NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE
We heard the joyful noise of Naples as soon as our
steamer came to anchor within the moles whose rigid
lines perhaps disfigure her famous bay, while they
render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose
to us, hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases
for the glory of her sea and sky and mountains and
monuments, from a boat which seemed to have been keeping
abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It
was not a largo boat, but it managed to contain two
men with mandolins, a mother of a family with a guitar,
and a young girl with an alternate tambourine and
umbrella. The last instrument was inverted to
catch the coins, such as they were, which the passengers
flung down to the minstrels for their repetitions
of “Santa Lucia,” “Funicoli-Funicola,”
“II Cacciatore,” and other popular Neapolitan
airs, such as “John Brown’s Body”
and “In the Bowery.” To the songs
that had a waltz movement the mother of a family performed
a restricted dance, at some risk of falling overboard,
while she smiled radiantly up at us, as, in fact,
they all did, except the young girl, who had to play
simultaneously on her tambourine and her inverted
umbrella, and seemed careworn. Her anxiety visibly
deepened to despair when she missed a shilling, which
must have looked as large to her as a full moon as
it sank slowly down into the sea.
But her despair did not last long; nothing lasts long
in Naples except the joyful noise, which is incessant
and perpetual, and which seems the expression of the
universal temperament in both man and beast. Our
good-fortune placed us in a hotel fronting the famous
Castel dell’ Ovo, across a little space of land
and water, and we could hear, late and early, the
cackling and crowing of the chickens which have replaced
the hapless prisoners of other days in that fortress.
At times the voices of the hens were lifted in a choral
of self-praise, as if they had among them just laid
the mighty structure which takes its name from its
resemblance to the egg they ordinarily produce.
In other lands the peculiar note of the donkey is
not thought very melodious, but in Naples before it
can fade away it is caught up in the general orchestration
and ceases in music. The cabmen at our corner,
lying in wait by scores for the strangers whom it
is their convention to suppose ignorant of their want
of a carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another;
the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity,
murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or
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
