We heard the joyful noise of Naples as soon as our steamer came to
anchor within the moles whose rigid lines perhaps disfigure her famous
bay, while they render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose to us,
hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory of her
sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which seemed to
have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It was not
a largo boat, but it managed to contain two men with mandolins, a mother
of a family with a guitar, and a young girl with an alternate tambourine
and umbrella. 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.
[Illustration: 08 NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE]
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. The sole poetic novelty of my experience was
in my being offered loaves of bread which, when I bought them, would be
given to the poor, in honor of what saint's day I did not learn. But it
was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over the
book-counter was charming, since it was a condition of her flirtation
with the far younger man beside me who wanted something far more
interesting from her than any brief sketch of the history of Naples, in
either English or Italian or French or, at the worst, German. She was
very pretty, though rather powdered, and when the young man went away
she was sympathetically regretful to me that there was no such sketch,
in place of which she offered me several large histories in more or less
volumes. But why should I have wanted a history of Naples when I had
Naples itself? It was like wanting a photograph when you have the
original. Had I not just come through the splendid Piazza San
Ferdinando, with the nobly arcaded church on one hand and the
many-statued royal palace on the other, and between them a lake of
mellow sunshine, as warm as ours in June?
What I found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in
1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the “Elegy” used to be called on his
title-pages) found them in 1740. “The streets,” he wrote home to his
mother, “are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much
that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively kind
of animals, more industrious than Italians usually are; they work till
evening; then they take their lute or guitar (for they all play) and
walk about the city or upon the seashore with it, to enjoy the fresco.”
There was, in fact, a bold gayety in the aspect of the city, without the
refinement which you do not begin to feel till you get into North Italy.
When I came upon church after church, with its facade of Spanish
baroque, I lamented the want of Gothic delicacy and beauty, but I was
consoled abundantly later in the churches antedating the Spanish
domination. I had no reason, such as travellers give for hating places,
to be dissatisfied with Naples in any way. I had been warned that the
customs officers were terrible there, and that I might be kept hours
with my baggage. But the inspector, after the politest demand for a
declaration of tobacco, ordered only a small valise, the Benjamin of its
tribe, opened and then closed untouched; and his courteous forbearance,
acknowledged later through the hotel porter, cost me but a dollar. The
hotel itself was inexpressibly better in lighting, heating, service, and
table than any New York hotel at twice the money--in fact, no money
could buy the like with us at any hotel I know of; but this is a theme
which I hope to treat more fully hereafter. It is true that the streets
of Naples are very long and rather narrow and pretty crooked, and full
of a damp cold that no sunlight seems ever to hunt out of them; but then
they are seldom ironed down with trolley-tracks; the cabs feel their way
among the swarming crowds with warning voices and smacking whips; even
the prepotent automobile shows some tenderness for human life and limb,
and proceeds still more cautiously than the cabs and carts--in fact, I
thought I saw recurrent proofs of that respect for the average man which
seems the characteristic note of Italian liberty; and this belief of
mine, bred of my first observations in Naples, did not, after twelve
weeks in Italy, prove an illusion. If it is not the equality we fancy
ourselves having, it is rather more fraternity in effect.
[Illustration: 09 OUT-DOOR LIFE IN OLD NAPLES]
The failure of other researches for that sketch of Neapolitan history
left me in the final ignorance which I must share with the reader; but
my inquiries brought me prompt knowledge of one of those charming
features in which the Italian cities excel, if they are not unique. I
remember too vaguely the Galleria, as they call the beautiful glazed
arcade of Milan, to be sure that it is finer than the Galleria at
Naples, but I am sure this is finer than that at Genoa, with which,
however, I know nothing in other cities to compare. The Neapolitan
gallery, wider than any avenue of the place, branching in the form of a
Greek cross to four principal streets, is lighted by its roof of glass,
and a hundred brilliant shops and cafes spread their business and
leisure over its marble floor. Nothing could be architecturally more
cheerful, and, if it were not too hot in summer, there could be no doubt
of its adaptation to our year, for it could be easily closed against the
winter by great portals, and at other seasons would give that out-door
expansion which in Latin countries hospitably offers the spectacle of
pleasant eating and drinking to people who have nothing to eat and
drink. These spectators could be kept at a distance with us by porters
at the entrances, while they would not be altogether deprived of the
gratifying glimpses.
