We are always
complaining, nowadays, of an abatement of religious feeling. How easy
for such a one to send down an Isaiah to foretell the hour of the coming
catastrophe, and thus save those of its victims who were disposed to
hearken to the warning voice; to reanimate the flagging zeal of
worshippers, to straighten doubts and segregate the sheep from the
goats! Truly, He moves in a mysterious way, for no divine message came;
the just were entombed with the unjust amid a considerable deal of
telegraphing and heart-breaking.
A few days after the disaster the Catholic papers explained matters by
saying that the people of Messina had not loved their Madonna
sufficiently well. But she loved them none the less, and sent the
earthquake as an admonishment. Rather a robust method of conciliating
their affection; not exactly the suaviter in modo. . . .
But if genuine prophets can only flourish among the malarious willow
swamps of old Babylon and such-like improbable spots, we might at least
have expected better things of our modern spiritualists. Why should
their apparitions content themselves with announcing the decease, at the
Antipodes, of profoundly uninteresting relatives? Alas! I begin to
perceive that spirits of the right kind, of the useful kind, have yet to
be discovered. Our present-day ghosts are like seismographs; they
chronicle the event after it has happened. Now, what we want is - -
"The Signore smokes, and smokes, and smokes. Why not take the tram and
listen to the municipal music in the gardens?"
"Music? Gardens? An excellent suggestion, Gennarino."
Even as a small Italian town would be incomplete without its piazza
where streets converge and commercial pulses beat their liveliest
measure, so every larger one contrives to possess a public garden for
the evening disport of its citizens; night-life being the true life of
the south. Charming they are, most of them; none more delectable than
that of old Messina - a spacious pleasaunce, decked out with trim palms
and flower-beds and labyrinthine walks freshly watered, and cooled, that
evening, by stealthy breezes from the sea. The grounds were festively
illuminated, and as I sat down near the bandstand and watched the folk
meandering to and fro, I calculated that no fewer than thirty thousand
persons were abroad, taking their pleasure under the trees, in the bland
air of evening. An orderly, well-dressed crowd. 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. They play well, these
fellows. Palermo, too, has a respectable band - Oh! a little too fast,
that recitativo!"
"The Signore is a musician?"
"A proprietario. But I delight in music, and I beguiled myself with
the fiddle as a youngster. Nowadays - look here!" And he extended his
hand; it was crippled. "Rheumatism. I have it here, and here" - pointing
to various regions of his body - "and here! Ah, these doctors! The
baths I have taken! The medicines - the ointments - the embrocations: a
perfect pharmacopceia! I can hardly crawl now, and without the help of
these two devoted boys even this harmless little diversion would have
been denied me. My nephews - orphans," he added, observing the direction
of my glance.
They sat on his other side, handsome lads, who spoke neither too much
nor too little. Every now and then they rose with one accord and
strolled among the surging crowd to stretch their legs, returning after
five minutes to their uncle's side. His eyes always followed their
movements.
"My young brother, had he lived, would have made men of them," he once
observed.
The images revive, curiously pertinacious, with dim lapses and gulfs. I
can see them still, the two boys, their grave demeanour belied by mobile
lips and mischievous fair curls of Northern ancestry; the other, leaning
forward intent upon the music, and caressing his moustache with bent
fingers upon which glittered a jewel set in massive gold - some scarab or
intaglio, the spoil of old Magna Graecia. His conversation, during the
intervals, moved among the accepted formulas of cosmopolitanism with
easy flow, quickened at times by the individual emphasis of a man who
can forsake conventional tracks and think for himself. Among other
things, he had contrived an original project for reviving the lemon
industry of his country, which, though it involved a few tariff
modifications - "a mere detail" - struck me as amazingly effective and
ingenious. The local deputy, it seems, shared my view, for he had
undertaken to bring it before the notice of Parliament.
