NAPLES.
Naples! What marvellous scenes that one word conjures up! Everybody
knows Naples. Those who have not seen it have read about it, and its
thousand marvels are familiar as household words. Vesuvius is known to
every street arab who sells matches in the street. The story of Pompeii
is as the story of Noah’s Ark. And Naples itself! Are not Neapolitan
ices sold from barrows at a halfpenny each wherever the English language
is spoken--from Hampstead Heath to Donnybrook Fair? The Neapolitan
fisherman, in his red cap, who sings choruses from ‘Masaniello'; the
little Neapolitan girl who sings ‘Santa Lucia'; the lazzaroni, the Bay,
the Chiaja, the house of Emma Lady Hamilton, the grottoes, the blood of
St. Gennarius, the storytellers on the Port, the puppets, the poor
horses with open wounds--all these things are now as A B C to
Englishmen; and there is not a boy or girl in the fourth standard who
couldn’t tell you that ‘_Vedi Napoli e poi mori_’ means ‘See Naples and
then die.’
Shall I confess that, having been taught from my earliest infancy to
believe in the Naples of romance, the Naples of the operatic stage, the
Naples of the guide-book, and the Naples of the tourist, I was just a
little disappointed when I first found myself in the famous city? My
first disappointment was the complete absence of choruses of
red-bonneted fishermen, singing, ‘Behold, how brightly breaks the
morning.’ My second disappointment was the utter absence of colour and
costume on the quay and in the city; and my greatest disappointment of
all was that the bay was not blue, the sun was not warm, and the people
were not gay. I arrived in Naples on a day which must have left London
last November, and have remained hidden somewhere off the coast until it
heard of my arrival. It was a dark, dull, lowering day--a day such as my
good friend the oldest inhabitant could not remember the like of.
Vesuvius in the background was shooting up a black volume of smoke that
made him look like Sheffield in the distance more than the time-honoured
mountain of the London matchbox, and the sky was as dirty and grimy as
the lava pavement of the city. It wasn’t the fault of Naples that it so
belied its character. It was my fault. I had brought my own weather with
me, and spoiled Naples as I had spoiled the Riviera.
But in the morning all was changed. The sky was a cloudless blue, and
the sun shone brilliantly, and I sallied forth to lounge away the day,
and to steep myself in Neapolitan life. Much of my first disappointment
was atoned for, but still I searched in vain for picturesque costume.
Naples is no longer the Naples of old. The curse of the billycock hat,
which has spread over Europe, has not spared Southern Italy. The common
people wear the castoff clothes of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do
dress in the London fashion. As a natural consequence, the Neapolitan
porters and fishermen and lazzaroni have little to distinguish them from
the London labourer and the London costermonger. Naples has also in a
great measure been ruined by the rich foreigner, who insists on
carrying his own manners and customs with him. The old habits of the
people yield to foreign influence, and one great city becomes as another
great city. The English and the French and the Germans come to spend
their money at Naples. They must be pleased. To please them everything
that is English and French and German is introduced, and one by one the
Neapolitan characteristics disappear.
Still, the industrious searcher who leaves the beaten track of the
visitor and plunges into the side streets and the poorer quarters can
find plenty of reward for his pains. He who would see Neapolitan life
and study the people, their amusements and their customs, must shun the
great hotels, and turn a deaf ear to the words of porters and hotel
guides. As a rule the hotel people know nothing of the town. As an
instance, take the hotel at which I stayed. The proprietor was a Swiss;
the hall-porter was a German newly arrived from the Midland Hotel, St.
Pancras; the head waiter was, during last season, sitting-room waiter at
the Old Ship at Brighton. My sitting-room waiter came from the Queen’s
Hotel, Hastings, and my chambermaid’s last place was the Schweizerhof at
Lucerne. You can imagine for yourself what these people are likely to
know of Naples. I had not been two days in Naples before I was able to
tell the hall-porter of a dozen places which would be most interesting
to English visitors, but of which he had never heard. Yet every day I
heard English tourists inquiring of this man what they ought to see, and
he gave them the stereotyped answer. He sent them to Pompeii, Vesuvius,
and one or two well-known places, and for their evening’s amusement
invariably recommended them to try the opera at San Carlo. San Carlo is
the largest theatre in Europe, and the opera is magnificently given
there; but there are a score of things to see in Naples of an evening
which are far more amusing and instructive and novel than a night at the
opera.
One such place I found for myself, and I will tell you what I saw there
presently, but first I must get over my ascent of Vesuvius. It is an
awful journey from Naples to the edge of the crater, but the adventurous
voyager is well repaid for all his trouble, especially if he is as
fortunate as I was on the day of my visit. Vesuvius is a great fact in
the history of Naples; but for Vesuvius there would be no Herculaneum
and no Pompeii, and Vesuvius has had a tremendous influence on the
Neapolitan character. People who live at the foot of a volcano, within
sight of buried cities and islands and mountains which disappear in a
single night and reappear again, sometimes after thirty years of
submergence, are naturally superstitious, and equally naturally strongly
pervaded with the sentiments of religion.
