirens, on
their charms of voice and feature, till finally the "whitening bones"
and other harsh traits faded from sight.

After Hellas came the Alexandrian period with its philological and
historical vagaries, and the prodigious syncretism of gods in the
second and third centuries; then medievalism, which dwarfed Hellenic
shapes into caco-demons and with their glories crowned its saints.

The Siren Parthenope escaped by taking refuge during mediasval storms
in the narrow confines of an amulet, such Siren-charms as are still
seen in the streets of Naples and credited with peculiar efficacity
against the evil eye. In this, I seem to see the homoeopathic
principle at work, for the Sirens themselves were witches at the
time--sea-witches, and to this day the bathing population may be
observed to cross themselves devoutly before plunging into the water,
in order to paralyse these malevolent genii of the deep. Others, such
as Venus, sheltered themselves behind musty saints; Santa Venere is in
high repute as Healer of certain diseases.

And another point of general interest becomes clear from these
scientific disquisitions: that the Sirens of Homer must be sought in
the West rather than where Gladstone and others have located them.  A
variety of speculations are now converging to show that the Odyssean
fable is the record of one of many westward processions of gods and
men and is, indeed, only another example of that suggestive "westing"
law first propounded, I believe, by the Russian naturalist, Von Baer.
Curiously enough, Baer himself asserted that the adventures of
Odysseus, including the Siren episode, took place in the Black Sea;
but this may have been due to a kind of patriotism on his part--if we
always knew from what motives our profoundest convictions have sprung!
An interesting phenomenon, by the way, this of exact thinkers
relapsing, in old age, into hazardous theorisings. So Baer, the
physiologist, discourses about the legendary Phseacians; Virchow, the
pathologist, about prehistoric man; Wallace, the biologist, about the
world of spirits.  And sometimes the weariness, the acquiescent mood
is premature: Lodge, the mathematician, has already begun to preach of
reons and ethics. It is the way of individual man and the way of
nations; none exemplifies it better than Hellas: from "pillars of
unwrought stone" to Aristotle and back again, via Plato, to the
_logos_, which is obscurity once more. But not all of us follow this
natural curve; some are born old and others never attain maturity, the
discords being adjusted in some posthumous or antenatal existence.

The Greek Sirens, at least, are stamped with features of eternal
youth. They linger on sea-girt rocks, lyre in hand, or rise from the
gleaming water, clash their cymbals, and again vanish.  So you may see
them pictured on Greek vases.  There is a vagueness, remoteness, and
restraint about them which permits of multifarious interpretations and
constitutes the charm of so many of these Hellenic conceptions. They
are not the product of one mind, but a complex, many-faceted growth
which reflects the touches of various layers of culture superimposed
upon one another--fair but elusive shapes. Here is one aspect. Long
ago, the Sirens engaged the Muses in a singing-contest.  They were
worsted, and the Muses decked themselves with their enemies'
feather-plumes.  Who is not tempted to detect in this legend the
victory of disciplined music over the wild improvisations of natural
song? And another: the three sister-Sirens drowned themselves out of
Jove for Odysseus. This is the impress of strong human feelings--a
hopeless passion, you perceive: no school-girl sentimentality. Picture
a "demon of putrefaction" casting itself into the sea for a mortal!
Oh, they had changed considerably in the air of Hellas. The
purification--the hallmark.  The "_chaste_ Parthenope" found a
resting-place and an honoured tomb on the spot where now stands
Naples. For a thousand years she dominated its social and religious
institutions.  She dominates them still. Is Parthenope dead?  Who,
then, is Santa Lucia? The madonnas of Naples are all sea-queens whose
crowns shine with a borrowed lustre; the Madonna della Libera, the
Stella di Mare--they are all reincarnations of antique shapes, of the
Sirens, of Leucothea, Euploia, and the Nereids, and their cult to this
day is pagan rather than Christian. You will not find such saints in
Tuscany.

A large Siren literature has sprung up within recent times. But I
would still like to see a book which should develop the idea as a
whole, tracing their genealogy from birth through all the changes of
character they have undergone since ancient days--a book which might
be entitled _Les Sirenes a travers les siecles_ (why does it sound
better in French?), and which would afford an interesting measure of
the corresponding state of the human intelligence. For we create our
gods in our own likeness.



There is an imp of the imagination called the familiar spirit or
guardian angel, who often runs parallel to these eerie water-ladies.
Like the Sirens that occur everywhere--in Chinese and Saxon tradition,
in Brazil and in the grey-green reaches of Polar seas, [Henry Hudson's
crew saw one when seeking a passage to the North Pole near Nova
Zemblya. She was like a woman above, "her skin very white and long
hair hanging behind, of colour black." Her tail was speckled and
shaped like that of a porpoise.] the attendant demon is of animistic
growth, springing up, independently, in Burma, among the old Irish,
the Eskimos, the Chilians.

Our particular Sirens are probably of Phoenician origin, while our
particular guardian angels come from the Chaldaeans. The crystal
spaces of their aether were alive with fluttering divas who grew in
holiness as they receded from earth; Hellenic and Roman culture took
them over from direct contact with the East, but Christian Europe
received them indirectly as a legacy from the Jews who had imbibed
this poetic demonology during their Babylonian sorrows and had
enriched their sacred books with these terrible and lovely creatures
of air, which the Gnostics and Sabaeans elaborated into a glittering
hierarchy. So the seven planetary spirits of Persian mythology melted
into the seven arch-angels of Cabbalistic dreamings; but our ideas of
ordinary ones, of winged forms intermediate between God and man, are
purely Chaldaean.  Christians were actually forbidden by the Council
of Laodicea to call upon the angels, and it was not till the second
Council of Nicca that this "idolatrous practice" was sanctioned;
Byzance indeed, rather than Rome, is the mother of angel worship.
Even as the Sirens soon took on fixed aesthetic attributes, so the
guardian angel was early installed in his moral functions. Every man
had his own; angels and gods likewise; the graves of the dead
likewise, and high divinities were sometimes pleased to play the part
with deserving mortals like Tobias or Telemachus. Pythagoras, strongly
tainted with Orientalism, made his _daimon_ perceptible to the senses,
whereas the familiar of Socrates was invisible, the "divine voice" of
reason. This point of time is approximately the high-water mark of
both conceptions--hence onward there is the exuberance of decline. And
as in Homer we can designate the precise poetic touch which raised the
Sirens from their lowly place, so in Plato we may note the very
blunder whereby the familiar became gross once more. For the master
can hardly have meant by "a divine something" that which his disciples
thought--interpreting literally an allegorical remark of his, they
built up that anthropomorphic theory which stultified Socrates and
re-materialised the _demon_.

It is characteristic of mankind that only then did he, like the
Sirens, become "popular." Xenophon, Menander, Apuleius, and the rest
of them waxed eloquent in explanations; Diogenes and Apollonius also
began to consult private devils, and of course Plotinus, the ape of
Socrates, had one too. And soon the curious spirit of Alexandrian
pedantry was at work upon them, dwelling, with erudite dilettantism,
upon the origins and meanings of the Sirens, while Philo mised his
astounding _salade russe_ of Greek and Jewish demons.

The Romans, busy and honest, had no use for things of beauty, save as
plunder of war to decorate their temples and villas. They rejected the
Sirens, but the stern Pelasgic cast of their religion led them to
identify the _demon_ with what philosophers called the idiosyncracy,
the genius. Enlarging upon this sober notion, they gave congenial
spirits to corporate bodies and towns, the grandest being that of Rome
itself; the patron saints of modern Italian cities and villages are so
firmly rooted only because they represent the lineal descendants of
these old tutelar deities. And sometimes a good and a bad genius lived
conjointly in the body of one man, striving for the mastery: a problem
which already confronted these Chaldaeans whose religious
cursing-tablets (models of what such literature ought to be) are
largely taken up with conjurations for the expulsion of malefic demons
in favour of beneficial ones. The dilemma was inevitable--one of the
two antagonistic forces must preponderate--and so these imaginary
intra-corporeal mannikins are a microcosmic illustration of the
pitfalls of dualistic creeds.

Medievalism came, and the familiar or paredral spirits went through
the same degrading metamorphosis as the Sirens. They grew common;
philosophers like Simon Magus, saints like Teresa, poets like
Tasso--everybody had one or more of them. That of Cornelius Agrippa
lived in the shape of a black dog (Faust): on his death-bed at Lyons
the sage thus cursed it--_Hence, beast of damnation, that hast wholly
damned me_! (whereupon it vanished), and his great disciple Wier, who
also believed in them, is sharply reprimanded for doubting this
particular tale. The idea commingled with a host of mandrake legends;
idols, of which numbers were sold in England under Henry VIII, were
carved out of this plant and gravely consulted.

I think the Crusades and the Western domination of the Arabs, in whose
lore the attendant genius plays a conspicuous part, may have helped to
spread the superstition throughout Europe, which was then in a fit
condition to believe anything. The familiar lived no longer inside
man, prompting him to moral actions; he was imprisoned in capsules or
rings (Parthenope in her amulet) and could be constrained to appear or
dismissed from service (Ariel). Up to this day, _humunculi_ in glass
phials are bought in German fairs and kept "for luck"--I have seen
them hawked about the streets of London--and the following will show
that this trade, like all others, had its risks:--"In the year 1650 a
merchant of Augsburg kept some of these quaint spirits sealed up, like
flies or ants, in bottles, intending to bring them to the fair of
Leipzig; but when, by means of a letter, it was discovered that he was
about to offer them for sale, he denied the whole matter--_perhaps
they themselves had whispered to him_ that he might have to answer
awkward questions on their account." Awkward questions!

Despoiled of their pristine ennobling qualities, these beings were
still sociable and not without hopes of heaven; the familiar had
become realistic, swayed by passions like mankind, sometimes lovable
and often tinged with a vein of sadness, while Sirens like Undine and
Melusine were strangely human in their tears and laughter. We were not
yet wholly afraid of these our creatures. But soon enough, by that
process of deterioration of which the word "demon" is itself an
example, they were absorbed into the essence of the Evil One and
became his slaves--past redemption. Witches only, and not
philosophers, kept familiars in the shape of cats, and the belief was
merged into that of incubi, Satanic Pact; the Church warning its
adherents against them: _Ipse simulat se captum, ut te capiat; a te
inclusum, ut contra te finaliter concludat_. Thus the rebellious
angels confined in copper vessels by the great Lord Solomon have
degenerated into a bottled imp, an infant's toy; and from the voice of
reason of the Greek sage, from the guardian angel that watches over
the slumbers of innocent childhood, from the genuis of divine Augustus
and eternal Rome, we descend to the "harmless, necessary cat."

I rather question whether the familiar spirit would have maintained
its strong fascination if it had not lent itself to practical
purposes, and one may speculate how much of the worldly prestige of
men like Mahomet, Numa, or Carbajal was due to their fiction of a
ghostly counsellor, which justified actions unintelligible to the
vulgar. The familiar has lately appeared in a new guise: the control
of the medium.

Will he quite die out? No more than the Sirens. The pious Silvio
Pellico addressed a prayer to his spiritual custodian; the Catholic
Church, however, has never favoured this individualistic tendency,
convinced that the role of guardian angel is more properly performed
by confessors or one of the thousand saints appointed for that
purpose. Protestantism, meanwhile, has reverted to the "still, small
voice," though in neurotic men, like George Fox, a vision is required
to supplement the conscience. All those who fail to attribute their
well-being to natural causes will crave for something of the
guardian-angel type, even as simple mariners, in moments of danger,
may wonder whether there is indeed no truth in those tales of spiteful
she-devils lurking in the depths.  And if this were a philosophical
age, I would endeavour to show that the whole invisible-companion-idea
is merely an exemplification of Lotze's views, as to that striving of
the human personality to extend and consolidate its sphere of
domination which has induced us to carry walking-22 sticks and to wear
tall hats; while the Sirens are--well, no matter. Fortunately,
metaphysics are out of fashion just now.



It seems to me that the Sirens, like other old Hellenic ideals, are
coming to honour again.

