After A Time, The Galley-Slave
Becomes Discursive--Incoherent.
The secretary pauses and rubs his
chin.
The galley-slave is voluble and energetic. The secretary,
at length, catches the idea, and with the air of a man who knows
how to word it, sets it down; stopping, now and then, to glance
back at his text admiringly. The galley-slave is silent. The
soldier stoically cracks his nuts. Is there anything more to say?
inquires the letter-writer. No more. Then listen, friend of mine.
He reads it through. The galley-slave is quite enchanted. It is
folded, and addressed, and given to him, and he pays the fee. The
secretary falls back indolently in his chair, and takes a book.
The galley-slave gathers up an empty sack. The sentinel throws
away a handful of nut-shells, shoulders his musket, and away they
go together.
Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right
hands, when you look at them? Everything is done in pantomime in
Naples, and that is the conventional sign for hunger. A man who is
quarrelling with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand
on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs--expressive of a
donkey's ears--whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation. Two
people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary
waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away without
a word: having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers
it too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his
lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right
hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm. The
other nods briskly, and goes his way. He has been invited to a
friendly dinner at half-past five o'clock, and will certainly come.
All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist,
with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative--the only
negative beggars will ever understand. But, in Naples, those five
fingers are a copious language.
All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
macaroni-eating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long, and
begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the
bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily. But,
lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too
studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and
wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably
associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and
the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged
red scarf, do not make ALL the difference between what is
interesting and what is coarse and odious? Painting and poetising
for ever, if you will, the beauties of this most beautiful and
lovely spot of earth, let us, as our duty, try to associate a new
picturesque with some faint recognition of man's destiny and
capabilities; more hopeful, I believe, among the ice and snow of
the North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples.
Capri--once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius--Ischia,
Procida, and the thousand distant beauties of the Bay, lie in the
blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times a-
day: now close at hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest
country in the world, is spread about us. Whether we turn towards
the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphitheatre, and go by the
Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae: or
take the other way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one
succession of delights. In the last-named direction, where, over
doors and archways, there are countless little images of San
Gennaro, with his Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of
the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on
the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built
upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of
Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses,
granaries, and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare, with its
ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon
a heap of rocks. Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may
ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and
beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo,
the highest neighbouring mountain, down to the water's edge--among
vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards,
heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills--and by the bases of
snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-
haired women at the doors--and pass delicious summer villas--to
Sorrento, where the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty
surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castel-
a-Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp
water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in
distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to
dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset:
with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain, with
its smoke and flame, upon the other: is a sublime conclusion to
the glory of the day.
That church by the Porta Capuana--near the old fisher-market in the
dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello
began--is memorable for having been the scene of one of his
earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly
remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejewelled
Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number
of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a
battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door, and
the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented
the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
Gennaro or Januarius:
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