Nowhere are the people so devout as in these parts. Shrines are
everywhere, and no house is without its cross. The priests flourish in
the midst of the people, and are beloved and revered by them. New ideas
come slowly to minds filled with simple and childlike faith, and free
thought makes but slow progress among a populace who are ever in the
presence of Nature’s most sudden and most awful catastrophes. Grant that
the Neapolitan is bigoted, superstitious, incapable of great mental or
physical effort. Who can wonder at it? Climate, race, and surrounding
circumstances account for it all! Live in Naples and be energetic under
that clear blue sky, in that hot sun, in that dreamy atmosphere, if you
can. Live under the shadow of that ever-seething volcano, knowing not at
what moment it may pour forth its fiery deluge and bury the villages for
miles around under a molten mass, and scoff if you dare!
All my life long I had wanted to see Vesuvius. My youthful imagination
was fired by the picture on the fusee boxes. It was not until the month
of January, 1888, that I found myself at last within measurable distance
of the grand old volcano.
I was in Naples for some days before I made the excursion. Every morning
I used to gaze at the great mountain celebrity, and from the respectful
distance of my bedroom window at the Grand Hotel watch him ‘smoking his
morning pipe'; but Vesuvius, as seen from Naples, is a very different
affair from Vesuvius as seen from the mouth of its crater. I was a long
time making up my mind to ‘do’ Vesuvius, because Naples is a place where
one does not go to bed particularly early. Every evening found me at one
of the theatres, generally the magnificent San Carlo, and as the opera
in Naples is frequently not over until past midnight, and there is life
to be seen at the Café de l’Europe, in the Via Nazionale, ‘after the
opera is over,’ it was often two o’clock in the morning ere I walked
back along the lonely Chiaja to the Grand Hotel. Now, to see Vesuvius
properly, and get back to Naples before nightfall, it is necessary that
you should make a start at eight o’clock in the morning. Naples is the
last place in the world in which a man wants to get up early in the
morning--Naples is the home of the _dolce far niente_. Mendelssohn
declared that in Naples he felt the greatest disinclination to do
anything at all. ‘I lounged about the streets all day,’ he says, ‘with a
morose face, and would have preferred lying on the ground without the
trouble of thinking, or writing, or doing anything. The atmosphere of
Naples is suitable to grandees who rise late, never require to go out on
foot, never think (for this is heating), sleep away a couple of hours on
a sofa in the afternoon, then eat ice and drive to the theatre at
night, where again they do not find anything to think about, but simply
make and receive visits.’ This peculiarity of ‘Neapolitans at the play’
I may refer to on another occasion, when I write my long-contemplated
article on the theatres of Europe; for the present I only wish to draw
attention to the intense laziness which the climate engenders. You will
now understand why I remained in Naples a whole week before I summoned
up sufficient courage to get up at eight o’clock in the morning to go to
Vesuvius.
However, I managed it at last. This is how I got up at eight o’clock in
the morning: I returned from the theatre at one in the morning, sat up
in my room with my companion, the now famous Albert Edward, native of
Finland and citizen of the world, smoking and talking till three. Then
we settled ourselves down in easy-chairs and went to sleep without
undressing. At seven we were aroused by the waiter, who, according to
overnight instructions, entered with considerable noise and some hot
coffee, and after giving us half an hour’s grace took us by the
shoulders and forced us downstairs.
Even when we stood outside the hotel, and found it cold, we said we
would go back and go to bed; but the landlord, who had promised us
faithfully to prevent any weakness on our part at the last moment, was a
man of his word, and, assisted by the waiter and the porter, thrust us
into the carriage, banged the door, and bade the coachman drive off with
us at once to Vesuvius.
Finding that further subterfuge was impossible, we turned up our
coat-collars, wrapped ourselves in our rugs, and presently we fell fast
asleep, the rhythmic snoring of my companion alone breaking the silence
of the lonely roads along which, at a cruel crawl, our wretched animals
proceeded.
Oh, the poor horses of Naples! They have haunted me ever since I saw
them. There is not, I should think, any place in the civilized world
where dumb beasts are treated with such wanton brutality as in this
glorious Naples. Some of the horses are mere skeletons--bags of
bones--and their starved bodies all one mass of gaping wounds and
hideous sores. The Neapolitan flyman always keeps a wound or a sore
place open on his horse’s body. It is into this wound that he thrusts a
sharp-pointed stick when he wants to urge the poor beast to further
effort or increased speed. I have seen a poor little pony, one mass of
sores and dead lame, dragging a _calesso_ containing fourteen people,
and being goaded into a gallop the whole length of a journey of ten
miles.