During their westward progress they tarried long about the headland of
Athenaeum, which is the southern horn of the Bay of Naples now called
Punta Campanella, and about its islands. A snowy temple, one of the
wonders of the western world, rose in their honour near this
wave-beaten promontory--for promontories were sacred in oldest days
from their dangers to navigation; colonnades and statutes are swept
away, but its memory lies embedded in the name of the village of Massa
Lubrense (_delubrum_). A wondrous mode of survival, when one comes to
think of it: a temple enshrined in the letters of a word whose very
meaning is forgotten, handed down from father to son through
tumultuous ages of Romans and Goths and Saracens, Normans, French, and
Spaniards, and persisting, ever cryptic to the vulgar, after the more
perishable records of stone and marble are clean vanished from earth.

A good idea of the country can be obtained from the well-known Deserto
convent above Sorrento or, nearer the point of the promontory, from
the summit of Mount San Costanzo which, if I mistake not, ought to be
an island like Capri near at hand, but will probably cling to the
mainland for another few thousand years. The eye looks down upon the
two gulfs of Naples and Salerno, divided by a hilly ridge; the
precipitous mass of Sant' Angelo, stretching right across the
peninsula in an easterly direction, shuts off the view from the world
beyond. This is Siren Land. To the south lie the islets of the Sirens,
nowadays known as the Galli; westwards, Capri, appropriately
associated with them from its craggy and yet alluring aspect;
Sorrento, whose name has been derived from them--I wonder some
adventurous scholar has not identified it with the Homeric
_Surie_--lies on the northern slope. A favoured land, flowing with
milk and honey; particularly the former: Saint Non mentions as proof
of its fertility the fact that you can engage wet-nurses there from
the ages of fourteen to fifty-five.

I am not going to describe its natural features; the thing has been
done by five hundred travellers already. Imagine to yourself a tongue
of limestone about three miles across and six long, jutting into the
sea; a few islands hanging upon its skirts; villages and farms whose
inhabitants reflect the various cultures that have been imposed upon
them during the last two thousand years of political changes. A
microscopic territory; but overgrown with hoary traditions of which
that of the seamaidens is only one. We need merely think of those
quaintly carved vessels which in olden days sailed in between Capri
and Point Campanella, bearing westwards certain gods and letters and
aspirations--much of what is best, in fact, in our own modern
civilisation. And more recent memories, grim and glorious, cluster
thickly about its rocks and inlets....

It was no doubt during one of those spells of deathlike summer
stagnation, known hereabouts as _scirocco chiaro_ or _tempo di
bafogna_, that Odysseus encountered the Sirens---

  While yet I speak the winged galley flies
  And lo! The Siren shores like mists arise.
  Sunk were at once the winds; the air above,
  And waves below, at once forgot to move.
  Some daemon calmed the air, and smoothed the deep,
  Hushed the loud winds, and charmed the waves
    to sleep---

for scirocco is the withering blast whose hot and clammy touch hastens
death and putrefaction.

This passage may have suggested to Cerquand the idea that the Sirens
"sont le calme sous le vent des hautes falaises et des iles" an
interpretation which he subsequently discarded. Loosely speaking, this
would imply that _some_ thing had been created out of nothing; even
as, on the same principle, Pan has been called the personification of
the midday hush that can be felt. The Swiss painter Boecklin, whose
Gothic exuberance often ran on lines antithetical to what we call
Hellenic serenity, has yet divined the psychology of the matter in
"Das Schweigen im Walde"--the shudder that attunes the mind to receive
chimerical impressions, the silence that creates; though I cannot but
think that the effect of this particular picture would have been
improved by the omission of Madame Boecklin. So may those pioneers of
navigation have felt when, becalmed in the noonday heat amid
pale-shimmering cliffs, they grew conscious of the unseen presence.
Sirens dwell here! For the genii of earth and air were ready enough to
commune with untutored men of early ages, to whom everything unknown
was marvellous. Such fruitful shadows cast by inanimate nature upon
the human phantasy are not rare; the secondary stage is reached when
the artist endeavours to fix in stone these wavering shapes, or the
bard in verse; the third is that of the philosopher or grammarian who
explains them as the splashing of waves and what not.

What not, indeed? The Sirens, says one, are the charms of the Gulf of
Naples. No, says another; they were chaste priestesses. They were
neither chaste nor priestesses, but exactly the reverse.  They were
sunbeams. They were perilous cliffs.  They were a race of peaceful
shepherds. They were symbols of persuasion. They were cannibals.  They
were planetary spirits. They were prophets.  They were a species of
Oriental owl. They were the harmonious faculties of the soul. They
were penguins.

Penguins! That is the final pronouncement of commentatorial erudition.

Yet I must add my own mite of conjecture regarding the so-called "eyed
Sirens." These, I hold, may well represent a pristine version of the
Beasts in the Apocalypse. And Eustathius has already explained how
they came by their feather-dresses.  They used to be young girls like
any other nymphs or naiads, but Venus was so annoyed at their
persistent chastity that she changed them into birds. Just like
Venus--the Venus of the grammarians.

So may they have felt, those ancient mariners, spell-bound in drowsy
scirocco-chains; but I question whether this was the true genesis of
the Sirens. The bird-termination.... It recurs in the harpies, of
Egyptian origin. Those Egyptians, too, had that notable conceit of the
dead body being visited by its soul in the shape of a human-headed
hawk ("Die Seelenvogel"), and it was also--says Doughty--"an ancient
opinion of the idolatrous Arabs, that the departing spirit flitted
from man's brain-pan as a wandering fowl, complaining thenceforward in
deadly thirst her unavenged wrong." Leucothea, a Phoenician goddess,
could likewise assume the bird-form, [Footnote: Professor Correra
gives various reasons for supposing that the cult of Leucothea was
more widely diffused in these regions than is generally believed. So,
for example, he refers to this divinity the statue of a sea-lady
seated upon a marine monster which was found in the ancient Villa
Pausilipon and is now in the Naples Museum. I observe that in the
Blacas collection there was a gem which exactly reproduces this
statue--King has figured it under the title of _Venus Euploia_ whose
temple is supposed, though not by Beloch, to have stood near the site
of this Villa at the western point of the Bay of Naples, facing the
Athenaeum promontory on the east. This identical gem is also
photographed as "Nereid or Thetis" in the beautiful work of
Furtwaenglcr, who thinks that the several gems depicting this subject
are antique copies of a stone dating about 400 B.C. Here are three
different versions of one figure: Leucothea, Venus, and Nereid; whence
we may conclude that the sages have not yet quite disentangled the
genealogies of these wave-born divinities. It used to be thought that
some of them, like the Sirens, Leucothea and Aphrodite, had come to
these shores with their old Phoenician worshippers.  These traders
have doubtless left their mark in certain South Italian local names,
such as Megaris (their depot at Naples), Marata, and Sama--Megaris,
Marathon, and Samos in Greece are also of Phoenician origin--but their
gods, as we now know them, only entered the country later on, under
Hellenic auspices.] and--who knows?--some crazy enthusiast may yet
succeed in establishing a cousinship between the Sirens and those
enigmatical swan-maidens who winged their way from snowy Himalaya to
grace the bridal couch of northern hero-kings.

For the rest, such days of heavy-lidded atmospheric brooding are rare
in Siren land.

They are clear-eyed and caressing as a rule, these summer breezes;
caressing and cleansing; they set all the shining leaves a-tremble and
scatter town-memories and the fumes of musty learning. How the bizarre
throng of water-witches and familiars grows uneasy in that brave
light, and wan--how they fade away, like the ghosts they are!




II. UPLANDS OF SORRENTO


With the exception of Capri, which is the only spot within a hundred
miles of Naples where a foreigner is reasonably well treated, no
accommodation in the septentrional sense of the word can be found in
Siren land save at Sorrento and Sant' Agata, the idea being that
"foreigners must first come" before anything can be done to welcome
the few that flee into these solitudes from the din and confusion of
that fair land whose frontier-station bears the ominous name of
Chiasso (noise). Massa is rich and populous, but contains not a single
hotel or even restaurant; it is a community of peasant-proprietors who
live, some of them, in fine country houses built in pre-Bourbon days
by Spanish and Neapolitan grandees--indeed, it is one of the
surprising things in this district to see mouldering structures with
ample courtyards, arched galleries, and noble escutcheons over their
gates, now inhabited by mean-looking folk whose manners, at least, are
still in harmony with their dwellings.  Massa is full of them, but
even the humblest village can boast of one or two. The terrors of a
century of Bourbonism reduced this country to direst distress. Capri,
after the discovery of the Blue Grotto, began to thrive in spite of
its sovereigns, but the mainland portions are only just now recovering
from the blight. Neapolitans have grown rich again and seek the fine
air of the hills as of yore, while the inhabitants themselves bring
much money from New York; and from Argentina, where a good half of
them are periodically em-ployed in sellling potatoes to the Spaniards,
who apparently eat nothing else. "Good people" they call therm,
because they are easily gulled in the matter of weights and measures.

One consequence of this revival is that the price of land is rising
once more and new houses are being built. This would be satisfactory,
were it not that the style of architecture has changed for the worse.
That harmonious medley of small vaulted chambers with their
vine-shaded loggia in front, so becoming to this climate and charming
to look upon, has been displaced by hideous _palazzi_ constructed with
iron beams, asphalt, and roofing tiles--things formerly unheard of. No
person with a sense of the fitness of things will ever fall in love
with these new dwellings, although they are built, as the architects
will tell you, according to the latest _regola d'arte_. When a
Southerner discourses upon _regola d'arte_, he is generally up to some
mischief.

Even the colossal hand-made house-keys of the olden days, now replaced
by weedy cast-iron abominations, were not without a certain austere
beauty: there was a smack of Saint Peter about them. And they had
their uses, too. Three years ago a wealthy landowner, returning home
at night, was attacked by two ruffians with knives.  Having no
ordinary weapon of defence, not even a walking-stick, he began to
wield his house-key with such dexterity that one of his assailants was
brained on the spot, while the other crawled into the fields, where he
was found dead next morning--at least, he ought to have been.

The ridge or backbone which divides the gulfs of Salerno and Naples is
called "Le Tore"--an obscure and venerable word which is common all
over this region and takes us back to Mount Taurus in Cilicia and to
the Celtic and Sinaitic Tor.  Perhaps the poet Statius was referring
to these Tore when he spoke of the "green Taurubula;" of Sorrento or
Capri, but unfortunately nobody can tell us exactly what he meant, as
in the whole of ancient literature the word occurs only in this one
passage. A modern scholar derives the "Tore" from the Greek _ta ore_,
the mountains; which, if not correct, is at least simple. There is a
village called Torco on the southern slope of the ridge just below
Sant' Agata, whose name has been drawn by some from the Latin
_torqueo_, because the road "turns" there, and by others from the
Greek _theorica_ because, they say, a religious procession of youths
and maidens used to wend thither in olden days. Though the church of
Torco is one of the oldest in the district, there are no classic
remains whatever in the neighbourhood, and I rather disbelieve this
tempting theorica-derivation, although it is adopted in his _Magic and
Astrology_ by Maury who copied it, I suspect, from the old Sorrentine
writer, Onofrio Gargiulli. It seems more natural to connect the word
Torco with this backbone or Tor.

It is not a crest but a rounded plateau, and as the divide approaches
far nearer to the southern shore, the rocks on this incline needs must
rush precipitously into the sea, with perilous paths into grottos, and
thrifty olives on the middle heights grasping the limestone ledges or
climbing warily down the gullies; the northern slope, on which Massa
and Sorrento lie, is a gentle declivity planted with vines and oranges
and walnuts, and refreshed by streams that run through the heat of the
dog-days. The Tore reach their highest elevation immediately behind
Sorrento. Here, in the early morning, when sea-mists on either side
shroud the two gulfs from view, the wanderer has all the illusion of
being on some lonely Alpine meadow--not a sign of human habitation or
handiwork; a chill nip in the air; browsing cattle with deep-toned
bells round their necks, and real, close-cropped turf under foot.
This, I imagine, is the track which the wolves follow when they leave
their fastnesses on the Sant' Angelo in winter to scour the richer
country.

