(...an excerpt from an
unsigned article in Harper's,
New Monthly Magazine, vol. XI. Jun-Nov 1855.
The article is entitled "A Day at Pompeii" and is much
longer than this excerpt. I have included the author's
general description and impressions on Naples to the
point in the text where he decides to leave for Pompeii.
I have added the photo.)
A
Day at Pompeii
What traveler fails to
associate with Naples a laughing sky, a bounteous
soil, a smiling sea—in short, that happy combination of
elements which, making up our idea of a terrestrial
paradise, ever beckons us to approach and pluck its fruits
of enjoyment? The ancients sought to secure this coveted
happiness by the discovery of the "Fortunate Islands."
Their descendants, still more eager and worldly, not
contented with the prodigality of Nature in a climate more
favored than Plato ever imagined, have worried science and
research in the futile effort to detect the elixir of
life, or discover the fountain of youth, that they might
drink of the one or bathe in the other and live forever on
the earth. But there are certain secrets that Nature seems
determined to keep), although constantly flattering us
that she is upon the point of disclosing the coveted
mysteries. Among them is the common delusion of a " good
climate"—an atmospherical Eden, which is neither too hot
nor too cold, too damp nor too dry, and, opening every
pore to sensuous delight, we would be content to pronounce
it "just right." Having tried a greater variety of
climates than is the usual lot of man, I am satisfied that
while all have their good points, there is none perfect.
The only sure rule of enjoyment is "to make hay while the
sun shines," and not to believe that because Dame Nature
smiles today she will tomorrow. She is a coquette from
principle, and often fascinates but the more speedily to
disappoint.
She smiles so sweetly, however,
upon Naples, when she does smile, that one is, as it were,
subdued into enjoyment, in spite of human nature and its
thousand ills and wayward humors. Her fine days are
absolutely borrowed from Paradise. The atmosphere
absolutely becomes an elixir of health and fountain of
happiness. The soul is not beguiled into that dreamy
languor, so fatal to exertion in the tropics, but it
nerves the body to active pleasure and grateful emotions.
Like the lark, one longs to soar and sing in the sparkling
sunlight, receiving health and bliss in each expansion of
wing. The ripe fruit, however, does not drop into the lap,
but it must be plucked. Hence, in a temperature like that
of Naples arises that superior happiness which results
from the equal stimulus and employment of both mind and
body under circumstances the most favorable, so far as
God's works are concerned, for the perfect development of
life—life in the sense of blissful existence, where every
breath is pleasure, and every pulsation joy.
Yet Naples is sadly capricious,
notwithstanding her largess of delights. She gives, but
she exacts also. The scorching sirocco shrinks pores and
strangles the mind. It is a fiery furnace, in which every
previous atmospherical sense of enjoyment is consumed by
slow torture. The reaction in the nervous system is
terrible. Africa, by one blast of her breath, revenges a
thousand wrongs. I know nothing in the whole range of
winds more soul-subduing, body-famishing, than the
sirocco. It wilts, it shrinks, it parches, it enfeebles;
it irritates, it pinches, it pricks, it tickles; it is an
amalgam of melancholy and imbecility, the subtlest medium
for low spirits ever let loose upon egotistical man, and
yields to no exorcism save that of a shift of the
weather-cock.
The eccentricities of weather
tend, I believe, to make Naples what it really is, a city
of paradoxes. Its subtle influences affect the national
character, and give it a composite element of seeming
eccentricities. One is equally eager to arrive and to
leave; both emotions have their pleasurable
associations. Naples, after Rome, is like a
resurrection from the grave to the world. Here we find
life in its active sense. London life is a dull, plodding,
staid, wearisome life; forms and shams—much eating and
loud speaking are its elements. New York life is a
commercial whirlpool; "to get" is written on every man's
brow; the weak are swallowed up, while the strong splash,
and toss, and foam upon the broad current of Mammon. Paris
life is a refined, sensuous emotion, selfish but courteous
—a graceful flowing of the stream of pleasure toward the
precipice of death. Naples life is deviltry itself. It is
at once the busiest and idlest city of them all,
overflowing with merriment while steeped in misery; with
the most glitter it exhibits the most rags; and from
beauty to ugliness there is but one step, which forms the
bridge of contrast; and these external contrasts, joined
to virtues and vices of equally opposite degrees, are in
general concentrated in every individual inhabitant.
Electrify these extremes by the
active affinities of life, quickened into intensity by a
climate which gives, as it were, an additional sense of
pleasure or pain to every passion or emotion, and we have
the veritable Neapolitan, the real child of the Sun—at
once the most indolent and most active, the most vivacious
and the most taciturn, the best humored and most
revengeful, the most cunning and the most frank, the
greatest vagabond and the best fellow—all things to all
men; quick-witted, sagacious, begging, specious,
hypocritical, superstitious, lying, droll, amiable,
talking with double-tongue power, and gesticulating
specimen of humanity extant. To complete the paradox,
because Nature has been to them overbountiful, they want
but little besides her sun-shine.