I have referred to the subject of the Naples horses elsewhere, but it
cannot be referred to too often. I am, in common with many other writers
who have seen the awful cruelty of Naples, hopeful that some day public
opinion will grow so strong on the subject that even the Neapolitans
will be shamed into something like ordinary humanity to their dumb
slaves.
Let me briefly, while our own wretched animals drag us wearily along the
road to Vesuvius (it takes four hours to get to the base of the cone
from Naples), tell you something of the Naples beasts of burthen.
The _calesso_ which I mentioned above is a long, narrow cart with three
benches or seats in it, and two poles sticking out behind, on which a
board is placed which seats more people. These _calessi_ belong mostly
to the villagers and the costermongers. The sides are painted sometimes
with pictures of the Virgin, sometimes with ballet ladies, and sometimes
with apocryphal figures. But however much they differ on the outside
they are always the same inside--that is, they are always full. The
proprietor of a _calesso_ drives half the village to town and back
again for nothing if they are his friends; for a small fee if they are
not. All the morning you see these loaded _calessi_ coming into Naples,
and all the afternoon you meet them going out again. Sometimes, instead
of the usual lame, raw, starved pony, a donkey draws the terrible load;
occasionally a horse in the last stage of break up and break down is
harnessed to the shafts. The heavier waggons are drawn by teams.
Sometimes four horses, sometimes a horse and a donkey, are harnessed
together. Sometimes a horse, a donkey, and a cow limp along side by
side. Upon one occasion near Pozzuoli I met a horse, a cow, a mule, and
a donkey drawing a load, but the most frequent ‘pair’ is a horse and a
cow.
Up in a secluded corner near the tomb of Virgil, just at the entrance to
the old grotto of Posilipo, I came one day on a dirty, broken-down
looking stable. On the door I saw written up ‘Society for the Protection
of Animals.’ After seeing the animals, I was not surprised that the
society took such a back seat. After all, what can it do in a country
where everybody tells you it is wicked to think of animals--animals have
no souls! Well, it may be so. I am far from sure about it, but animals
have hearts, and in this respect they have the advantage of the people
who torture them so cruelly in return for their willing, life-long
drudgery.
We arrived at the foot of the cone at last. The last part of the journey
had been a zigzag climb over miles of lava and black mud and shapeless
rocks, the cooled down ‘vomit of Vesuvius.’
At the foot of the cone is a funicular railway which has been rendered
familiar by the advertisements on most of the Continental
railway-stations.
The price of a seat in one of the cars is £1. We step in, and are hauled
up to the top.
It is something like going up the side of a house on a switchback, and
the process is so alarming that many people still prefer the
old-fashioned method of ascension, and either climb up laboriously or
are carried up in chairs by the guides and porters.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that the rope might break as I made the
ascent, and I was intensely relieved when we reached the mountain
station and stood once more on _terra firma_.
But there is still a further ascent to make on foot to reach the actual
mouth of the crater and look down into the yawning hell that night and
day, for ever and ever, is belching forth flame and smoke, and hurling
large stones and masses of rock into the air with a report that can only
be compared to the discharge of artillery.
As we alight from the funicular, we find ourselves in an awful
atmosphere. We are nearly choked with the noxious fumes of the volcano,
and our eyes are stung and blinded with the sulphurous smoke that
envelops us. The earth trembles beneath our feet, the huge mountain
throbs and gasps from beneath, and thick as hail around falls the shower
of stones that the volcano, with a thunderous roar, hurls unceasingly
into the air.
Still we determine to go on. I have sworn to look into the fiery jaws of
Vesuvius, and I will. Slowly we climb up that ‘awful’ summit--a summit
seething and boiling and steaming at every pore. Only those who have
made the ascent can realize the awful grandeur of the scene which awaits
the intrepid excursionist.
I use the word ‘awful’ advisedly. The stoutest heart will quake at the
spectacle which he beholds for the first time, and the surroundings are
not calculated to diminish the feelings of terror.
During the week I made my ascent a rumour had been published to the
effect that an Englishman who made the ascent of Vesuvius without a
guide had been lost. It is quite possible to be lost on the summit of
Vesuvius. Enveloped in smoke and steam, you may easily, if you are
incautious, become asphyxiated and fall into the crater of the raging
volcano, never to be heard of again.
The Englishman turns out to have been a German, and he has probably
turned up again at his hotel safe and sound, but there was plenty of
justification for the anxiety of his friends.
We take a guide. My companion was on the mountain during one eruption
and had to fly for his life. While we are ascending he tells me the
story, and that does not add to my sense of security.
It was the greatest eruption that had occurred during the present
century, and took place on April 24, 1872. At 4 p.m. a new crater opened
on the side of the mountain, and the lava from it made a circular sweep
round the mountain, threatening to cut off the descent of all the people
who were up above.