A path, the _via delle Tore_, runs along the whole summit, passing
through Sant' Agata and ending at Termini, which is the last village
on the peninsula. An ideal summer walk, for those who do not feel a
little dry heat. But if you sit down, it is well to seek out the
shadow of some wall or an umbrageous carob, for the reverberation of
the light may induce a sun-stroke.

The olives make scanty shade: they are too ferociously pruned
hereabouts. The whole of the southern incline is planted with them
wherever a little soil can be scraped together, and their oil is
excellent--better, says Pliny, than that of Venafrum--probably because
the inhabitants know the secret of preparing it. As soon as it is
plucked, the fruit must be pressed in those picturesque rustic mills
where, by the dim light of a lantern--the work is nearly always done
at night--half-naked, Praxitelean shapes of men and boys may be
discerned turning the heavy stone wheel which crushes the berry to a
clammy pulp. Alas, these trees are now remorselessly uprooted wherever
the soil will feed the more profitable grape; Capri has lost half its
olives, Ischia all: a consummation to be deplored since the vine,
however gladsome in its summer greenery, is bare for six months in the
year when its straggling limbs have a peculiarly unkempt and
disreputable appearance. Were the landscape alone to be considered, I
could wish that some new scourge like phylloxera might be introduced,
for there is enough wine in the country already. At this moment it is
being sold for three francs a barrel (forty-four litres) on Ischia,
whereas the oil-crop has failed altogether; there has been no rain,
the grub has invaded the fruit, and the preceding winter was too mild
(the olive likes a good shiver once a year). These trees are small in
size, mere pigmies beside the writhing monsters of Spain and Greece
and Apulia; their upper limbs are stretched in a nervous tension which
is the despair of artists, but in those tumid roots there sits--to all
appearances--a deep repose. Yet who can tell what passionate alchemy
is astir in that subterranean laboratory, sustaining life and
fashioning fruit through those scorching summer months, among stones
that are often too hot to handle?

At this season the olive's complexion wanes to a yellowish green; with
the autumn rains it becomes blue-grey; the plant also varies in tint
according to locality. This may help to explain the contradictory
colour-epithets which the ancients bestowed upon it. Even now it is
still revered as emblem of peace and plenty, a sprig of olive being
attached to boats and houses after the Easter blessing. There is this
peculiarity in its leaves, that they can make no fluttering movements
like those of most plants; they are affixed to the stem like metal
plates, and if the wind blows it is the whole limb of the tree which
sways. And so a pretty effect may often be seen upon these
olive-coloured slopes: the branches bending with one accord to the
breeze expose the white under-surface of all the leaves, and the
hillside is clothed in silver.

Here, on these remote uplands, I prefer to turn my back on the green
undulations of Massa and Sorrento, on Vesuvius and Naples, Ischia and
the Phlegraean Fields: all these regions are trite and familiar. I
prefer to gaze towards the mysterious South, the mountains of
Basilicata and the fabled headland Licosa, where Leucosia,
sister-Siren of Parthenope, lies buried. At this height the sea's
horizon soars into the firmament smooth as a sheet of sapphire, and
the eye never wearies of watching those pearly lines and spirals that
crawl upon its surface, the paths of silver-footed Thetis--a restful
prospect, with dim suggestions of love and affinity for this
encircling element that reach back, for aught we know, to primeval
days of Ascidian-life.  There is a note of impotence in the sea's
wintry storms, for it can but rage against its prison bars or drown a
few sailormen, an ignoble business: true grandeur is only in its
luminous calm.

Licosa is the furthest point visible but, on rare occasions, other
lands with peaks and promontories unknown loom upon the sky-line, and
sometimes, by the same atmospheric witchcraft, the volcanic cone of
Stromboli is projected out of the waves.  Early mornings in spring and
autumn are most propitious for these delicate trickeries. So Hehn saw
the island of Ischia from Monte Cavo near Albano, though it must have
been well below the horizon. Dream-pageants, swift-fading....

This is essentially a land of line, of irreproachable contours, and
your painter had best begin by throwing away his palette and striving
to see it aright: a land of classical parsimony, limestone and blue
sea, whose chastened beauty none save a really great craftsman, with
disciplined hand and heart attuned to eternal melodies, can hope to
disentangle from among the prejudices and traditions of his own mind.
What caricatures are the works of even world-famous artists who have
painted on these shores; what faulty draughtsmanship, meretricious
effects, and lack of decent restraint! How they fail to see the
simplicity underlying those complex natural formations!  For the
loveliness of this landscape is not that of Phryne, and the painter
errs who thinks that his inmost thoughts are met half-way by a smile
of encouragement. The smile is there, but not for him. It is for the
constraining mortal who disregards it; who stands to his work in the
relation of God to man.



A gradual change is taking place in the orographical modelling of the
Bay of Naples. Capri and the other limestone portions must formerly
have presented a smoother aspect to the eye, as they were covered with
trees and soil which gave them a rounded look. The trees being felled,
the earth slipped down, exposing the jagged asperities of the rock.
With the volcanic districts it is generally the reverse, for these
craters are of soft material, and the longer they are exposed, the
smoother they become. The lower eminences of Baite and Ischia are now
merely a jumble of curving lines, and a small crater near Fuorigrotta
is in the last stage of liquescence; soon the rain and the plough will
have merged it into the earth whence it arose--the limestone tracts,
meanwhile, grow more peaked every day.

Capri is a microcosm whose perfection of _decor_ and hieratic
lineaments can only have been the inspiration of some divinely
frenzied Prometheus.  But its beauty, though vital and palpitating, is
now cramped and impaired by the encroachments of humanity. Rocks are
blasted away for driving roads; shrubs are cut down; high walls and
houses everywhere invade its primitive comeliness.  The place is too
small to endure these affronts without prejudice. It must have been
different in the days when the Sirens were its only inhabitants; if,
indeed, it was really their island.  For I cannot help thinking that
commentators of the Homeric cosmography take the "islands" too
seriously, and thereby involve themselves in need-Iess trouble.
Ancient navigators were inordinately fond of islands, and slow sailing
without a compass may well turn an indented coastline or promontory
into a group of them. This is plain from _Sindbad the Sailor_, and
from Hanno's _Periplus_. People living on continents are more likely
to locate marvels in islands--India and America were also "islands";
so was Paradise, according to Lam-bertus Floridus; to say nothing of
Atlantis--and the ingenious Pelliccia has written a book to prove that
the whole Sorrentine peninsula was likewise an island in olden days.
He argues thus: The Sirens dwelt at Capri; Circe, the enchantress,
lived on another island near at hand; Sorrento is near at hand;
therefore Sorrento must have been the island of Circe--falsifying
geography and geology in order to vindicate a prehistoric sailor's
yarn. What strange creatures we are, placing more faith in deductions
than in facts--why? God created the facts and they may take care of
themselves, but the deductions are our own, to be clung to with
parental attachment. Even so Vargas, that monster of misapplied
erudition, insists that the Siren Parthenope was not worshipped at
Naples, because--well, it would injure his pet theory about the
Semitic races.

A wonderful discovery was made on Capri three years ago: the bones of
mammoth, hippopotami, and other improbable beasts embedded together
with human weapons of the earliest palaeolithic ages. Inasmuch as a
pair of mammoths would soon nibble away the last leaf on a rock of
this size, we must presume it to have been joined to the mainland in
those days. These relics were found below the ashes of the terrific
Phlegraean convulsions which may have done the work of detachment
later on.

Capri is curious also for its Tyrrhenian fauna and flora; it is part
of the wreck of that submerged continent whose ruins still lift their
head above the water here and there, and whose configuration is being
patiently mapped out by the labours of men like Suess, Blanchard,
Parato, and Forsyth Major. The remains of the fallow-deer, a
Tyrrhenian creature, have been unearthed here; certain snails and
various Tyrrhenian plants still occur on the island, such as the
_convolvulus cneorum_ with its creamy blossoms, and the wild palm,
which used to hang in exquisite clusters, untouched from time
immemorial, on the rocky ledges, but is now ruthlessly torn down to
decorate gardens, in which ninety per cent of them perish.

How much of this drowned world still saw the light of sun and stars
when the Sirens sang, I, for one, would be glad to know. For it can
hardly have vanished with a _Hey, presto_! like Graham's Island;
doubtless it sank slowly; Odysseus may yet have drawn up his ship on
beaches that are now, for aught we can tell, slumbering beneath the
waves. We have all heard that story of Plato's, and how the priest of
Sais told Solon of the mighty island of Atlantis which lay beyond the
Pillars of Hercules and was engulfed by the sea. An old Orphic
tradition runs to the same effect. Of the former existence of this
true Atlantic continent there are abundant grave indications--may not
this legend have become amalgamated in the course of ages with that of
the Tyrrhenian catastrophe?  Humboldt seems to have thought so.

It is easy to see, from the summit of the Tore, that Capri is merely a
prolongation, a dependency, of the mainland. And in point of shape,
too, it is almost a repetition--on an enlarged scale, of course--of
the mountain of San Costanzo, which terminates the peninsula and is
itself something of an island. That the chief beauty of Capri, its
insular position and the noble line of cliffs fronting the town on the
west, should be due to what they call a "fault," proves that
scientific nomenclature is not always appropriate for ordinary
purposes.

I often gaze down upon Siren land from those inspiring heights of
Faito on Sant' Angelo which afford, from splendour and associations,
one of the finest prospects in the world. It is cool up here among the
mountain pastures, and there are still ancient beech trees and firs
that look strangely out of place--relics of the autochthonous
woodlands that have now been stripped of their timber like that once
famous Sila forest, which is being eradicated so conscientiously that
its chief town already lies in a desert of glaring rocks and to gather
a handful of firewood there entails a scramble of half a day. Conceive
what this means in a winter of Northern severity, how it makes for
misery and depopulation, and how easily it could have been avoided!

It is a relief to think that the wooded tracts above Siren land have
fallen into the hands of a man like their present owner. For they are
an historical monument worth preserving: they display the flora of the
Italian continent as it was in the days when the pious Aeneas sailed
hitherwards. We are apt to forget that the whole appearance of Italian
scenery has been changed owing to imported plants--the very cypress,
the orange and maize and a hundred others great and small, which we
regard as so characteristic, are aliens to the soil. [Footnote: So,
for instance, the spiky agave which they call _mal' occhio_ because
its point is a defence against the evil eye; the mesembry-anthemum,
known as _ungbia di iannara_ (witches' claws) from the shape of its
leaves; or the grotesque Indian fig--one of God's earliest attempts at
tree-making--which Prellcr, by mistake, depicted in his "Homeric
Landscapes." The _kaklos_ of the Greeks seems to have been a kind of
artichoke.] And the idea of preserving such tracts, absurd as it may
seem to modern Italians, is really not inherently preposterous:
certain civilised nations, such as the French, Americans, and English,
have already by private gift or public subscription enclosed
delectable woodlands to be an eternal delight and precept to their
children; and only the other day the German Emperor rescued, in the
very heart of Italy, the hoary oaks of Olevano from their impending
fate. These, unless I am much mistaken, will be monuments more
acceptable and more intelligible to posterity than the forests now
growing up in Italy: forests of trousered political nonentities in
bronze and marble, whose doctrines, often enough, became a derision
before their protagonists were yet fairly in their graves.



The stealthy teachings of the sea, the Sirens' abode, still lie open
to all, but those of earth-nature have been sadly misread of late and
thwarted; and although we have heard much concerning the hygienic and
economic advantages of properly controlled woodlands, there is room
for another benefactor to mankind--for him, namely, who would proclaim
their ethical significance, their influence as a refining and
civilising agency in the education of the human race. Who will deny
that forests, once they have abandoned their hostile attitude to man's
progress upon earth, exercise a benignant power, subtle and profound,
upon the mind of a people; that music, architecture, and other
generous arts have in forests sought, and found, high inspiration;
that some of the sublimest efforts of literary genius could not have
been conceived in regions as denuded of timber as Italy, Greece, and
Spain now are? Rentzsch ascribes the political decadence of Spain
almost wholly to the destruction of forest. Even if this be going too
far, I cannot but think that in sweeping away woodlands many deeply
rooted humane aspirations, interwoven in their leafy solitudes, are
likewise swept away, and a legion of gracious phantoms, who wandered
freely among those solemn aisles ready to converse with all, banished
for evermore. Shakespeare's England can still be found by those who
look for it, but they who would discover the Italy of her poets must
go far afield. Communion with nature, which exalts and purifies the
mind, has ceased and in its place has arisen that pest of the South:
futile inquisitiveness concerning man in his meanest manifestations.

