The Last Instrument Was Inverted To Catch The Coins, Such
As They Were, Which The Passengers Flung Down To The
Minstrels for their
repetitions of "Santa Lucia," "Funicoli-Funicola," "II Cacciatore," and
other popular Neapolitan airs, such as "John Brown's
Body" and "In the
Bowery." To the songs that had a waltz movement the mother of a family
performed a restricted dance, at some risk of falling overboard, while
she smiled radiantly up at us, as, in fact, they all did, except the
young girl, who had to play simultaneously on her tambourine and her
inverted umbrella, and seemed careworn. Her anxiety visibly deepened to
despair when she missed a shilling, which must have looked as large to
her as a full moon as it sank slowly down into the sea.
But her despair did not last long; nothing lasts long in Naples except
the joyful noise, which is incessant and perpetual, and which seems the
expression of the universal temperament in both man and beast. Our
good-fortune placed us in a hotel fronting the famous Castel dell' Ovo,
across a little space of land and water, and we could hear, late and
early, the cackling and crowing of the chickens which have replaced the
hapless prisoners of other days in that fortress. At times the voices of
the hens were lifted in a choral of self-praise, as if they had among
them just laid the mighty structure which takes its name from its
resemblance to the egg they ordinarily produce. In other lands the
peculiar note of the donkey is not thought very melodious, but in Naples
before it can fade away it is caught up in the general orchestration and
ceases in music. The cabmen at our corner, lying in wait by scores for
the strangers whom it is their convention to suppose ignorant of their
want of a carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another; the
mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated
appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in
a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am
aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must
have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or
affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat
there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing tendency of all
the local discords to soften and lose themselves in the general unison.
This embraces the clatter of the cabs, which are seldom less than fifty
years old, and of a looseness in all their joints responsive to their
effect of dusty decrepitude. Their clatter penetrates the volumed tread
of the myriad feet in a city where, if you did not see all sorts of
people driving, you would say the whole population walked. Above the
manifold noises gayly springing to the sky spreads and swims the clangor
of the church-bells and holds the terrestrial uproar in immeasurable
solution. It would be rash to say that the whole population of Naples is
always in the street, for if you look into the shops or cafes, or, I
dare say, the houses, you will find them quite full; but the general
statement verifies itself almost tiresomely in its agreement with what
everybody has always said of Naples. It is so quite what you expect that
if you could you would turn away in satiety, especially from the
swarming life of the poor, which seems to have no concealments from the
public, but frankly works at all the trades and arts that can be carried
on out-of-doors; cooks, eats, laughs, cries, sleeps, wakes, makes love,
quarrels, scolds, does everything but wash itself - clothes enough it
washes for other people's life. There is a reason for this in the fact
that in bad weather at Naples it is cold and dark and damp in-doors, and
in fine so bright and warm and charming without that there is really no
choice. Then there is the expansive temperament, which if it were shut
up would probably be much more explosive than it is now. As it is, it
vents itself in volleyed detonations and scattered shots which language
can give no sense of.
For the true sense of it you must go to Naples, and then you will never
lose the sense of it. I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke
up the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in the
Castel dell' Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the cab-drivers
quarrelling, and the cries of the street vendors, and the dogs barking,
and the children wailing, and their mothers scolding, and the clatter of
wheels and hoops and feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful
Neapolitan noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after
my first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old. As soon
as possible, when the short but sweet Vincenzo had brought up my
breakfast of tea and bread-and-butter and honey (to which my appetite
turned from the gross superabundance of the steamer's breakfasts with
instant acquiescence), and announced with a smile as liberal as the
sunshine that it was a fine day, I went out for those impressions which
I had better make over to the reader in their original disorder.
Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the day before, was now of a soft,
smoky white, and the sea, of a milky blue, swam round the shore and out
to every dim island and low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was
full of people on foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey
pleasure-carts, and the familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and
beggars began with my first steps toward what I remembered as the
Toledo, but what now called itself, with the moderner Italian
patriotism, the Via Roma.
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