My companion, alarmed by the shouts of the guides, guessed something had
happened, and made all haste to descend, and only got down just in time
to find a narrow passage still open, through which he dashed.
By the time he reached the Hermitage the entire side of the mountain was
a sheet of burning lava. He learned afterwards that forty people had
perished on the volcano. The lava overwhelmed two villages--Massa and
San Sebastiano--and at Resina, the village at the foot, nearly a hundred
people were destroyed.
I had joked on the road about an eruption and what a fine thing it would
be to write about; but standing within measurable distance of the seat
of danger I am not only willing but decidedly anxious to postpone the
experiment.
Our guide conducts us cautiously over the yellow masses of sulphurous
rock and the yawning, steaming fissures, and the huge masses of coiled
lava that look like twisted rope. Our feet are parboiled with the steam
that rises from beneath them. The perspiration begins to burst from
every pore. We are in a perfect Turkish bath, or, rather, imperfect one,
in which the noxious fumes and vapours are allowed to escape and choke
the patient.
We cough and sneeze, and I gasp out a prophecy that I shall be choked.
My eyes smart as they have never smarted in the foulest London fog.
‘Close your mouths!’ yells our guide. We close our mouths and make
frantic efforts not to inhale the awful fumes of Vesuvius through our
nostrils, and still we stagger on with trembling limbs and anxious
faces, and at last we stand on the edge of the crater and peer down into
the abyss below.
The sight is terrible, and yet sublime in its grandeur.
Even as we look, blinded and choked, there is a loud report, and
hundreds of large stones are hurled high in the air.
The ground rocks beneath us. There is another report, and another, and
this time huge masses of rock are flung aloft from the infernal depths
of the crater.
I am fascinated by the scene, though I am in a state of mortal terror.
My companion urges me to come away. He has had enough of it, and is
thinking of the day when he had to fly for his life. No one who has ever
seen the burning lava pour down the sides of Vesuvius, and has been in
its path, ever wants to behold the sight again.
I, too, am thinking, but my thoughts have flown farther back than my
friend’s. I am thinking of all the scenes of horror and death and
desolation of which this stupendous volcano has been the cause. I think
of the buried cities that lie around me, hidden for ever beneath the
deadly vomit of the mouth into whose insatiable jaws I stand and gaze.
Herculaneum and Pompeii are below me, and hundreds of villages have been
swallowed up in the bygone centuries, and have left no record on the
pages of history.
I don’t know how long I should have remained gazing down into the jaws
of the volcano, terrified, yet too fascinated to move, had I not felt
symptoms of dizziness coming over me.
Not wishing to share the fate of the gentleman named Empedocles, who in
the year 400 B.C. toppled over into the crater of Mount Etna, I made a
violent effort and stepped slowly backward from the mouth of the crater,
and gradually staggered over the rough rocks and piles of lava until,
steaming and caked with sulphur, I returned to the little restaurant
which has been obligingly built by the authorities at the foot of the
cone.
Here I sat down to rest my weary limbs and recover my dazed senses. We
had a bottle of Vesuvio--a wine made from the grapes which grow on the
southern slopes of the mountain--and then we made our way to the
world-famous observatory on the side of the mountain, over which
Professor Palmieri presides, and which contains a marvellous instrument
called a seismograph.
Professor Palmieri has made Vesuvius the study of his life. By the aid
of his instrument he is able now to know twenty-four hours in advance
whether the intentions of the mountain are honourable or not.
By the kindness of the aged professor I was enabled to examine the
seismograph at my leisure, and I will briefly explain what it is.
It is a marvellous piece of mechanism, so arranged that certain wires
are agitated every time Vesuvius breathes. It is a long way from the
crater--in fact, it is actually on a neighbouring spur, but so perfectly
is it arranged that every movement of the volcano is recorded. While I
watched it the wires trembled--Vesuvius had thrown up a few stones. So
delicate is the mechanism that if you put your wrist within the glass
case which contains it your pulsation causes the wires to be agitated.
In the night, when the ‘observers’ sleep, the seismograph still records
the force of every breath the volcano draws. Attached to spiral wires
are a red pencil and a blue pencil, and underneath the points of these a
piece of tape--such as is used in telegraphing--winds itself round a
reel. Any force or agitation in the centre of the crater brings the
pencils down upon the tape, and causes them to mark it. A spasm of one
kind causes the red pencil to mark the tape, a spasm of another kind
sets the blue pencil off. In the morning the member of the staff on duty
simply looks at the tape, and he can tell exactly what ‘Old ‘Suvy’ has
been up to in the night. This is only a rough outline of what this
wonderful instrument of Professor Palmieri’s can accomplish. To
understand it thoroughly you must see it yourself.