It was not without an intuition of this truth that the ancients
contrived their exquisite fable of Eresichthon, and whoever yet
remembers the elves and fairies of his childhood may be envied of a
talisman indeed. It will hardly profit us, I think, to withhold from
our children the contemplation of woodland marvels, with their tender
symbolism of leaf and flower, birth and decay; the wonder-period of
our remote ancestors, through which we must all pass in youth, that
fleeting hour of nature-worship, may well be abbreviated, but cannot
wholly be cut out of the programme of our moral growth without
detriment to the race.

The elimination of mystery: what has it not done for modern Italy?
Whether the disfigurement of the landscape has not reflected itself
upon the race? Whether the listlessness of so many Italian
townspeople, and the evil precocity of their children, be not the
nymphs' revenge for Eresich-thon's crime? The old Greeks felt
differently and so do their modern descendants; their humblest
mechanic loves the country, and has therefore preserved a far nobler
curiosity upon the things of life. The boy of the streets, who sees
nothing of the protean witchery of flowers and living waters, is not a
veritable boy at any time, since his youth is ended ere it began. We
are not yet ripe for growing up in the streets; they stimulate the
social instincts of the adult, but stunt the adolescent who craves for
solitude and surroundings habitual to earlier periods of human
history. We know what is said of the second generation of
city-dwellers, even of high social standing; and has any good ever
come out of that foul-clustering town-proletariat, beloved of
humanitarians? Nothing--never; they are only waiting for a leader,
some "inspired idiot," to rend to pieces our poor civilisation.
Whereas out of the very dregs of the country-folk has often arisen, by
the operation of that dark law which regulates the meteoric appearance
of "sports," a Lincoln, a Winckelmann, to guide men's footsteps in the
path.

On these Siren heights--_Montes Sireniani_, they used to be
called--the human element is lacking; there is no sound save the
chirping of the cicadas among the olive branches; an azure calm, a
calm of life, streams down from on high, permeating every sense with
tremulous scintillations of vitality. It is always difficult to
analyse sensations--imponderable moods; and in such moments of
breathless summer radiance every one will have feelings commensurate
to the bent of his mind and habitual associations.  Here, in spite of
the solitude, it seems to me that no genii of earth or heaven are
waiting to hold communion with mankind. I have felt the awe-inspiring
midday hush in many wilds and wolds, and often enough the mind,
surrounded by the unfamiliar, is prone to conjure up phantoms from
inanimate nature. Here it is merely aglow with life; self-centred in
the circumambient calm and stimulated to attention by the sun's rays,
it is yet at rest. The landscape, therefore, and not only the hour and
the man, plays a part when gods are to be created. Perhaps this helps
us to understand the enigma of universal Pan. From being an Arcadian
forest-god he became, as culture advanced, diffused and impalpable.
The forest lost its noonday mystery and its Embodiment was no longer
seen of men; he was merged into the brooding meridian stillness of all
earth which no clearings, no cornfields, no sparkling cities could
impair; his weaker comrades, the fauns and dryads, unable to endure
this searching light, took refuge in yet shadier groves, or pined
away.

Nor do immortal gods look down from cloudy pavilions, for the sky here
is a vast dome, and not a plane. Wherever thunder-clouds touch
mountain summits this quaint belief will arise, and Zeus, whatever his
origin, found a congenial home in Greece, where the exhalations,
formerly more abundant, even now repose upon the hill-tops. In Siren
land they do not; they sail overhead in summer-time, a painted argosy
that seldom anchors to spill its dewy freight against the
mountain-sides, though the _Cloud-gatherer_--when the south wind
blows--is busy as at Aegina, collecting out of a sunny sea invisible
wreaths of vapour which he spins into a crown about the grey head of
Capri. The community of this two-story-world idea in Scandinavia and
Greece is hardly a proof of the boreal descent of some Hellenic gods
(we might as well trace it to old Australia, where a Walhalla was
fabled among the interlacing boughs of lofty eucalypti); nor yet their
violence and unruliness, for in early stages divinity naturally
reflects the turbulence of human environment. Wotan, had he survived
to this day, would doubtless have become an orderly fellow, even as
Zeus did. Altogether, some little nonsense has been written concerning
the anthropomorphism of the gods of Greece. As if any deity could
afford to dispense with these traits! The Jahveh of the Jews was
sufficiently human in his vindictiveness and jealousy; later on, when
he became etherealised, the humanity of his son refreshed our interest
in him. And what lends the devil his charm? His quasi-human
attributes; his bargainings, his ill-treatment at the hands of heaven.
Beings wholly divine are inevitably endowed with qualities of good and
evil identical with our own: they are mere caricatures of good or bad
men. The profoundly divine therefore is, and ever has been, profoundly
uninteresting. These Greek gods are extra-human rather than
super-human; they are interpenetrations of human motives with new and
unaccountable elements. Much might also be said in favour of the view
that their absurdities and excesses were deliberately contrived as a
foil to the moderation-ideal of the Greeks themselves. Yet, polish
away all excrescences and subtilise them to the vanishing point of
purity--their pedigrees cannot be wholly expunged; some Lucian will
always be there to rake up old scandals; to remind Jupiter Optimus
Maximus of certain Cretan meadows and Venus, the _alma mater_, of that
affair of the net.

Here, on these odorous Siren heights, far removed from duty's sacred
call--for duty has become the Moloch of modern life--it may not be
amiss to build a summer hut wherein to undergo a brief period of
_katharsis_, of purgation and readjustment.  For we do get sadly out
of perspective with our environment in the fevered North, out of touch
with elemental and permanent things; we are for ever looking
up-stream. It is well, now and then, to glance backwards adown that
flowing river and to note, before they fade from sight, the strange,
half-forgotten landscapes one has traversed.  Is it I, one wonders,
who thought and felt thus?  How one changes! And one's friends--how
they change! And even public opinion, that exemplary biped which
stands, nose in air and uttering incomprehensible grunts, with one leg
in the illusions of the past and the other in those of the future--how
it changes!

An old Hebrew, who taught the pleasures of a virtuous life after
exhausting those of a voluptuous one, said: Go to the ant; he forgot
to remember that the ant sleeps for half the year. Man alone is a
perennial drudge. Yet many of us would do well to _mediterraneanise_
ourselves for a season, to quicken those ethic roots from which has
sprung so much of what is best in our natures. To dream in Siren land,
pursuing the moods and memories as they shift in labyrinthine mazes,
like shadows on a woodland path in June; to stroll among the hills and
fill the mind with new images upon which to browse at leisure, casting
off outworn weeds of thought with the painless ease of a serpent and
un-perplexing, incidentally, some of those "questions of the day" of
which the daily papers nevertheless know nothing--this is an antidote
for many ills There is repose in Siren land; there is none of that
delirious massing-together in which certain mortals, unable to stand
alone, can lean up against one another and so gain, for a moment, a
precarious condition of equipoise.

To dream--yes; but, as De Quincey observed, _he whose talk is of oxen
will dream of oxen_, and I am not attempting to prescribe for the
uncivilised, particularly as they are in loving hands just now: is not
the whole trend of our legislation a sustained effort to pamper the
unfit at the expense of the fit, to foster the moral delusions of the
crowd--of those whose spiritual activities are in abeyance? May they
prosper! There will ever remain one badge of distinction to mark them
from those of another fibre--their imperviousness to the meaning of
certain old Siren voices---

  O stay, oh pride of Greece! Ulysses stay!
  O cease thy course, and listen to our lay!
  Blest is the man our song ordain'd to hear,
  The song instructs the soul, and charms the ear,
  Approach! Thy soul shall into rapture rise!
  Approach! And learn new wisdom from the wise!
  We know whate'er the kings of mighty name
  Achieved at Ilium in the field of fame;
  Whate'er beneath the sun's bright journey lies.
  O stay and learn new wisdom from the wise....

for I perceive in this lay no promise of any of those things which
they covet, of gold and diamonds and fair women and long life and
earthly honours and the joys of Heaven; but only of enlightenment.

And whoso hears these voices, says Homer, nevermore returns to his
home and family, which may be taken to mean that certain persons have
rated wisdom higher than domestic bliss; doubtless a poetic
exaggeration.




III. THE SIREN ISLETS


Of the five Siren rocks only three lie close together, and these are
the so-called Galli. The old name Sirenusae gradually died out; no
earlier reference to them under their present one occurs, I believe,
than that contained in the chronicle of the Abbot of Telese (1133),
who records their capture by Roger of Sicily. He speaks of them as
"Guallo"--evidently, therefore, a patronymic from the family of Guallo
or Gallo on the mainland--and, what is more singular, he calls them "a
little town placed _infra mare_." Now there is a spot called Guallo on
the peninsula, but wise men will have it that he meant these islands,
and I am not for arguing the point.

It is not absolutely clear, from this and other old documents, whether
in those days the three rocks had the same configuration as now;
presumably, yes; at the same time, they were certainly spoken of as
one and single, and the Amalfitan doge, who lived awhile in exile
here, might have found it a more tolerable residence if they had all
been joined together. But he had been blinded, and they, whose hands
are their eyes, may as well grope about on a rock as on a continent.

How fond they were of blindings and mutilations at this period--the
straightforward killing of the Romans was too harsh for these
Byzantines, who, like all squeamish people, were proportionately
cruel.

Perhaps, too, he was confined in a dungeon, although there is no
mention of any buildings on the islands when, in 1330, King Robert
reared a brave tower there, whose cistern is still resorted to by
fishermen and quail-hunters, for the protection of seafaring men
against pirates. In fact, the island, or islands, are expressly called
"uncultivated" in the deed which confers the guardianship of this keep
to his trusty and well-beloved Pasquale Celentano, who established
himself there with four soldiers, and seems to have liked it, for it
was he who had applied for the post. His family is still extant.

And so they are at this present moment; uncultivated, treeless and, in
summer, aflame with heat; struck by the sun's first beams, they
glister through the livelong day and remain fiercely glowing, like
incandescent rubies, long after the coast-line is drowned in the
shades of evening. Yet there are wandering breezes and a harmonious
wave-lapping suggestive of coolness. They lie in a rough circle, and
anyone but a geologist familiar with the inevitable "quaquaversal dip"
would take them to be the relics of a submerged crater, an illusion
which is strengthened by the outward slope and half-moon shape of the
greater islet, and by the riven pinnacles of stone gnawed by the waves
into bizarre shapes and painted, wherever the spray can reach them, to
a murky brown. And this is exactly what one old traveller called
them--a mistake for which he was sternly rebuked by Breislack. So
Dumas talks of the "granitic ramparts" of Capri, and a Swiss, writing
only three years ago, praises its "parois verticales de porphyre et
basalte" A deplorable lack of general intelligence, seeing that the
principal charm of all Italian scenery, its graceful outlines and much
of its delicate aerial tints, are exclusively due to a peculiar
natural formation.  Limestone, and no other rock, is able to produce
them.

The Galli, again, are nothing but Apennine limestone--wrecks of the
neighbouring peninsula which used to slope southward with a gentle
incline so as to include them in its body, even as on the other side
it still descends gradually seawards: they were torn off in some
terrific prehistoric convulsion.  In one spot the laminated strata are
broken to form a melodious sea-cave--each cave in Siren land sings its
own peculiar melody--the haunt of countless sly-twittering swifts who
rear their families in the shelving rock.

Were I writing a guide-book or historical account of this region, I
would endeavour to give a systematic description of these legendary
islets, supplemented with measurements and hints for travellers. But I
am doing nothing of the kind; I am only dreaming through the summer
months to the music of the cicadas, and dreams are irresponsible
things that flit about aimlessly, dwelling with absurd gravity upon
unconsidered trifles and never quoting statistics.