I do not know whether poverty avails itself of its privileges by
visiting the Neapolitan gallery; but probably, like poverty elsewhere,
it is too much interested by the drama of life in its own quarter ever
willingly to leave it. Poverty is very conservative, for reasons more
than one; its quarter in Naples is the oldest, and was the most
responsive to our recollections of the Naples of 1864. Overhead the
houses tower and beetle with their balconies and bulging casements,
shutting the sun, except at noon, from the squalor below, where the
varied dwellers bargain and battle and ply their different trades,
bringing their work from the dusk of cavernous shops to their doorways
for the advantage of the prevailing twilight. Carpentry and tailoring
and painting and plumbing, locksmithing and copper-smithing go on there,
touching elbows with frying and feeding, and the vending of all the
strange and hideous forms of flesh, fish, and fowl. If you wish to know
how much the tentacle of a small polyp is worth you may chance to see a
cent pass for it from the crone who buys to the boy who sells it smoking
from the kettle; but the price of cooked cabbage or pumpkin must remain
a mystery, along with that of many raw vegetables and the more revolting
viscera of the less-recognizable animals.
The poor people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of
your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare,
perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because
they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always
crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there
into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the
fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the
Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last of the
imperial Hohenstaufen line, was less appropriately beheaded by the
Angevines. The open spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking
alleys, but if you have the intelligent guide we had you approach them
through the triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that
is something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the
guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.
He had been six years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he
had got work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That
was in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then
another, and came away at last through some call home, honoring and
loving the Americans as the kindest, the noblest, the friendliest people
in the world. I tried, politely, to persuade him that we were not all of
us all he thought us, but he would not yield, and at one place he
generously claimed a pre-eminence in wickedness for his
fellow-Neapolitans. That was when we came to a vast, sorrowful prison,
from which an iron cage projected into the street. Around this cage
wretched women and children and old men clustered till the prisoners
dear to them were let into it from the jail and allowed to speak with
them. The scene was as public as all of life and death is in Naples, and
the publicity seemed to give it peculiar sadness, which I noted to our
guide. He owned its pathos; “but,” he said, “you know we have a terrible
class of people here in Naples.” I protested that there were terrible
classes of people everywhere, even in America. He would not consent
entirely, but in partly convincing each other we became better friends.
He had a large black mustache and gentle black eyes, and he spoke very
fair English, which, when he wished to be most impressive, he dropped
and used a very literary Italian instead. He showed us where he lived,
on a hill-top back of our gardened quay, and said that he paid twelve
dollars a month for a tenement of five rooms there. Schooling is
compulsory in Naples, but he sends his boy willingly, and has him
especially study English as the best provision he can make for him--as
heir of his own calling of cicerone, perhaps. He has a little farm at
Bavello, which he tills when it is past the season for cultivating
foreigners in Naples; he expects to spend his old age there; and I
thought it not a bad lookout. He was perfectly well-mannered, and at a
hotel where we stopped for tea he took his coffee at our table unbidden,
like any American fellow-man. He and the landlord had their joke
together, the landlord warning me against him in English as “very bad
man,” and clapping him affectionately on the shoulder to emphasize the
irony. We did not demand too much social information of him; all the
more we valued the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now
rather poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of
business. I could have told him that the American nobles were
increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have
known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was himself a
moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact
everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the
Socialist party.
He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa
Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a
secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where
the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius,
perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am
thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me
observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the
sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the
world-old sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival
antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune. The
sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill sanctuary
above them, and-he was so full of rheumatism that you could almost hear
it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful sage, and satisfied with
the fee which my guide gave him and which he made small, as he
explained, that the sacristan might not be discontented with future
largesse. I need not say that each church we visited had its tutelary
beggar, and that my happy youth came back to me in the blindness of one,
or the mutilation of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At
Santa Chiara I could not at first make out what it was which caused my
heart to rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was
closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice in a
cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and open it, just
as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the past.