After we had spent a pleasant hour in the observatory, chatting with one
of the attendants, who, by-the-bye, was formerly in the chorus of the
Royal Italian Opera in London, we went down the mountain to the inn at
which our horses had been stabled, and as soon as our coachman was ready
we drove back again to Naples.
I was tired out and fell asleep, only waking up once, just in time to
listen to a pious _pifferari_, who was making music at midnight before
the shrine of the Madonna.
I had a day’s rest after doing Vesuvius, and then I set out for Pompeii.
You can go by rail, so I didn’t this time have to rise at an abnormally
early hour. The train that left Naples for Pompeii might have been a
special from the Tower of Babel. Certainly every European language was
represented in it. When I arrived at Pompeii I was hungry, and I
adjourned at once to a restaurant, where a _table d’hôte_ breakfast was
being served in every language under the European sun. At the little
table at which I managed to find a seat we were English, French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Roumanian, Russian, Pole, and Swede, and the other
Continents were represented by a couple of Australians and three
Americans. But it is an extraordinary thing that, when we conversed
together in scraps of our various languages, we found we were all making
the same joke about the food. The omelette was made with eggs discovered
in Pompeii, which had been laid eighteen hundred years ago. The beef was
from a cow which had been dug up petrified during the latest excavation;
the apples had been found in the house of Diomed, where Diomed had left
them when he fled from the rain of hot ashes that fell upon his doomed
villa on November 24, 79. We all laughed at the joke, and the waiter--a
polyglot personage, who talked fourteen languages all mixed up together
at the same time--laughed too, and told us that it was on record that
ever since there had been a restaurant in Pompeii every traveller who
refreshed at it had perpetrated that very identical joke. And then he
looked very hard at me, and said: ‘But, pardon, sir; do I know you? Is
it not that you are Mr. ----?’ ‘You have guessed it the first time,’ I
replied, putting the idiom into German as well as I could on the spur of
the moment; ‘but where have you known me?’ ‘Ah, you no remember John! I
am John, as was your waiter in sitting-room at the London North-Western
Hotel at Liverpool.’ Oh, these jack-in-the-box sons of the Fatherland!
They pursue me everywhere. Fancy meeting your Liverpool German waiter at
Pompeii!
Of Pompeii itself what can I say in these pages? I want a whole book to
write what I think about it, and then I shall only have said what
hundreds have said before me. To wander about that old-world town,
rescued from its ashes after centuries of oblivion, is to stand aghast
with astonishment at the little progress which civilization has made
with the centuries. The Pompeians had probably forgotten far more than
we shall ever know. One stands absolutely open-mouthed and with starting
eyeballs before the cases in the museum, which contain the Pompeian
lady’s rouge-pot, and the Pompeian doctor’s surgical instruments, and
the pass-out checks for the Pompeian theatre; and the hair of one’s head
stands erect as one comes to a wall in Pompeii, and reads what a rude
little Pompeian boy had chalked upon it just seventy-nine years after
the birth of our Saviour. They knew how to live and how to enjoy
themselves, did those old Pompeians, and the art of making the house
beautiful was far more theirs than ours. Beautiful and perfect as works
of art as are the relics of that past civilization already recovered, it
is almost certain that buried deep down in old Herculaneum are works of
far greater beauty and of still higher art. But new towns have risen
above the old ruins, and the treasure will now probably never be
recovered.
The museum at Pompeii suffers from the best things found in the city
having been sent to the Naples Museum. In the Pompeii collection, after
the dead Pompeians in glass cases, there is very little to see, but they
are wonderful enough to satisfy the greatest curiosity hunter. It gives
one a little flutter of excitement to look at a man, perfect in form and
feature, lying just as he died on that terrible November day in 79--to
see his hands clenched and his teeth set, and the very look of horror on
his face that came there as he fell, fleeing from the doomed city--fell
to rise no more. And in another case lies a beautiful girl of Pompeii,
who died with her arm across her eyes, shutting out the sight of the
swift death that was overtaking her. And near her lies a poor little dog
who died that day. He still wears the collar and chain that bound him to
his kennel and prevented his escape. The poor little Pompeian bow-wow,
who lived one thousand eight hundred years ago, lies upon his side, his
limbs drawn together in agony, his lips parted just as they were when
they gave the last dying whimper of terror and despair. Poor little dog!
He will be handed down perhaps for thousands of years yet to come, for
the wondering eyes of a new race of human beings to gaze upon. That
little dog of A.D. 79 may---- But I mustn’t lose myself in building up a
Rider Haggard romance about that dog. He has achieved immortality, and,
like a good many four-footed immortals, he paid a good price for the
advertisement.