I sail across to the neighbouring rock of La Rotonda and
find--nothing, save a peregrine that dashes off the cliff at my
approach. "Ah, if I had brought my gun!" exclaims my companion, with
unfeigned anguish. Does he eat peregrines? To be sure he does, and
finds them "better than pigeons." Of all the hawk tribe, they are only
surpassed by the lesser kestrel, which is _squisi-tissimo_.

Long ago, the Anjou sovereigns caused the peregrines "in the territory
of Capri and Sorrento" to be caught and trained for purposes of
falconry.

The third islet, called "Castelletto" from its castellated appearance,
is known to sailors as "Punta da Vuccacia"=Boccaccia=a piece of
ordnance which, at some period, was placed there to command the
straits. A broad rock-cut path, worthy of the Romans, and probably
built to allow ships to be drawn on land, ascends part of the way: the
rest is rather a dangerous climb. A precipitous crag, inaccessible to
invaders; all the summit built over and the limestone chiselled smooth
in certain tracts where a sentinel may have paced. I suspect that this
fortress dates from 1532, for in that year a native of Sorrento
received the grant of all three islets on the condition that one of
them should be fortified. It looks as if no inspector had been sent
down from head-quarters to see that the work was properly done: a
jerry-built affair-King Robert's tower will long outlast it.

Treeless they are, the Siren rocks; but not flowerless. Now that the
riot of vegetation has been allowed to grow for the last year or two,
one can form some idea of what it would become if left undisturbed for
longer periods. Capri, I believe, holds a record for variety of plants
on a small space---

  La Flore est de telle richesse
  Que dans ce rcduit limite
  A huit cents arrive l'espece,
  A trois cents, la variete....

sings the truthful bard, but nowhere on Capri do flowering plants rush
into such reckless overgrowth as here. In the winter months the
narcissus dominates; its scent is heavy upon the air and the glossy
brown bulbs thrust each other out of the earth; in May the ground is
hidden under a radiant tangle of many-hued blossoms that must be seen
to be believed. Every flower of Campania seems to have taken refuge on
this lonely rock.  The rapid evaporation of sea-air no doubt
contributes to this luxuriance, and also the rich soil of the outer
slope.

I once attempted to draw up a list of the Galli flowers, but abandoned
the idea; they shift with every month. Let him, whose mind is at
peace, sojourn awhile on these rocks, and there elaborate a catalogue
of all of them, great and small, with a shepherd's calendar setting
forth their seasons of flowering and decay. Or better still if,
detached from sordid cares, he buys the islets outright and replants
them with ten thousand shade-giving trees, marrying the rough
exhalations of briny sun-scorched rock with the fragrance of rose and
cedar.  What joy to watch their rapid growth in the deep, warm soil!
In these days, when life is so complicated as to lose all homogeneity
and unity of purpose, when our fine edges are worn off by never-ending
trivialities and meannesses, I often think that planting trees and
reclaiming the waste places of earth are among the few occupations
that still commend themselves to gentler natures--pleasure and
instruction for oneself, health and profit to posterity....

According to Strabo, the Siren islets were "three stony and _desert_
little rocks." His words are plain enough, and he uses them twice
over.

Were they true, when he wrote?

For whoever, climbing up the usual path from the sea, arrives at the
summit of the larger island, will perceive that the rocky surface here
has been artificially levelled down for a length of some fifty yards,
and, jutting out of the soil, will be seen the substructures of two
thick parallel walls of the first century--Strabo's lifetime. Here,
then, stood a grandiose edifice, slightly curved so as to follow the
natural crescent of the island, with its larger facades fronting east
and west. The nameless Siren-worshipper who designed this lordly
pleasure-house had studied local conditions of landscape and
ventilation; the site could not have been more happily chosen. In the
hottest days of midsummer a sea-breeze rustled through those ample
halls, and his view was superb, whether, in early morning, he let his
eye wander over leagues of violet sea-calm towards Pzestum and the
shapely peak of Alburno that fades into mist as the sun gains
strength, or glanced westwards into the chaos of rocks and many-hued
waters at his feet, with Capri and lerate in the background, shutting
out the world beyond.

The marbles are gone--gone into the mortar of King Robert's tower.
Yet, searching among the debris on the hill-side, I found some
fragments of white penthelic and _giallo antico_ slabs for a pavement,
and a systematic hunt might yield brick-stamps which would help to
decide the age of the building. The ground sounds hollow in certain
places, as if there were chambers beneath.

The foundations of this structure are massive enough to have supported
a temple, but I question whether they ever did so, because we should
probably possess some record of an ancient divinity worshipped here,
and also because, at the water's edge on the inner side of the islet,
are the remains of a bathing-house or harbour, or both combined,
without which such a large establishment as that above could hardly
have been considered complete.  Its flooring, of irregular shape, is
surrounded by formidable walls of reticulated Posilipo tufa leaning
against the hill-side: in the centre stands a modern lime-kiln. Rocks
have tumbled upon it and into the sea beyond, but I can detect no
traces of its continuation below the waves. At the promontory of
Marciano near Massa, on the contrary--a highly interesting
point--there is another (contemporary) Roman villa with its little
_dependence_ at sea-level, and here the masonry descends into the
deep. These are the sites which ought to be examined by those who wish
to settle the debated question of the former water-level.

Altogether, it would be well if some trained archaeologist were to
investigate this and other remains upon the southern shore of the
peninsula, of whose existence no one seems to be aware.  [Footnote: So
there is the contorted ruin of a Roman building on the beach at
Cantone, below the large tower, not far from a spring which gushed
into the sea. The bricks, unfortunately, bear no stamp.] No great
outlay would be required to lay bare what is left of this building on
the Galli-rock, and nothing more enjoyable or interesting could be
imagined than this kind of work. Crusades are gone out of fashion for
the moment and the only warfare at present worthy of the name is the
bloodless crusade against fools ("The Warfare of the Future?")--can
any nobler participation in it be imagined than that of unearthing
those monuments of bygone ages in whose presence the veriest hind must
perforce pause and bethink himself?

The ethics of ruins--their educational value: what has it not done for
Italy of the Renaissance?  Petrarca already, and Samiuzaro ami
Boccaccio, had drawn deep draughts of enthusiasm from this source. And
all this quite apart from the possibility that these deformed heaps of
rubbish may hide some marble head, soiled with the dust of ages, from
under whose stony brow there gleams a look of rare wisdom or
sweetness; a revelation--inspiring, compelling.

Meanwhile, what of Strabo and his _desert_ Siren islets? This: either
the villa here and that on the islet of Isca, of which I will speak
later, were only built after his death or, if during his lifetime, he
had no knowledge of them. Supposing Mommsen to be correct in surmising
that his _Geography_ was written as late as the reign of Tiberius,
there is still much to be said for the hypothesis of another scholar
that it was composed in a distant region of Asia Minor, where it is
not likely that the latest information was to be procured.

Be this as it may, one thing is interesting: he says that there were
_three_ Siren islets. Now if Isca be omitted from this group, as lying
too near the land, there is still the large rock of Vetara close to
the Galli which cannot be overlooked and which raises their number to
four. Can this mean that the three (true) Galli rocks were at that
time united into one single block making, together with Isca and
Vetara, the three of Strabo? It almost looks like it. Far be it from
one who has grown up under the shadow of Lyell to advocate cataclysms:
in comparison with other catastrophes which have occurred in these
regions the disruption of the Galli rocks from each other would be the
merest trifle. We have some historical account of the havoc wrought
here during the last thousand years by gales and landslides (ice and
earthquakes have done little damage), and it stands to reason that the
preceding ten centuries must have been equally fertile in disasters;
all the time, too, majestic earth-contortions, they say, have tilted
the country up and down, disquieting the works of man.

Where is the house of the poet Tasso, the convent of Revigliano, the
town of Marcina, the harbour and arsenals of Amalfi, or the ancient
Conca, whose picturesque horn juts into the waves opposite the Siren
rocks, and where Richard Coeur-de-Lion halted on his way to Palestine?
Engulfed, all of them. A complex study, bristling with difficulties,
but full of geological and historical interest. Concerning the
"Serapis" temple alone a voluminous literature has sprung up; whether
the marshy situation of Paestum be due to some such subsidence may
still be questioned--the deforestation of the mountain slopes, which
filled the plains with alluvial soil and damned up the river beds,
might also be suggested as an explanation. So the islet of the Siren
Ligeia has lately become joined to the mainland through the deposits
of the Calabrian streams.

The Greek period over, ancient life on these eastern shores of the
Parthenopean Bay resolves itself into one word--Tiberius. His
predecessor, it is true, _discovered_ Capri, for no earlier Roman, not
even the diffuse Cicero, so much as mentions the island; it was as
unknown to the aristocracy of his day as it is to the modern _Romani
di Roma_, who would as soon think of sailing to the stillvex'd
Bermoothes as to Capri: Augustus it was who landed here time after
time, charmed with the convivial Greek natives and the mild climate;
who built those twelve Imperial palaces. But the court remained
nominally in the capital. Of Tiberius we know that he "insederat,"
concerning which cryptic word enough has been written, and that he
lived here for ten consecutive years (Plutarch, who sometimes blunders
in his dates, says seven); and what this entails may be observed when
some sovereign of to-day establishes a temporary residence among the
mountains, while country-houses of officials and snobs grow up like
mushrooms all around. The Sirens always called Augustus back to them:
Tiberius they held fast for good.

This island--Capri--was too small to contain the swarm of nobles and
administrators who helped to conduct the affairs of the world; they
overflowed and brought life to the mainland, and their names survive
to this day in Ceserano, Marcigliano, Mitigliano, and so forth. To
this inundation there is the testimony of Sorrentine inscriptions, of
works of art like the Aphrodisieus statue, and, above all, of the
actual existing masonry.

No doubt there was a revival on these shores under Marcus Aurelius and
another under Hadrian, but these were men of a different stamp; they
were not true Siren-worshippers; they knew what _Weltschmerz_ meant.
The world had aged frightfully in those few intervening years. Marcus
was a conscientious valetudinarian whom the world has agreed to take
at his own valuation (that correspondence with Pronto has a sick-room
air--the querulous note of expiring antiquity); in Hadrian were summed
up all the romanticism and disordered curiosity of a soup-bubble
renaissance.

The builder of this sumptuous villa on the Siren rock was no freedman,
nor yet a mere worlding. I can conceive such persons establishing
themselves in the fat fields of Sorrento, where there was "society"
and some business to be done in wine or oil, or among the reeking
baths at Baise; but it is contrary to what one knows of human nature
to suppose that an islet like this should appeal to them. No, he was a
civilised man, and it is to be imagined that, unlike Tiberius, who
could create his own society, bidding men come and go as he pleased,
this one returned city-wards in the winter months to stimulate
himself: with the din of the Forum and the conversation of his town
friends, and to test anew the capabilities of his digestion.  The
hermit's motto, _vixit qui latuit_, was not altogether his, since the
man that has the true feeling for seclusion among these scenes will be
the last to prolong his stay, though he may well return year after
year, as the Sirens call him back. Nearly all the Roman villas on
Capri and the opposite mainland face to the north, which proves that
they viewed this country as a summer resort. Who can live here in the
winter? Only "foreigners" come at that season. From November to April
the whole wind-bag of Aeolus is let loose; when there is no hurricane,
it rains in torrents; Capri, even with modern appliances (such as they
are) is often inaccessible, while the Galli rocks are surrounded for
weeks by a weltering waste of foam.  No sensible person, unprovided
with the comforts--as well as the disillusions--of Tiberius could
stand the uproar for three or four months on end; it is like being on
board a boat, and when men come to like that kind of life they are, as
Johnson remarked, "not fit to live on land...."



Unavoidably one learns to take an interest in the winds hereabouts,
seeing that these Siren regions are fanned by every breath of Heaven.
In summer it is a simple matter; sea-breeze by day and land-breeze by
night, stepping into each other's shoes with praiseworthy regularity;
but later on things become complicated, and the catalogue of local
winds swells to a formidable size. The northern _tramontana_ which
closes the pores (speak not of love to these folk when the
_tramontana_ blows), and the scirocco that relaxes them, are the best
known, but not the most popular; the latter may well have increased
since ancient times, perhaps on account of the deforestation of
northern Africa, else the Romans, who had absurdly sensitive skins and
nerves, would have execrated it even more than they did.