Our day ended at sunset--a sunset of watermelon red--with a visit to the
Castel Nuovo, where my guide found himself at home with the garrison,
because, as he explained, he had served his term as a soldier. He was
the born friend of the custodian of the castle church, which was the
most comfortable church for warmth we had visited, and to which we
entered by the bronze gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the
Aragonese victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was
newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the battles
between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people
one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater
advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on by the house of Aragon
and then that of Bourbon for the next six hundred years after the
Angevines had retired from the banquet is problematical. History is a
very baffling study, and one may be well content to know little or
nothing about it. I knew so little or had forgotten so much that I
scarcely deserved to be taken down into the crypt of this church and
shown the skeletons of four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put
to death--two laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by
dividing crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and
dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met them,
poor things, too late in my life to wish for their further
acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story and
make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader's imagination,
along with most other facts of my observation in Naples.
I was at some pains to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if
I could have found more of them no doubt I should have been more
interested in these skeletons. For forty-odd years I had remembered the
prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets branching from a busy
avenue and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps.
When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and in a
few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of such a public
staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even
than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side
with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables
of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I
tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups
bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I
think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead
level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there
are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined
markets.
[Illustration: 10 UP-STAIRS STREET IN OLD NAPLES]
Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the
hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those
days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered
then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere
pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded,
statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and
the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my
day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of
the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and
the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a
file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means
of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a
splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare
legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged
and those who importuned with postal-cards. This terrible traffic
pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting
traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost
impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own
that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell,
or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor
problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should
take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such
acquired slang as “Skiddoo to twenty-three”? One who had no postal-cards
had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his
price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached
by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of
strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed--in fact, he went away
singing. He did not take with him the divine beauty of the afternoon
light on the sea and mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were
content with our bargain.
In fact, it would be impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that
incomparable environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know,
the night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six days
out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and five days of
at least a May or September warmth; and though one day was shrill and
stiff with the _tramontana,_ it was of as glorious sunshine as the rest.
The gale had blown my window open and chilled my room, but with that sun
blazing outside I could not believe in the hurricane which seemed to
blow our car up the funicular railway when we mounted to the height
where the famous old Convent of San Martino stands, and then blew us all
about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our search for the
right way to the monastery. It was worth more than we suffered in
finding it; for the museum is a record of the most significant events of
Neapolitan history from the time of the Spanish domination down to that
of the Garibaldian invasion; and the church and corridors through which
the wind hustled us abound in paintings and frescos such as one would be
willing to give a whole week of quiet weather to. I do not know but I
should like to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it
from my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars at
their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the more easily
could the sun warm us through in spite of the _tramontana._
[Illustration: 11 NAPLES AND THE CASTEL ST. ELMO FROM THE MOLE]
I do not know that Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which
Venice and Genoa are excellent. Those cities were adorned by their sons
with palaces of an outlook worthy of their splendor. But in the other
Italian cities the homes of her patricians were crowded into the narrow
streets where their architecture fails of its due effect. It is so with
them in Naples, and even along the Villa Nazionale, where many palatial
villas are set, they seclude themselves in gardens where one fancies
rather than sees them. These are, in fact, sometimes the houses of the
richest bourgeoisie--bankers and financiers--and the houses which have
names conspicuous in the mainly inglorious turmoil of Neapolitan history
help unnoted to darken the narrow and winding ways of the old city. A
glimpse of a deep court or of a towering facade is what you get in
passing, but it is to be said of the sunless streets over which they
gloom that they are kept in a modern neatness beside which the dirt of
New York is mediaeval. It is so with most other streets in Naples,
except those poorest ones where the out-door life insists upon the most
intimate domestic expression. Even such streets are no worse than our
worst streets, and the good streets are all better kept than our best.