In the Naples Museum the rescued statuary and bronzes and ornaments are
very wonderful; but what interested me much more was the bread taken out
of the oven where it was recently found. It was put in on the day of the
catastrophe, and taken out some years ago. It was new bread then; it is
absolutely the stalest bread in existence now, for it is 1,800 years
old. After the loaves of bread such minor curiosities as the dessert
from a nobleman’s table, a bottle of wine from the cellar of Pliny, and
a patent latchkey found in a Pompeian gentleman’s pocket, fail to
attract more than passing attention. My only astonishment was that
nowhere in the museum could I find any traces of the electric light of
Pompeii, and that among the rescued literature exhibited there was not a
single copy of the Pompeian daily sporting paper. But when I asked the
custodian for these things he took a noble revenge by showing me a
challenge from the Jem Smith of Pompeii to fight the Jake Kilrain of
another town, and the score of a Pompeian tosspot which had been chalked
up behind a tavern door. After this he would be a bold man to deny that
people were quite as advanced in their civilization in 79 as they are
to-day.
All around Naples there are wonderful ruins and natural curiosities,
and, of course, I explored them all. I went to the great sulphur mine of
Pozzuoli and sulphured myself, and I went all over the Temple of Serapis
in the same place, and thoroughly explored the great amphitheatre in
which the famous seafights or Naumachia were held by the Romans. The
centre of the amphitheatre was filled with water, and then hundreds of
slaves and prisoners rowed in and hacked each other to pieces. It was
while exploring the dungeons underground in which the prisoners were
kept that a terrible adventure befell us. Our guide was a local old
gentleman of about ninety--the real genuine oldest inhabitant in the
flesh. He carried a tow torch to light us through the damp, noisome,
winding passages that led to the cells below the earth, and just as we
got into the darkest dungeon the old gentleman fell down in a fit and
his torch went out.
The situation was awful. We had not the slightest idea where we were,
and we hadn’t any matches with us. We shouted aloud, but only the
mocking echo of our own voices answered us. Just as the old gentleman
fell he had told us that we were now in dungeons from which no sound
could escape. We groped about in the dark, and tried to find a passage,
but only with the result that I found myself in one dark dungeon and
Albert Edward got into another, and we could neither of us find our way
back to the old gentleman. We gave ourselves up for lost. We had not
even the hope which the ancient prisoners had of being dragged out into
the arena to make a fight of it. We should perish by inches in the
secret dungeons of the great Roman amphitheatre of Pozzuoli. Just as we
had abandoned hope, and I was trying to scratch a last message to the
world on the wall with the point of my scarf-pin, a distant murmur
reached our ears. It grew nearer and nearer. We shouted; on it came. We
heard English words spoken by English lips. A guide was bringing another
party to the secret dungeons. They entered and found us, and between us
we carried the epileptic old gentleman upstairs into the light of day,
and got him some cold water and brought him round. But I registered a
vow never again to visit dungeons with an elderly gentleman subject to
fits, and with a tow torch of limited powers of endurance.
In Naples my principal amusement was buying lottery tickets and going to
the theatre. I didn’t get much out of the lottery, but I was vastly
amused at the theatre, as I sought out the smaller houses where plays in
the Neapolitan dialect, with Pulcinella as the principal comedian, were
given. One evening’s entertainment was unique in my experience, and will
remain impressed upon my mind while memory maintains a sitting position.
I had heard much of the marionettes and puppet-shows, and so one evening
I found my way to the Teatro Mercadante, where marionettes were
announced to appear in a grand play, entitled ‘The Universal Deluge,’
and in the great ballet of ‘Excelsior.’
I fancied, of course, that I was going to a small puppet-show. Imagine
my astonishment when I arrived at a real theatre with a real box office,
and found that the prices of admission ranged from one lira (equal to a
franc) to twenty lire. I paid ten lire for a private box, and on
entering the theatre found a huge audience assembled--an audience not of
children, but of grown men and women, of well-dressed ladies and
gentlemen armed with fans and opera-glasses--just the same kind of
audience, in fact, that assembles at the Lyceum, or the Criterion, or
the Gaiety. There was an orchestra, too, of twenty performers, and
programmes were sold, and when the curtain rose on ‘The Universal
Deluge,’ the great grown-up audience settled itself down to enjoy the
tragedy enacted by wooden dolls.
When I saw the scene, and Noah and his sons and daughters and the
priests came on and conversed, and raised their arms to heaven, and
generally conducted themselves in a manner worthy of Sir Henry Irving’s
company in ‘Hamlet’ or ‘King Lear,’ I was speechless with surprise. The
talking is, of course, done at the wings, but the gestures of the
puppets were perfect. There was a little lack of dignity occasionally in
the walk off, because the feet sometimes did not quite touch the ground,
but the figures being made to appear life-size by the dwarfing and
arrangement of the scenery, the illusion was at times simply marvellous.
Noah embraced his children; he fell on his knees and raised his hands to
heaven; he denounced the wicked, and he gave off long and impressive
speeches with such perfect dignity and appropriateness of gesture that
he speedily established himself as a great actor in the eyes of the
audience. He made his points amid rounds of applause, and at the end of
a really magnificent piece of acting he got such a terrific recall that
he came on and bowed his acknowledgments. Never did well-trained actor
take a call so gracefully as this wooden puppet, and never did trained
actor more thoroughly carry his audience away.