Blue-black tints and crisp waves prevail during the _tramontana_; an
"honest" wind, because, blowing off the land, it is debarred from
becoming dishonest so near the shore. The scirocco's tints are green
and yellow, and it has no pretensions to honesty--its wintry
convulsions are sometimes so violent that the salty spray is carried
far inland, and can be tasted in secluded orchards on the last
remaining figs. But perhaps this is cloud-work, for when the delirium
is at its height, the clouds often descend and join the fun, tempting
the waves to meet them half-way. When these waterspouts, careering
distractedly over the waste, break, the clouds cling to what they can
of the nether element and bear it away with them on their aerial
voyages.

The great storm of 1343, described by Neapolitan chroniclers and in
one of Petrarca's letters, blew from this quarter; it destroyed
shipping and villages, swallowing what little was left of Amalfi (for
that town had been reduced to a fragment before Mola da Tramonti wrote
his chronicle in 1149), obliterating landmarks all along this coast,
and thrusting even rivers, like the Sebeto, from their courses.
Intense darkness fell over the land during those awful days, and
turned men's minds to thoughts of prayer.

I can remember a scirocco phenomenon equally unearthly, perhaps, in
appearance. At that time, too, our hearts were somewhat perturbed;
things had happened; there had been wars and assassinations of kings,
and it was feared, by the simpler sort, that retribution was due. A
sultry afternoon was drawing to its close, and I had been observing a
small cloud that emerged above the sky-line.  It was round as a disc,
of ruddy hue, and in texture so compact and un-ethereal as to appear
solid.  Slowly it grew, and never changed its shape; an hour passed;
it gradually expanded into a monstrous peony upon the firmament and,
instead of drifting as clouds do, seemed rather to be pushed forwards
mechanically from behind the scenes. Its uncommon shape and colour,
its spasmodic growth, began to attract attention; we herded together
and found ourselves watching its movements not without uneasiness.
Suddenly, after an unusually vigorous jerk, the cheering sun was
effaced, blotted out behind the curtain, leaving the world in a dim
roseate fog. The change was disquieting, and there fell upon us the
hush of an eclipse. Then it rained in big, warm drops. I looked at my
hand--blood!

"Male pioggia, signorc," said an old man, hurrying past me. _Male_;
that was the word--an evil rain.

Next morning trees and flowers were smeared over with an incrustation
of mud, and sprightly white-stuccoed houses splotched with brown.  And
presently wise men came with microscopes and chemical paraphernalia;
they analysed a speck of the deposit of the blood-rain and found in it
plant-spores from the Sahara and animalcules of a thousand kinds--a
whole world in minature, fallen in a raindrop from the sky....



It is rather puzzling when one comes to think of it, to conceive how
the old Sirens passed their time on days of wintry storm. Modern ones
would call for cigarettes, Grand Marnier, and a pack of cards, and bid
the gale howl itself out. But those ancient feathered fowls--did they
peck at each other viciously, or content themselves with shivering in
silence among their crags? So have I seen, during a blizzard, the
bedraggled vultures perched among the bleak hills of Asia Minor. They
sat round the corpse of a camel, one of the unhappiest of its race,
that had dragged huge carpets over the mountain tracks and expired in
the performance of a task for which it seemed peculiarly unfitted. The
vultures craned their necks, but not one of them moved from its stone.
They were plainly hungry. But they preferred it dry.

No; summer is the time to pasture in Siren land. Even Mrs. Shelley,
for whom I entertain no profound respect, could not but feel the charm
of this season. "It seems," she writes from Sorrento in summer, "as if
I had not before visited Italy." The heat is too considerable for
violent exertion, but time passes quickly doing even nothing, if one
does it well. And for studious persons who desire local information,
there is literature galore--histories and chronicles of the rich city
of Massa in the olden days. They read pleasantly under some vine-clad
arbour.

Rich and populous it must have been, for older authors give glowing
accounts of its palaces and industries and great men. How, then, came
it to sink to its present level? The sages will refer you to corsair
raids or to the plague of 1656, quite forgetting that the writers who
describe such a flourishing state of things lived exactly at the time
of these events. I rather think it was another kind of plague, the
plague of a century of Bourbon-ism, which reduced these regions to a
condition of misery whence they are now, thanks to a better government
and to Argentina, slowly emerging.  For ordinary pestilences and
famines and earthquakes are mere amateurs in destruction whose effects
are healed in briefest time: there may even be witnessed, after
occasions when the plough of affliction has violently disruptured the
soil, a strange quickening of growth. But misrule strikes at the root
of things, since the humane strivings in a people, those of its
elements that actively make for good, are so sporadic that their
annihilation is wholly different from a haphazard calamity. And there
was a sinister thoroughness in the Bourbon system which insured
success. The effects of such a conscientious selection of badness must
necessarily endure; it takes longer to rear up that which is humane
than its opposite, seeing that there are a thousand wrongs for one
right. "There is no town and there is no country," says a Neapolitan
historian, "which would not inevitably be impoverished by the loss of
so many and such distinguished men." It is this same elimination of
progressive elements which has done so much harm to Spain and Russia,
and which paved the way, according to Professor Seeck, for the fall of
ancient Rome. Medical men are beginning to estimate, with something
approaching accuracy, the effect of wear and tear upon the individual
organism; experiments on the lines laid down by Mosso and De Fleury
may soon enable us to express it in mathematical terms; but its effect
upon the organic system of communities--upon their arts, commerce,
industry, and all the finer fibres of their social being--who shall
compute it? Who shall estimate the vital strain of a century of
terrorism?

Those Englishmen, therefore, who complain of certain unpleasant
characteristics of modern Neapolitans, might do well to remember that
the Bourbons had been incapacitated from further mischief when their
saviours from over the sea appeared on the scene and allowed them to
continue for another half-century that rule of brigands, monks,
_lazzari_, and other vermin which was responsible for this deplorable
state of affairs.  There had been tyrannies before in Naples, odious
tyrannies; but despots, secular and religious, had been powerless to
smother the grand traditions of Hellenic culture, the envy and delight
of ancient and mediaeval Europe. A glance into early literature will
show what Naples has done in the domain of philosophy--it was ever the
first city of Italy for speculative thought; a glance into the works
of pre-Bourbon travellers will afford a description of the inhabitants
of Naples, and of the provinces, as _they_ saw them. The Neapolitan
Academy for the Study of Nature was the first to be founded in the
world: it preceded the English Royal Society by nearly a century. One
of the brightest pages in human history is the successful struggle of
the Neapolitans against the inquisition.  This, and much else, might
be said in praise of pre-Bourbon Naples. But where philosophical books
may not even be imported into a country, much less printed; where the
reading of Voltaire is punished with three years' galley-slavery, and
that of the Florence newspapers with six months' imprisonment--how
incredible it seems, nowadays!--the flower of civilisation withers and
fades away.  Despotism, priestcraft, and proletariat have ever been
good friends; a kind of freemasonry, unintelligible to simple folks,
has conjoined them from time immemorial against the honest and
educated classes. Unable to stand alone, they lean against one another
for mutual support, and thus in the mephitic calm of ignorance, the
structure remains upright, a marvel of equipoise: like a child's house
built of cards, a breath of enlightenment--and it collapses.

We find natives of Siren land involved in all the movements of the
capital. Capri, for instance, distinguished itself in the
inquisition-frays--a certain Costanzo of that town was one of the
three chiefs of the _fuorasciti_ who, while numbers of the Neapolitans
fled into the country to escape the bloodshed, purposely came to
Naples with their adherents in order to support the city against Don
Pietro di Toledo and his proposed inquisition.  The contest was no
laughing matter. It lasted for months; the streets ran with blood;
sparks, they say, flew from the eyes of the terrible viceroy, and the
notary Grassi, who had been deputed to read the city's protest to him,
was so overcome by the ordeal that he took to his bed afterwards and
died in three days. As a pendant to this liberalism, the pious
Monsignor Apuzzo, Bishop of Sorrento, perpetrated the official Bourbon
"philosophical catechism"--an exquisite monument of bigotry.  And
foreign residents, too, have sometimes come forward with honour. There
died at Capri, in 1892, the Englishman Wreford who for nearly half a
century, as _Times_ correspondent, waged unceasing warfare against
Bourbonism and whose report on the ill-treatment of political martyrs
furnished the material for Gladstone's letter to Lord Aberdeen of
1851. It is fitting that a man like this, who "did a knight's service
for Italy and the world," should not be forgotten, and the
municipality of Capri will do well to erect a tablet to his memory. He
came to the island, originally, for an afternoon, and stayed there
over thirty years.

The Sirens, says Hyginus, were fated to live so long as they could
detain passers-by. Can they be still alive?

And he who really finds time heavy on his hands might do worse than
compile a literary _catalogue raisonne_ of this region. [Footnote: An
unmistakably wholesome sign of the times in Southern Italy is the
revival of local historical studies. Societies are formed, libraries
collected, and every little spot has its champion biographer--often
busy professional men, who sacrifice their leisure to patriotic
researches. Siren land is no exception; much has been written of late
concerning Sorrento and Capri; Filangieri's new account of Massa is
scholarly and exhaustive and the bibliography of Doria promises well.
Works which used to be picked up for a few sous arc now worth as many
francs, and the chief second-hand bookseller in Naples tells me that
for the last three years not one of the rarer writings on Capri has
passed through his handsj old monographs like that of Persico on
Massa, Sccondo on Capri, or Molcgnano on Sorrento have clean vanished
from the market: when found, they can be weighed against gold. Such
facts are at convincing as a good Treasury budget.] By Janus! A little
while ago I found myself recommending the planting of trees and the
unearthing of Roman remains, but now it seems to me that the compiling
of bibliographies is a more respectable occupation, for in
tree-planting there are degrading collisions to be anticipated with
thievish gardeners and workmen, as well as the painful reflection that
posterity will turn into cash the fragrant groves, chuckling at the
old fellow's sentimentalism ("he blundered into a good thing, now and
then"); while the excavation of antiques runs perilously near the
bric-a-brac business, a demoralising form of commercialism.  How one
changes! But _malbeur_, says Rcnan, _a qui ne se contredit pas--une
fois par jour_! Around the bibliographer's table there lies a
passionless calm, unruffled by politics or sex-problems; we all become
tender-hearted towards the innocuous enthusiast who writes for the
delectation of one odd lunatic-scholar in every hundred years. The
thing has been done, of course, by various writers--but in a
perfunctory fashion; the ideal catalogue of a region like this must be
compiled _con amore_....

Here meanwhile, is a curious item touching a shipwreck on the Galli
rocks which will be referred to therein. I translate it from a
manuscript entitled "Dies brumales" in the convent of Sant' Anna del
Pertuso. So far as I can discern, the "Dies brumales" seems to be the
product of some monkish pedant-poet who aimed at inculcating, under
the cloak of adventures, moral maxims to youths preparing for a
religious life; somewhat after the fashion of the Jesuit Daniele
Bartoli who published, in the seventeenth century, an edifying but
wholly unreadable "Geography Transported into Morals."

"When Anselmus had done, the Prior told us that this about the
Arimaspians was only an old fable contrived to show the folly of
gold-seeking.  For gold and love to aught save God, said he, are the
mainsprings of wrong action, and few evils that afflict mankind cannot
be traced to one or the other. And he said that long before regular
trafficke with the Orient was established by the Vessel of Cava,
certain mariners of Amalfi went forth in ships and were often killed
by barbarians or shipwrecked for their greed.

"And now a rare tale, quoth he, comes to my mind anent a vessel which
foundered in a siroc not far from the Siren rocks, where all hands
were drowned save only the captain's son, who was reserved for a worse
fate. Him the waves bore to a pebbly beach, as far as might tire a
little child to run, whereon sat a maiden singing, who looked up with
eyes of friendship. Being a grave lad, he walked aside and, stumbling
among the stones, happened upon a heap of decaying human bones, a
loathly thing. Yet she followed with endearing words, till he lost
reason for her sake. Fair to see was this maiden, and to bespeak--fair
beyond all imagining to those she had fooled, and he deemed himself
favoured above the angels. A brief infatuation, for soon a change came
over her, and while he cherished her more than before, the light of
love faded out of her eyes, and there stole into them the look of an
hundred generations of tigers.  Then ever and anon he would bethink
himself of what he had seen among the rocks, and would fear for his
life. For he had given his heart, but she had sharpened her teeth.

