The Saint's Afternoon and Others - Page 2

befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck to
find himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of them
should come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea is
not a little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as the
wave rises over the aperture, there is the most encouraging
appearance that they perfectly may not. There it is. There is no
more of them. It is a case to which nature has, by the neatest
stroke and with the best taste in the world, just quietly
attended.

Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, about
itself, Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and see
why; and yet, while you roast a little under the awning and in
the vaster shadow, it is not because the trail of Tiberius is
ineffaceable that you are most uneasy. The trail of Germanicus in
Italy to-day ramifies further and bites perhaps even deeper; a
proof of which is, precisely, that his eclipse in the Blue Grotto
is inexorably brief, that here he is popping out again, bobbing
enthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly back. The
spirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has a
broad-faced candour against which there is no standing up,
supremely expressive as it is of the well-known "love that
kills," of Germanicus's fatal susceptibility. If I were to let
myself, however, incline to that aspect of the serious
case of Capri I should embark on strange depths. The straightness
and simplicity, the classic, synthetic directness of the German
passion for Italy, make this passion probably the sentiment in
the world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in the
largest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassably
marked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seated
itself to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its own
loud accents; it breaks out in the folds of the hills and on the
crests of the crags into every manner of symptom and warning.
Huge advertisements and portents stare across the bay; the
acclivities bristle with breweries and "restorations" and with
great ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to add that some
such general consciousness as this may well oppress, under any
sky, at the century's end, the brooding tourist who makes himself
a prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, "behind." It is
behind, in the track and the reaction, that he least makes out
the end of it all, perceives that to visit anyone's country for
anyone's sake is more and more to find some one quite other in
possession. No one, least of all the brooder himself, is in his
own.

II

I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, on
scaling the general rock with the