The second scene was the day of the Deluge. The skies were stormy and
ominous; peals of thunder were heard. Noah made one final appeal to the
wicked crowd of dolls, who only mocked him and went off to continue
their evil ways. Then Noah knelt down, and, joining his hands, indulged
in a short prayer, after which he opened the ark doors, and his sons and
daughters, each embracing him, passed in. Then he had a grand exit
speech, and walked up the plank into the ark, turning at the door with
true stage instinct to give off his exit speech. Then, the human beings
having taken their places, the animals commenced to arrive two by two.
The animals were wonderful wooden imitations of the real thing, and they
walked and pricked their ears and wagged their tails, each species
stopping just at the ark door to roar, or to bark, or to neigh, or to
crow, or hee-haw, as the case might be. The two donkeys displayed great
courage on the eve of such a catastrophe, for they kicked up their heels
and relieved the scene with considerable low comedy, retiring at last
amid roars of laughter and rounds of applause. Then the serpents
wriggled up, and then came the birds. Unfortunately a number of the
birds were real ones, and some of them flew into the theatre instead of
into the ark. Instantly the huge audience, with true Neapolitan cruelty,
set up a yell, and stretched out their hands to capture the frightened
little things, and the gallery boys hurled their caps at them, and the
crowded house rose and hooted and shouted, and was only satisfied when
the poor birds had been caught and killed. After all the animals were in
the ark, the door was closed; then a terrible rain descended on the
earth--the best rain I have ever seen on the stage. It was so real that
I found myself picking up my umbrella in my private box. Now the waters
rose rapidly, the ark began to pitch and toss, the wild lightnings
flashed, and the audience was hushed to a silence that might be felt. In
a moment the wicked were seen climbing to the mountain summits, only to
be washed off and carried away. Mothers clung to their children,
husbands clutched madly at their drowning wives, and the angry billows
were thick with struggling human beings--I beg pardon, struggling with
puppets. How all these figures were worked so naturally is a puzzle to
me. The action was never jerky or mechanical; it was natural--so natural
that the scene became painful. One poor doll mother held her doll baby
in her arms and smothered it with kisses as the cruel wave swept them
away, and a doll husband perished in agony locked in his young doll
wife’s embrace. But safely, amid all the horrors and the cries of the
doomed, the brave old ark rode the angry waters, until the dove flew
out, and presently returned with an olive-branch. Then the waves were
still, day dawned over the scene, and Noah, with the limelight full upon
his patriarchal head, knelt at the ark door and returned thanks to
Heaven for its mercy to him and his, and then the band played soft,
sweet music, and the curtain slowly fell upon ‘The Universal Deluge.’
If this was wonderful, what can I say of the ballet of ‘Excelsior’ which
followed? I have seen this famous ballet at San Carlo in Naples, at the
Eden in Paris, and at Her Majesty’s in London, but I have never seen it
performed with such vigour as by the wooden troop of artists engaged at
the Mercadante. The complete ballet was given, with the music, the
scenery, the dances, and the various tableaux. The _corps de ballet_
went through the complicated figures with a precision that would have
gladdened the heart of Monsieur Jacobi at the Alhambra, and the leading
lady, Miss Emma Wood, as she was playfully called in the playbill, won
all hearts by the grace and finish of her dancing. She leapt a little
higher perhaps than Palladino or Pitteri ever did, and now and then she
didn’t trouble to touch the boards with her twinkling little feet; but
here, as in the tragedy, the action was excellent, and when, after a
magnificent _pas seul_, Miss Wood was called, she came on and bowed
right and left with the most exquisite grace. The dramatic scenes of the
ballet were perfectly played, and from start to finish it was thoroughly
appreciated by the audience, who remained in the theatre from eight
until nearly midnight, applauding and enjoying the really artistic
performance of these wooden actors and actresses. When the curtain had
descended and we all filed out into the street, it seemed to me that I
had at last discovered the secret of true happiness for a dramatic
author. It was to live in a country where his plays could be interpreted
by puppets. And oh, what a paradise such a land must be to the
theatrical manager! No quarrels among the company, no trouble with the
leading man, no indisposition of the leading lady, and no salaries to
pay, except those of the voices at the wings and the men who work the
strings of the puppets from the flies.
From that night I went only to puppet shows. Even a grand opera at San
Carlo could not tempt me away from them. I saw dramas and comedies and
farcical comedies played by dolls, and I saw everywhere packed audiences
roaring with delight at their antics, or weeping in sympathy with their
sorrows.