"And Anselmus said:

"'I conjecture that this was some Siren's mischief.'

"But the Prior held that Sirens are fables of the pagans, and that
belike this was an earthly maiden, and what befell between the two is
called earthly love."




IV.  TIBERIUS


Let us examine this Siren-loving monster, Tiberius, a little nearer.

Broad-shouldered, stooping, and tall above the common measure, slow in
his movements and speech, with great glittering eyes and hair falling
over the nape of his neck, wrapped in a ceremonious and almost awkward
reserve--such is the external impression we gain of him. And if,
forgetting awhile his character as ruler of the world, we survey him
in private life, we soon discover what manner of man he was--a
specimen of what the French call la _vieille roche_. Courteous and
formal, a strenuous cultivator of the "grand manner," a conservative
in speech, detesting all slipshod expressions, slang, and Gallicisms
(Hellenisms); economical, conscientious, methodical; a scorncr of
luxury and dissipation and an outspoken enemy of the irregularities of
fashionable married life: this old man--he was old, before he became
emperor--possessed many of the virtues which, if we are to believe our
grandfathers, were far commoner in their days than in ours. Of course
his frugality was interpreted as avarice, while a certain invincible
shyness, peculiar to many great men, was put down to pride--that
celebrated pride of the Claudian house, whose true significance, like
that of the democratic Gracchi, it has taken the world twenty
centuries to understand.  The younger generation of his day hardly
appreciated traits like that recorded of him when, one day, only half
a boar being served up at table--the other half having been eaten
previously--he observed to the embarrassed company that "the half boar
has just the same taste as the whole." A particularly fine fish was
brought to him; he sent it out to be sold, remarking that some rich
fellow like Apicius or Octavius would be sure to buy it. He was right;
after some bidding, it fell to Octavius for 5000 sesterces. The
profligate youngster Caligula, we are told, was kept very strictly
"under the simple and wholesome mode of life" of Tiberius on Capri;
whenever he went out for a spree, he disguised himself in a wig and
muffler so as to escape unobserved....

Of the military genuis of Tiberius, his political sagacity, his
assiduity in work: of his wonderful ability for finance and
administration, there has never been a question. If the Roman world
was able to withstand the shocks of the madmen who succeeded him on
the throne, it was due to the stability and prosperity in which he
left it. And wherein lies the secret of his intellectual superiority
and successes? In this, I think: that he had a conspicuous preference
for the able and honest common man. He knew the rottenness of the
aristocrats of his day and treated them accordingly.  "He was always
unwilling to admit them to authority, and it is unquestionably true
that, taking them as a class, they were during his long and prosperous
reign treated with unusual disrespect.... Although he evinced the
greatest anxiety to surround the throne with men of ability, he cared
little for those conventional distinctions by which the minds of
ordinary sovereigns are greatly moved. He made no account of dignity
of rank, he did not even care for purity of blood. He valued men
neither for the splendour of their pedigree, nor for the grandeur of
their titles....  His large and powerful intellect, cultivated to its
highest point by reflection and study, taught him the true measure of
affairs and enabled him to see that to make a government flourish its
councillors must be men of ability and virtue; but that if these two
conditions are fulfilled, the nobles may be left to repose in the
enjoyment of their leisure, unoppressed by those cares for the state
for which, with a few brilliant exceptions, they are naturally
disqualified by the number of their prejudices and by the frivolity of
their pursuits."

Is not this an exceedingly truthful account of the aims and methods of
Tiberius? Yet it is extracted out of no biography of that emperor;
convert the "he" into "she," and the words will be found in Buckle's
description of Queen Elizabeth.

Both sovereigns correctly judged that the nobles of their time had
played their part--idle, intriguing, and discontented, they were now
merely a menace to the peace of the empire. Among the self-made men
whom the Roman emperor drew to his court was the senator Lucilius
Longus, who clung to Tiberius "in good and evil days" and whose death,
we are told, afflicted him as much as that of his only son. Another
was the knight Curtius Rufus. To those who reminded Tiberius of this
man's lack of pedigree, he was wont to reply: "Rufus, it seems to me,
is his own ancestor." The minister Sejanus was also one of these _new
men_, as the Romans disparagingly called some of the ablest of their
time. The persons who witnessed the testament of Tiberius were "quite
ordinary people." He married his grand-daughter to a man whose
grandfather, Tacitus regrets to say, "everybody had known as a common
knight in Tibur." Like Elizabeth, too, he had little respect for the
senate, whose xiadiguified flunkeyisin made him sick. "O generation
fit for slavery!" he exclaimed to them. And simultaneously he
detested--an ancestral trait and one that he possesses in common with
refined persons of all ages--the grossness of the proletariat. He
never encouraged their cravings for gladiatorial shows.  He gave few
games. That sufficed to damn him in their eyes and to make them forget
all he had done for the maintenance of public order, and all his
munificence towards them in moments of public distress, "Into the
Tiber with Tiberius!" may well have been sincere, for the common herd
of ancient Rome was the same ignoble beast, governed only by its
appetites, and as incapable of any generous or even consecutive
thought, as that of our day.

The events of his life, a series of sharp disappointments, brought out
more clearly with increasing age the characteristic of the Claudian
house: cynical aloofness. Embittered in his family and marital
relations, thwarted by the intelligent plebeian (Sejanus) in whom he
had placed his confidence, he felt all the loneliness of his position.

He felt also--his power.

Modern Europe, grown wise with age, has muzzled its sovereigns. Thus
has arisen a race of constitutional marionettes, whose chief
occupation--to judge by the newspapers, at least--consists in
"swopping" uniforms, rushing about the continent in special trains,
and hanging ribbons and decorations round each other's necks. This is
all as it should be, and it is well to remember that the muzzling has
been done by the class of men whom Tiberius respected and sought to
bring to honour.  It is also well, now and then, to ask ourselves this
question: how many of those who now "govern" Europe would display the
magnanimity of Tiberius if they possessed a tithe of his power--how
many would follow his example in refusing all external honours, or
exercise his clemency towards religious dissentients, caricaturists,
and political adversaries? The mind shudders to think of the
pandemonium that would break loose if these were allowed, only for a
day, the freedom of Tiberius.  On that day, there would be more
prosecutions for _lese majeste_ in Germany than in the immense Roman
world under the whole reign of Tiberius; Austria and Russia would be
aflame with the fires of _autos-da-fe_. There is recorded, on this
last matter of religious persecution, a remark illustrating the
fundamental sanity of Tiberius which cannot be too often repeated. A
man was about to be put on his trial for insulting the divinity of the
deceased Augustus, but the emperor stopped the proceedings by saying
that "gods could avenge their own wrongs": _deorum iniurias deis
cures_--a genial, golden pronouncement, which deserves to be graven
over the portals of every church on earth.

The fact is, he had learned worldly wisdom where our present rulers
can never hope to learn it--in the rough school of life. And he had
the courage of his convictions. How many men and women of to-day, the
slaves of contradictory conventionalities, might take to heart that
saying of his: "Let them hate me, so long as they approve my actions."
This is monumental. We may place it beside that sentence which Stahr,
with great propriety, has cited at the end of his volume of Tiberius,
and which shows his real feelings in regard to public opinion. After
repeating the words of Tacitus to the effect that "it was not so much
that he cared to gratify the present generation, as that he was
desirous of standing well with posterity," Stahr quotes the final
passages from a speech in which Tiberius deprecates the erection of a
temple to himself and his mother: "For myself, conscript fathers, I am
a mortal man; I am confined to the functions of human nature; and if I
well supply the principal place amongst you, it suffices me, I
solemnly assure you; and I would have posterity remember it. They will
render enough to my memory, if they believe me to have been worthy of
my ancestors; watchful of your interests; unmoved in perils and, in
defence of the public weal, fearless of private enmities. These are
the temples I would raise in your breasts; these are the fairest
effigies and such as will endure. As for those of stone, if the
judgment of posterity changes from favour to dislike, they are
despised as no better than sepulchres. Hence it is I here invoke the
gods, that to the end of my life they would grant me a spirit
undisturbed, and discerning in duties human and divine: and hence,
too, I implore our citizens and allies that, whenever my dissolution
comes, they would celebrate my actions and the odour of my name with
praises and benevolent testimonies of remembrance." "And
thenceforward," Tacitus adds--I cannot resist quoting this
characteristic touch--"thenceforward he persevered in slighting upon
all occasions, and even in private conversation, this worship of
himself; a conduct which was by some ascribed to modesty; by many to
distrust of his merit; by others to degeneracy of spirit"--and by
none, it seems (certainly not by Tacitus), to its most natural cause,
common sense.

Common sense--that is the mark of Tiberius, and no wonder it was a
feature offensive, almost unintelligible, to dreamers who yearned for
things that are not, for things to come or things that have been. A
destructive flood had overswept some districts of Rome, and there was
an outcry that the goblins overhead must be appeased and the Sibylline
Books consulted with that object.  Tiberius thought it more profitable
to appoint a commission to inquire into the causes of the disaster and
report upon the measures to be taken for avoiding it in future. Sober
talk like this will never win a crowd.  [Footnote: When it was
announced to him that the skeleton of a giant had been unearthed and
his views were asked as to what should be done with it, he replied
that "they had better leave the giant lying where he was." How
different from Augustus, who possessed lomething of the curious spirit
of Sir John Soane and founded the first palaeontological museum in the
world, containing "giants' bones and weapons of heroes," which were
zealously collected for him on Capri.] Towards the end of his life he
allowed senate and nobles, both equally worthless and effete, to seize
each other by the throat; anticipating, probably, that the most
impulsive and incapable on both sides would be the first to succumb,
leaving the men of moderation to survive.  A rugged method, the method
of nature; yet a cynical and civilised modern aristocrat like the late
Lord Salisbury would have acted in precisely the same manner.
Brutality and common sense are not rarely different names for the same
thing. There are men who call surgeons brutal, because they amputate
limbs.

This firm grasp of general principles never degenerated with Tiberius
into coldness. On the contrary, there ran through his nature an
opposing current: a strong vein of kindliness and consideration for
others which alone can explain many of the enigmas, as they are
called, of his life. He was capable both of feeling, and of inspiring
in others, deep attachment. He might even be called an idealist in the
sense that he seems to have expected more of the world than he found
it could, or would, perform; and, as such, his sufferings at the blows
of fortune were proportionately the more intense. For the calculating
individual changes little during life; from the cradle to the grave he
pursues the even and not always lovely tenor of his way: the man of
heart, as we say, has only to live long enough in order to become
something of a cynic. And Tiberius lived to the age of seventy-eight.

Of his kindliness many instances are on record.  Such was that little
incident at Rhodes. "One morning, in settling the course of his daily
excursion, he happened to say that he should visit all the sick people
in the town. This being not rightly understood by those about him, the
sick were brought into a public portico, and ranged in order,
according to their several distempers. Being extremely embarrassed by
this unexpected occurrence, he was for some time irresolute how he
should act; but at last determined to go round them all, and make an
apology for the mistake even to the meanest among them, and such as
were entirely unknown to him." By what an accident of history has this
charming episode been preserved! When his brother, whom he loved
sincerely, died, Tiberius accompanied the funeral cortege, on foot,
all the way from the forests of Germany to Rome. Paterculus, speaking
from personal experience, has recorded how thoughtful he was, during
his campaigns, for the health and comfort of his troops. When any
officer was ill, Tiberius saw that everything was done for his
well-being and recovery; "for all, who required it, a carriage was in
waiting; the use of his sedan-chair was free to all, and I myself,
among others, have profited by it." When at last his dissolute second
wife Julia, the cause of endless trouble and pain to Tiberius, had
been divorced from him by decree of her father Augustus, he
"interposed by frequent letters to Augustus on her behalf, that he
would allow her to retain the presents he had made her,
notwithstanding the little regard she merited from him." His affection
for his first wife Vipsania, whom Augustus obliged him to divorce for
political reasons "not without great anguish of mind," is recorded by
various ancient writers. A chance meeting of the two that took place
after this event is thus described: "At divorcing Vipsania he felt the
deepest regret: and upon meeting her afterwards, he looked after her
with eyes so passionately expressive of affection that care was taken
she should never again come in his sight." Observe, now, how so simple
and natural a story can be misconstrued. After referring to this
passage, Beule says: "Peu de mots peignent beaucoup de choses: ce ne
sont point des larmes qui jaillissent des yeux de Tibere a la vue de
la compagne de sa jevmesse; il n'eprouve ni douleur ni regret; ses
yeux s'enflent, se tendent, s'enflamment. Les sens parlent done seuls,
c'est le cheval qui hennit devant une belle cavale." Truly, the
"dernier mot" of Beule's _odium republicanum_.

