“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 và 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 pharmacopcœia! 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.