Funerals at Naples are among the curious spectacles of the town. Being
of a cheerful disposition, I always run after a funeral. The body is
carried on a bier by four masked men, and a procession of masked men
follows. These masked men are the Brethren of the Misericordia. Rich
funerals have a grand open hearse in which the coffin is placed, and two
priests, with lighted candles, sit inside at the head of the coffin. The
coffin is always smothered in flowers.
The practice of exposing the dead to the public view still obtains in
Naples. Recently, in one of the small streets, a baker lost his only
daughter, a very beautiful girl of sixteen. I saw her after she was
dead, because the baker had cleared all the bread from his shop-window
and put his pretty dead daughter there instead. And for a whole day she
lay there, surrounded with beautiful white camellias and lovely flowers,
until it was time for her to be placed on the bier and carried off to
the Campo Santo.
The lottery playing in Naples is the curse of the town. Almost every
second shop is a lottery shop, and all ranks gamble from week to week.
The system is not to buy a ticket, but to back certain numbers to come
out. The numbers run from one to ninety, and five are drawn every week.
You can play the single number, the ambo, and the terno--that is, two
numbers or three, and four and five if you like. If you play the ambo
you name two numbers to come out, and if you are right you are paid by
the Government three hundred times your stake. That stake can be what
you like, from a penny to a pound. If you back a terno you get
proportionately more; if you name all five you get sixty thousand times
your stake.
With this game brought within the reach of all classes, you can readily
imagine that the lottery shops are besieged all day long. Every
peasant, every servant, every beggar plays at the lottery. The vice is
national; it is in the blood; it is part of the Neapolitan character.
There are a hundred superstitions among the people concerning the
lottery. If you meet a white horse you play such and such a number: if
you meet a funeral, if you hear a donkey bray, if you see a man with red
whiskers--whatever happens, the Neapolitan takes it as an augury of a
certain number, and he plays it accordingly.
Some of the priests have great success in foretelling successful
numbers. One of the monks who walk about soliciting alms once had a
great reputation. To anyone who gave him charity he whispered a number.
He was so successful that at last he could not move out without being
surrounded by crowds, who demanded a number to play. He lost his temper,
and refused to tell anybody. The crowd thereupon seized him, and he was
carried away and shut up in a cellar in a house, where he was beaten
with a stick to make him tell the number. Still he refused, and they
swore they would keep him prisoner until he consented; but the poor
priest fell ill, and then, getting alarmed lest he should die, his
assailants took him out and put him in the street, where he was picked
up by the police. He was taken to the hospital, where he died, but
before he breathed his last he gave ‘numbers’ to the sick in his ward.
They told others, and the entire hospital--patients, doctors, and
nurses--played the poor monk’s numbers, an ambo, and those numbers came
out of the wheel. The Naples lottery lost an enormous sum, but it gained
again next week, when every living soul put every shilling they had got
in the world on the poor monk’s terno, which, fortunately for the
Government, didn’t come out as the ambo had done.
There is one remarkable feature about the Naples Museum, which is, that
each of the old gentlemen who act as custodians of a room quietly
whispers into your ear that he should like to do business with you. One
dear old boy actually found out my hotel, and arrived in the evening and
asked to see me, having with him a book about the museum which he was
sure I should like to buy, as it was very rare and very curious. When I
had bought it I discovered that it was the 1888 edition of a work
published in Ludgate Hill, London.
The English are the special prey of the touts in the Museum--in fact,
they seem to be special prey everywhere. Everybody in Naples knows
enough English to waylay them with. Even the objectionable ‘guides’ who
stand outside the Café de l’Europe at night, and in the expressive
language of the country are called ‘ruffiani,’ ply their highly
objectionable calling in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. And a little barefooted
Neapolitan imp who sells matches outside the San Carlo Theatre shouts
morning, noon, and night, in a shrill treble, ‘Here yare, sare--vant
some matches!’ In addition to this a peripatetic trade in Holywell
Street literature and art is openly plied by men in the streets, who
expatiate upon the character of their wares in fluent English, and
follow the British or American tourist for a quarter of a mile in their
endeavour to persuade him to become a purchaser.
After all, England is not such a great place in everybody’s eyes as it
is in our own. I travelled with an Italian priest from Naples to
Pompeii, and we told each other stories in French--not French stories,
_bien entendu_. He had just come from Sicily, where he had been tutor in
a great Duke’s family, and when he wanted to teach the Duke’s son some
English history, the Duke said: ‘Nonsense! let him learn the history of
Sicily first; what is the use of his troubling about the small countries
like England?’ I met a Neapolitan, too, not long ago--a Neapolitan Count
from Otranto--who asked me many questions concerning England. I told him
it was a great country. ‘Is it as great a country as Greece?’ he said.
‘Oh, much greater!’ I replied; ‘the two are not to be compared.’ The
Count shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he exclaimed; ‘I see many
Greek ships at Otranto, but very seldom an English one.’