Although such flagrant defamations are scarce, there are various
passages where a misinterpretation of some authority, now lost, has
led to far more serious errors. Here is an interesting example from
the classics which I do not remember having seen recorded among the
thirty odd monographs on Tiberius that have come under my notice. On
the one hand, we have the careful tables drawn up by Sievers, Freytag,
and others, analysing the criminal cases under his reign, from which
it can be seen how frequently he intervened to mitigate the sentence
of the condemned. We have even the testimony of Tacitus, who records a
senator saying: "I have often heard our prince (Tiberius) bewail the
event, when, by suicide, a criminal has prevented the exercise of his
mercy." On the other hand, we are told that the emperor was so
bloodthirsty that he lamented whenever a criminal "escaped" him by
killing himself. "For he thought death so slight a punishment," says
Suetonius, "that upon hearing that Carnulius, one of the accused who
was under prosecution, had killed himself, he exclaimed: 'Carnulius
has escaped me!'" The accounts both of Suetonius and of Tacitus may
well have been drawn from the same original source. Now: this
preventing--this escaping: what shall we make of it? Does the suicide
escape his cruelty or his clemency? We may decide for the latter
version by throwing into the balance the fine trait recorded of him to
the effect that, although slow in his usual speech and almost
wrestling, as it were, with the utterance of his words, "his language
flowed freely and rapidly whenever he had occasion to succour
(_quotiens subveniret_)."

Can anything definite as to the character of Tiberius be read out of
his busts? I think not. I think we are not yet in a position to deduce
a single mental quality from the features of any human being, alive or
in effigy. Grossly asymmetrical lines will of course suggest a flawed
physical structure and consequent disharmony of mind; but phrenology,
the theory of Gall, and physiognomy, as expounded by Lavater and his
disciples, are still on a plane with astrology; the modern historian
or critic, who builds a hypothesis of character upon the evidence
furnished by such vague speculations, is no less of a quack than
Nostradamus. Like many inexact arts, to be sure, these tend to become
more scientific every day; various currents are converging in that
direction; but nothing exemplifies better the worthlessness of
present-day authority in these matters than the conflicting
characteristics which writers, according to their several passions or
prepossessions, succeed in discovering in the busts of the Roman
Caesars.  When one remembers with what slavish fidelity the artists of
ancient Rome reproduced the original features in these works, it would
stand to reason that the character to be read out of any single one of
them would be constant. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that a
portrait of one of the Csesars is capable of as many interpretations
as a contested passage in Holy Scripture. There is no vice, and there
is no virtue, that has not been plainly read out of the busts of
Tiberius. His mouth, according to one writer, betrays "indecision";
another discovers that "about the delicate mouth plays a smile of
superiority"; a third writes, "probably at no time has nature formed
such a perfect diplomatic mouth. Firmly closed, it illustrates
Talleyrand's saying that speech was given us to conceal our thought";
while a fourth shudders at "the horrible grimace, which one cannot
drive from one's remembrance." And so on, with every other item of the
face.

In regard to the bust as a whole, a similar uncertainty prevails. In
the Paris sardonyx cameo, Beule recognises, admirably portrayed, all
the vicious qualities that form his idea of Tiberius, "la bouche, le
menton, sont gras, sensuels, epais, et tourncnt au type de Vitellius.
Le you est enorme, enfle par le vin, la bonne chere, et comme par un
venin secret, etc. etc." According to Bernoulli there is no reason for
supposing this cameo to represent Tiberius at all! The "veiled head"
sold to the British Museum by Castellani is rejected by some of the
best authorities as not representing Tiberius, while many persons
consider it one of his most life-like busts. As in most of them, the
nose, the telling feature of the face, has been restored, and in the
present instance by an unusually inferior artist, so as to change its
whole expression.  The nose of Tiberius was probably moulded after the
aquiline pattern of his mother's, with whom he had many points of
character and physiognomy in common. The restorer of this "veiled
head" has given it a nose of a peculiarly London cast, so that the
portrait at a distance looks less like Tiberius than like his family
butler. The ears are also restored in conventional
fashion--altogether, the bust is a good instance of the unwarrantable
liberties that are taken with ancient works of art.  And yet if this
London head were placed side by side with that in the Naples museum,
the resemblance would appear in a flash, in spite of the disfiguring
"repairs." The London portrait represents him fifteen or twenty years
older than the other; there are lines of age about the face, and the
eyes are more sunk under the prominent orbitals, but there can be no
doubt as to the identity of the person. To compare photographs of
these marbles is misleading; they must be examined on the spot, for a
slight change in the position or height of the camera may affect the
entire physiognomy; nor must it be forgotten that the profile differs
on the two sides of the face. But what type of man these busts figure
forth can only be deciphered by those who have made up their minds on
the subject beforehand. Long years will elapse before serious
psychological deductions can be drawn from the data of iconography.



After a youth of exemplary virtue, and half a century more of public
life, during which the manners and morals of Tiberius were an honour
to his age, he retired in his sixty-ninth year to the island of Capri,
in order at last to be able to indulge his latent proclivities for
cruelty and lust. So, at least, the wisest of us believed for twenty
centuries.  We have all heard of the reformed rake; Tiberius was the
reverse: from being an Admirable Crichton, he became the prototype of
the Marquis de Sade.  But it is needless to go into this _res
adiudicata_; historians like Duruy, Merivale, and Ferrero, however
much they may disagree upon other questions, are at one upon this:
that no scholar of to-day, with a reputation to lose, should stake it
upon the veracity of Tacitus and Suetonius. That is a great step
forward. Napoleon called Tacitus a "detractor of humanity": he seems
to have arrived at this opinion upon purely _a priori_ reasoning, but
critical researches have borne it out. The Roman historian has been
tumbled from his pinnacle, and there is poetic justice in the fact
that Tiberius, whose memory he succeeded in disparaging for nearly two
thousand years, has been the cause of this revision of judgment. Nor
need we call this stately writer hard names; it suffices to say, what
no one will deny, that he suffered from a constitutional dislike of
the obvious; his mind was involuted; he worked with a fixed idea, and
that fixed idea was diametrically opposed to the fixed idea of
Tiberius.

We often observe that an individual who is not fully bred exaggerates
all the peculiarities of the race to which he desires to belong. Thus
a German Jew, domiciled in London, will eat his plover not only
putrid, like the rest of us, but putrid and raw.  Even so Tacitus, as
an aristocrat of the lower order, was extreme in his aristocratic
tendencies, he was _plus royaliste que le roi_; for no one save really
great people, like the Claudians of Rome, can afford to treat their
class at its true value. According to Boissier, Tacitus "resigned
himself" to the empire; it seems to me that he resigned himself with
sufficiently bad grace, and if, like Tacitus himself, I could claim
the gift of knowing the inmost thoughts of men, I should say that the
anti-oligarchical leanings of Tiberius appeared reprehensible to this
reactionary who yearned, in his heart of hearts, for turbulent days of
immature political development, which every Roman of sense rejoiced
not to have witnessed,

He took his pen in hand and wrote. All ancient literature of this
class is what the Germans call a _Tendenzschrift_: we must ever
remember that such a thing as truth is neither what authors
endeavoured to write, nor what readers cared to read; the extent to
which the whole world was tainted with the rhetorical spirit is not
easily appreciated nowadays. And beside this love of simple veracity,
another recent product of human growth is that of scientific
psychology. The "great psychologist" Tacitus, who imposed upon ancient
and mediaeval Europe with his childlike and subjective method of
approaching these problems, with his sublimely artful manner of
reading imaginary characteristics into historical personages in order
to draw puritanical conclusions therefrom, will find himself ill at
ease among men who have outgrown scholastic morality, and think
themselves quite moral enough when they try to discover a plain answer
to this plain question: Is it true, or is it false?

The shrewd Montaigne seems to have been the first to doubt the
sincerity of Tacitus; Schedlbauer cites a German pamphlet of 1646 in
favour of Tiberius; but it was reserved for the French sceptic
movement to shatter eternally the faith hitherto reposed upon Tacitus
and Suetonius. As with other authoritative writings, it was little
suspected how rotten--once touched--they would prove to be. Previous
to that time, these tales were blindly believed. So Gilles de Rays,
who was executed in 1440 after having murdered eight hundred children,
confessed in his defence that he was led into these excesses through
reading Suetonius' life of Tiberius. Strange to think that, but for
Suetonius--are we never to have an annotated modern translation of
him?--we might not have heard of Bluebeard.

Then followed the inevitable reaction, a wave of sentimentalism and
general obfuscation from which we are, at this moment, emerging.
During this long and dark period, Tiberius again put on his old
character; he was a "deified beast"; his court was composed of "pale
and trembling slaves, dissolute women, and executioners." In this
exhilarating company the old gentleman is supposed to have lived from
the age of sixty-eight up to his death ten years later. That sane
people could be found to listen to such nonsense, proves what a
systematic education in "believing the impossible" can accomplish.
What would they now say of Monsieur Bacha, the last of a succession of
conscientious scholars that have dissected the fables of Tacitus, who
consistently refers to the once revered historian as "le poete"? "Dans
l'invention dc ses contes, Tacite s'est incessamment preoccupe
d'interesser le lecteur." I suspect that the chief reason why it
pleased us to dislike Tiberius arose from the fact that Christ was
crucified under his reign; the culpability of the emperor in this
matter is not obvious, but when religious feelings come into play, the
mind ceases to trouble itself with cause and effect. The logic of the
emotions, says Ribot, does not acknowledge the fundamental principles
of the logic of the intellect. One point is noteworthy: with this
recent revival of rationalism has gone, hand in hand, an increased
feeling of decency. The obscenities which charmed our pious
forefathers of the Grand Tours, who would muse for hours over the
_Sellaria_ of Capri, and sell their last shirt to buy a sham
sphinctrian medal, have ceased to absorb a generation fed upon
healthier mental fare.

If we knew exactly why Tiberius, as a young man, shut himself up in
Rhodes, we might understand the reason of his retirement to Capri.
This departure for Rhodes may be regarded as the key to his character,
and a great diversity of motives--fear, disgust, cunning, hatred of
Julia, ambition, self-abnegation, disappointment, pride, general
moroseness--have been assigned by various writers for this step.
Family reasons, the eternal intrigues of the women of the Julian and
Claudian houses, and his own mother's behaviour towards him, probably
weighed heavily in the case of Capri; but, as Mr. Baring-Gould points
out: "Throughout life that passion to be away from the stir of life,
and to be alone with his thoughts and with his books, manifested
itself spasmodically." It is quite likely, too, that, convinced of the
impracticability of republican and despotic systems of government, his
friends and helpers all dead, he attempted the experiment of
constitutional rule, interfering as little as possible in the
machinery of the state, while reserving to himself the last word upon
all graver matters. Above all, he was weary after a public life of
nearly sixty years of incessant toil.  The idea of retiring from the
cares of government may seem absurd to us. But we must consider the
kind of work which confronted Tiberius.  Modern sovereigns, whose most
violent physical exercise takes the form of shooting tame pheasants or
leading a drowsy state-ball quadrille, would be killed outright by a
single one of his many campaigns: the economic problems with which he
grappled day after day would permanently liquefy their brains. The
labour of government is taken out of their hands by persons who are
fitted to perform it; not one of them could say, with Tiberius, that
"he f