On the occasion of my first journey at Christmas, 1857, I stopped only three weeks in the Eternal City and then went on by sea to Naples. I was ill from the fatigues and anxieties of the previous weeks, and after a few half-dazed visits to the Colosseum, the Vatican, and Shelley’s grave, I found myself unable to leave my solitary fourth-floor room in the Europa. A card was brought to me one day while thus imprisoned, bearing names (unknown to me) of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Apthorp,” and with the singular message: “Was I the Miss Cobbe who had corresponded with Theodore Parker in America?” My first impression was one of alarm. “What! more trouble about my heresies still?” It was, however, quite a different matter. My visitors were a gentleman (a real American gentleman) and his wife, with two ladies who were all among Parker’s intimate friends in America, and to whom he had showed my letters. They came to hold out to me the right hands of fellowship; and friends indeed we became, in such thorough sort that, after seven-and-thirty years I am corresponding with dear Mrs. Apthorp still. She and her sister nursed me through my illness; and thus my solitude in Rome came to an end.
Naples struck me on my first visit, as it has done again and again, as presenting the proof that the Beautiful is not by itself, a root out of which the Good spontaneously grows. If we want to cultivate Purity, Honesty, Veracity, Unselfishness or any other virtue, it is vain to think we shall achieve our end by giving the masses pretty pleasure-grounds and “Palaces of Delight,” or even æsthetic cottages with the best reproductions of Botticelli adorning the walls. Do what we may we can never hope to surround our working men with such beauty as that of the Bay of Naples, nor to show them Art to equal the treasures of the Museo Borbonico. And what has come of all this familiar revelling in Beauty for centuries and millenniums to the people of Naples? Only that they resemble more closely in ignorance, in squalor and in degradation the most wretched Irish who dwell in mud cabins amid the bogs, than any other people in Europe.
I had intended remaining for some time to recuperate at Naples and took a cheery little room in a certain Pension Schiassi (now abolished) on the Chiajia. In this Pension I met a number of kindly and interesting people of various nationalities; the most pleasant and cultivated of all being Finns from Helsingfors. It was a great experience to me to enter into some sort of society again, far removed from all my antecedents; no longer the mistress of a large house and dispenser of its hospitality, but a wandering tourist, known to nobody and dressed as plainly as might be. I find I wrote to my old friend, Miss St. Leger, on the subject under date January 21st, 1858, as follows: “I am really cheerful now. Those days in the country (at Cumæ and Capo di Monte) cheered me very much, and I am beginning altogether to look at the future differently. There is one thing I feel really happy about. I see now my actual position towards people, divested of the social advantages I have hitherto held; and I find it a very pleasant one. I don’t think I deceive myself in imagining that people easily like me, and get interested in my ideas, while I find abundance to like and esteem in a large proportion of those I meet.” (Optimism, once more! the reader will say!)
It was not, however, “all beer and skittles” for me at the Schiassi pension. I had, as I have mentioned, taken a pretty little room looking out on the Villa Reale and the Bay and Vesuvius, and had put up the photographs and miniatures I carried with me and my little knick-knacks on the writing-table, and fondly flattered myself I should sit and write there peacefully. But I reckoned without my neighbours! It was Sunday when I arrived and settled myself so complacently. On Monday morning, soon after day-break, I was rudely awakened by a dreadful four-handed strumming on a piano, apparently in my very room! On rousing myself, I perceived that a locked door close to my bed obviously opened into an adjoining chamber, and being (after the manner of Italian doors) at least two inches short of the uncarpeted floor, I was to all acoustic intents and purposes actually in the room with this atrocious jangling piano and the two thumping performers! The practising went on for two hours, and when it stopped a masculine voice arose to read the Bible aloud in family devotions. Then, after a brief interval for breakfast, burst out again the intolerable strumming. I fled, and remained out of doors for hours, but when I came back they were at it again! I appealed to the mistress of the house, in vain. Sir Andrew——and his daughters (I will call them the Misses Shocking-strum, their real name concerns nobody now) had been there before me and would no doubt stop long after me, and could not be prevented from playing from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the week. I took a large card and wrote on it this pathetic appeal:—
“Pity the sorrows of a poor old maid,
Whose hapless lot has made her lodge next door,
Who fain would wish those morning airs delayed;
O practise less! And she will bless you more!”
I thrust this under the ill-fitting door well into the music-room, and waited anxiously for some measure of mercy to be meted to me in consequence. But no! the hateful thumping and crashing went on as before. Then I girded up my loins and went down to the packet office and took a berth in the next steamer for Alexandria.
After landing at Messina (lovely region!) and at Malta, I embarked in a French screw-steamer, which began to roll before we were well under weigh, and which, when a real Levanter came on three days later, played pitch and toss with us passengers, insomuch that we often needed to lie on mattresses on the floor and hold something to prevent our heads from being knocked to pieces. One day, being fortunately a very good sailor, I scrambled up on deck and beheld a glorious scene. Euroclydon was playing with towering waves of lapis-lazulæ all flecked and veined like a horse’s neck with white foam, and the African sun was shining down cloudless over the turmoil.