Roman Holidays And Others - William Dean Howells

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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.

      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

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