Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

Shall I confess that, having been taught from my earliest infancy to believe in the Naples of romance, the Naples of the operatic stage, the Naples of the guide-book, and the Naples of the tourist, I was just a little disappointed when I first found myself in the famous city? My first disappointment was the complete absence of choruses of red-bonneted fishermen, singing, ‘Behold, how brightly breaks the morning.’ My second disappointment was the utter absence of colour and costume on the quay and in the city; and my greatest disappointment of all was that the bay was not blue, the sun was not warm, and the people were not gay. I arrived in Naples on a day which must have left London last November, and have remained hidden somewhere off the coast until it heard of my arrival. It was a dark, dull, lowering day—a day such as my good friend the oldest inhabitant could not remember the like of. Vesuvius in the background was shooting up a black volume of smoke that made him look like Sheffield in the distance more than the time-honoured mountain of the London matchbox, and the sky was as dirty and grimy as the lava pavement of the city. It wasn’t the fault of Naples that it so belied its character. It was my fault. I had brought my own weather with me, and spoiled Naples as I had spoiled the Riviera.

But in the morning all was changed. The sky was a cloudless blue, and the sun shone brilliantly, and I sallied forth to lounge away the day, and to steep myself in Neapolitan life. Much of my first disappointment was atoned for, but still I searched in vain for picturesque costume. Naples is no longer the Naples of old. The curse of the billycock hat, which has spread over Europe, has not spared Southern Italy. The common people wear the castoff clothes of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do dress in the London fashion. As a natural consequence, the Neapolitan porters and fishermen and lazzaroni have little to distinguish them from the London labourer and the London costermonger. Naples has also in a great measure been ruined by the rich foreigner, who insists on carrying his own manners and customs with him. The old habits of the people yield to foreign influence, and one great city becomes as another great city. The English and the French and the Germans come to spend their money at Naples. They must be pleased. To please them everything that is English and French and German is introduced, and one by one the Neapolitan characteristics disappear.

Still, the industrious searcher who leaves the beaten track of the visitor and plunges into the side streets and the poorer quarters can find plenty of reward for his pains. He who would see Neapolitan life and study the people, their amusements and their customs, must shun the great hotels, and turn a deaf ear to the words of porters and hotel guides. As a rule the hotel people know nothing of the town. As an instance, take the hotel at which I stayed. The proprietor was a Swiss; the hall-porter was a German newly arrived from the Midland Hotel, St. Pancras; the head waiter was, during last season, sitting-room waiter at the Old Ship at Brighton. My sitting-room waiter came from the Queen’s Hotel, Hastings, and my chambermaid’s last place was the Schweizerhof at Lucerne. You can imagine for yourself what these people are likely to know of Naples. I had not been two days in Naples before I was able to tell the hall-porter of a dozen places which would be most interesting to English visitors, but of which he had never heard. Yet every day I heard English tourists inquiring of this man what they ought to see, and he gave them the stereotyped answer. He sent them to Pompeii, Vesuvius, and one or two well-known places, and for their evening’s amusement invariably recommended them to try the opera at San Carlo. San Carlo is the largest theatre in Europe, and the opera is magnificently given there; but there are a score of things to see in Naples of an evening which are far more amusing and instructive and novel than a night at the opera.

One such place I found for myself, and I will tell you what I saw there presently, but first I must get over my ascent of Vesuvius. It is an awful journey from Naples to the edge of the crater, but the adventurous voyager is well repaid for all his trouble, especially if he is as fortunate as I was on the day of my visit. Vesuvius is a great fact in the history of Naples; but for Vesuvius there would be no Herculaneum and no Pompeii, and Vesuvius has had a tremendous influence on the Neapolitan character. People who live at the foot of a volcano, within sight of buried cities and islands and mountains which disappear in a single night and reappear again, sometimes after thirty years of submergence, are naturally superstitious, and equally naturally strongly pervaded with the sentiments of religion.

Nowhere are the people so devout as in these parts. Shrines are everywhere, and no house is without its cross. The priests flourish in the midst of the people, and are beloved and revered by them. New ideas come slowly to minds filled with simple and childlike faith, and free thought makes but slow progress among a populace who are ever in the presence of Nature’s most sudden and most awful catastrophes. Grant that the Neapolitan is bigoted, superstitious, incapable of great mental or physical effort. Who can wonder at it? Climate, race, and surrounding circumstances account for it all! Live in Naples and be energetic under that clear blue sky, in that hot sun, in that dreamy atmosphere, if you can. Live under the shadow of that ever-seething volcano, knowing not at what moment it may pour forth its fiery deluge and bury the villages for miles around under a molten mass, and scoff if you dare!

All my life long I had wanted to see Vesuvius. My youthful imagination was fired by the picture on the fusee boxes. It was not until the month of January, 1888, that I found myself at last within measurable distance of the grand old volcano.

I was in Naples for some days before I made the excursion. Every morning I used to gaze at the great mountain celebrity, and from the respectful distance of my bedroom window at the Grand Hotel watch him ‘smoking his morning pipe'; but Vesuvius, as seen from Naples, is a very different affair from Vesuvius as seen from the mouth of its crater. I was a long time making up my mind to ‘do’ Vesuvius, because Naples is a place where one does not go to bed particularly early. Every evening found me at one of the theatres, generally the magnificent San Carlo, and as the opera in Naples is frequently not over until past midnight, and there is life to be seen at the Café de l’Europe, in the Via Nazionale, ‘after the opera is over,’ it was often two o’clock in the morning ere I walked back along the lonely Chiaja to the Grand Hotel. Now, to see Vesuvius properly, and get back to Naples before nightfall, it is necessary that you should make a start at eight o’clock in the morning. Naples is the last place in the world in which a man wants to get up early in the morning—Naples is the home of the dolce far niente. Mendelssohn declared that in Naples he felt the greatest disinclination to do anything at all. ‘I lounged about the streets all day,’ he says, ‘with a morose face, and would have preferred lying on the ground without the trouble of thinking, or writing, or doing anything. The atmosphere of Naples is suitable to grandees who rise late, never require to go out on foot, never think (for this is heating), sleep away a couple of hours on a sofa in the afternoon, then eat ice and drive to the theatre at night, where again they do not find anything to think about, but simply make and receive visits.’ This peculiarity of ‘Neapolitans at the play’ I may refer to on another occasion, when I write my long-contemplated article on the theatres of Europe; for the present I only wish to draw attention to the intense laziness which the climate engenders. You will now understand why I remained in Naples a whole week before I summoned up sufficient courage to get up at eight o’clock in the morning to go to Vesuvius.

However, I managed it at last. This is how I got up at eight o’clock in the morning: I returned from the theatre at one in the morning, sat up in my room with my companion, the now famous Albert Edward, native of Finland and citizen of the world, smoking and talking till three. Then we settled ourselves down in easy-chairs and went to sleep without undressing. At seven we were aroused by the waiter, who, according to overnight instructions, entered with considerable noise and some hot coffee, and after giving us half an hour’s grace took us by the shoulders and forced us downstairs.

Even when we stood outside the hotel, and found it cold, we said we would go back and go to bed; but the landlord, who had promised us faithfully to prevent any weakness on our part at the last moment, was a man of his word, and, assisted by the waiter and the porter, thrust us into the carriage, banged the door, and bade the coachman drive off with us at once to Vesuvius.

Finding that further subterfuge was impossible, we turned up our coat-collars, wrapped ourselves in our rugs, and presently we fell fast asleep, the rhythmic snoring of my companion alone breaking the silence of the lonely roads along which, at a cruel crawl, our wretched animals proceeded.