I am not sure that there are even more beggars in Naples than in New
York, though I will own that I kept no count. In both cities beggary is
common enough, and I am not noting it with disfavor in either, for it is
one of my heresies that comfort should be constantly reminded of misery
by the sight of it--comfort is so forgetful. Besides, in Italy charity
costs so little; a cent of our money pays a man for the loss of a leg or
an arm; two cents is the compensation for total blindness; a sick mother
with a brood of starving children is richly rewarded for her pains with
a nickel worth four cents. Organized charity is not absent in the midst
of such volunteers of poverty; one day, when we thought we had passed
the last outpost of want in our drive, two Sisters of Charity suddenly
appeared with out-stretched tin cups. Our driver did not imagine our
inexhaustible benovelence; he drove on, and before we could bring him to
a halt the Sisters of Charity ran us down, their black robes flying
abroad and their sweet faces flushed with the pursuit. Upon the whole it
was very humiliating; we could have wished to offer our excuses and
regrets; but our silver seemed enough, and the gentle sisters fell back
when we had given it.
That was while we were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of the
prospect along the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored
postal-card will suffice better than the most hectic word-painting. The
worst of Italy is the superabundance of the riches it offers ear and eye
and nose--offers every sense--ending in a glut of pleasure. At the point
where we descended from our carriage to look from the upland out over
the vast hollow of land and sea toward Pozzuoli, which is so interesting
as the scene of Jove's memorable struggle with the Titans, and just when
we were really beginning to feel equal to it, a company of minstrels
suddenly burst upon us with guitars and mandolins and comic songs much
dramatized, while the immediate natives offered us violets and other
distracting flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to
neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those
restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not
know whether you are eating the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a cook or a composer.
It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of
the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a
Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with
us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to climb four nights of
stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest
postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the
balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin
which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of
the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort
rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for
false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know
by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current pieces. At
the bookseller's they would not take a perfectly good five-franc piece
because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes of all the bad money one
innocently takes for good? One fraudulent franc I made a virtue of
throwing away; but I do not know what I did with a copper refused by a
trolley conductor as counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously,
and perhaps I gave that copper in charity.
As we drove hotelward through the pink twilight we met many carriages of
people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do not
know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world severely from
their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly appointed coachmen and
footmen ought to be both, and that old gentlemen who frown over their
white mustaches have no right to their looks if they are neither. It
was, at any rate, the hour of the fashionable drive, which included a
pause midway of the Villa Nazionale for the music of the military band.
The band plays near the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at
the earlier hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and
wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of
fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the
bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry tentacles the food
lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is it to see it rise and reach
with those prehensile members, as with the tails of a multi-caudate ape,
some rocky projection of its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow,
and vanish there in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and
bloom of the deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men's “bones are coral
made” seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly
wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not pleasure
in store for the traveller who turns from them to the company of shad
softly and continuously circling in their tank, and regarding the
spectators with a surly dignity becoming to people in better society
than others. One large shad, imaginably of very old family and
independent property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his
flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him. Mostly his expression
is very severe; but in milder moments he offers a perverse resemblance
to some portraits of Washington.
All our days in Naples died like dolphins to the music which I have
tried to impart the sense of. The joyful noises which it was made up of
culminated for us on that evening when a company of the street and boat
musicians came into the hotel and danced and sang and played the
tarantella. They were of all ages, sexes, and bulks, and of divers
operatic costumes, but they were of one temperament only, which was glad
and childlike. They went through their repertory, which included a great
deal more than the tarantella, and which we applauded with an enthusiasm
attested by our contributions when the tambourine went round. Then they
repeated their selections, and at the second collection we guests of the
hotel repeated our contributions, but in a more guarded spirit. After
the second repetition the prettiest girl came round with her photographs
and sold them at prices out of all reason. Then we became very
melancholy, and began to steal out one by one. I myself did not stay for
the fourth collection, and I cannot report how the different points of
view, the Southern and the Northern, were reconciled in the event which
I am not sure was final. But I am sure that unless you can make
allowance for a world-wide difference in the Neapolitans from yourself
you can never understand them. Perhaps you cannot, even then.