We May Smile When They
Tell Us That These People Will Stint Themselves Of The Necessities Of
Life In Order To Wear Fine Clothes, But The Effect, For An Outsider, Is
All That It Should Be.
For the rest, the very urchins, gambolling about,
had an air of happy prosperity, different from the squalor of the north
with its pinched white faces, its over-breeding and under-feeding.
And how well the sensuous Italian strains accord with such an hour and
scene! They were playing, if I remember rightly, the ever-popular Aida;
other items followed later - more ambitious ones; a Hungarian rhapsody,
Berlioz, a selection from Wagner.
"Musica filosofica" said my neighbour, alluding to the German
composer. He was a spare man of about sixty; a sunburnt, military
countenance, seamed by lines of suffering. "Non va in Sicilia - it
won't do in this country. Not that we fail to appreciate your great
thinkers," he added. "We read and admire your Schopenhauer, your
Spencer. They give passable representations of Wagner in Naples. But - - "
"The climate?"
"Precisely. I have travelled, sir; and knowing your Berlin, and London,
and Boston, have been able to observe how ill our Italian architecture
looks under your grey skies, how ill our music sounds among the complex
appliances of your artificial life. It has made you earnest, this
climate of yours, and prone to take earnestly your very pastimes.
Music, for us, has remained what it was in the Golden Age - an
unburdening of the soul on a summer's night.
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