Naples is frightfully busy; the
stir in the streets is most extraordinary. Even the fleas
must be endowed with extra hopping powers to get a bite,
so quick and restless is this population, unless they see
fit to slumber, when they partake themselves to the apathy
of death. A stranger is tempted to ask, What the deuce is
all this noise and shouting about? The very dust seems
endued with a portion of this mercurial activity. There
are no commerce, war, elections, or protracted meetings—in
fact, it seems as if there were nothing to do, and yet a
more vigorous doing-nothing no population can display. One
would suppose that the city was each day either upon the
point of being taken by storm, or had laid siege to
itself. The clang of the trumpet, the rub-a-dub of the
drum, and the tramp of uniformed men, regiment after
regiment, are heard at every corner, while batteries of
grim guns point through the squares, and rake the
principal streets. Above them, below them, and around
them, the Neapolitans are girt with volcanic fires, and a
cordon of gunpowder and steel.
Daily, in their midst, do they
see the tender mercies of their government displayed by
troops of their fellow-citizens, clad in galley costume,
and heavily chained together in couples by their arms and
legs, followed by hireling soldiers, as they are driven
like cattle to their repulsive labors. These are simply
criminals in law—criminals in politics are withdrawn from
even the semblance of human sympathy, and in irons,
starvation, and solitude, banished to unwholesome
dungeons, to expiate, in protracted torture of mind and
body, the crime of patriotism. From prisons blackened with
the misery of ages and battered by time, through strong
and thick-set iron bars, despite the terrors of a
tyrant-drilled soldiery, famishing, hardened wretches
stretch their gaunt arms, and, with mingled ribaldry and
blasphemy, demand charity, or mock the freedom of their
former associates, who, with strange fascination, sun
themselves beside the walls of these sepulchers of human
virtue and liberty.
Elsewhere the apparatus of
tyranny is masked, but in Naples it stands forth as
prominent as Vesuvius, bristling with horrors like an
infernal machine. Yet the Neapolitans laugh and sing, work
or doze, as the impulse seizes them, as reckless of these
evidences of their degradation as if they were intended
solely for the inhabitants of another sphere, and not for
themselves, their wives, and their little ones. Their
climate is to them meat and drink, raiment and liberty. At
once the results and supports of a political tyranny and
religions despotism that recalls the darkest ages, they
will continue to bask contentedly in the mire of ignorance
and slavery until some new Massaniello fires their
passions, or education awakens in them the loftier hopes
and desires of humanity.
To enjoy Naples, one should not
think. Its mocking joys and stores of fun come really home
only in the perfect abandon of its life. To float on its
current, and not to dive, is the rule for enjoyment. Yet
the hour of satiety, even of pleasure, is not slow to
come. A perpetual grin is fatiguing, dust is choking, and
noise is stunning. Disgust is apt to poke its sardonic
face through the mask of novelty, so that what one not to
the manor bred and born at first found amusing, begins at
last to be wearisome. Now, as in the days of the Pharaohs,
the skeleton will appear unbidden at the feast.
Besides, there are some ingredients
in a Neapolitan crowd rather unprofitable than otherwise
both to purse and morals. Pimps importune with a
pertinacity peculiarly Neapolitan, reciting a tariff for
every feminine charm and masculine vice; beggars whine,
extort, and turn the public walks into pathological
museums for the exhibition of sores and deformity. But the
most amusing and successful of the street leeches are the
pickpockets. A thief in Naples is a hero. The public make
way for him to escape, and close up against his pursuer. I
had my pocket picked almost as soon as I entered the
street—an event which, in fifteen years' travel, had
happened but once before. A friend of mine rarely was able
to keep a handkerchief through a promenade. In
self-defense, he took to the cheapest cotton. As he was
stepping into his carriage, he missed, as usual, the
article. At the same moment, he saw it thrown
contemptuously toward him by one of the street gentry,
who, amidst the jeers of the crowd, vented his
disappointment by crying out, "Who would have thought a
gentleman like him would have carried a
pocket-handkerchief like that!!"
Then, too, one tires of seeing
surfeited urchins swallow macaroni by the unbroken fathom
at the rate of a copper a dish, for the amusement of the
"forestieri" who marvel at such gastronomic
dexterity. Turning their heads they can see lazzaroni
family groups amicably engaged in furnishing each member
with food from their superfluous craniological stock—a
process unfortunately common, and by no means a whet to a
fastidious appetite. But the cruelest sight of all is the
amount of work exacted from one little horse. An Italian
no-where is by any means sensitive in his treatment of
these animals. The whip is made to supply the deficiency
of spirit even among gentlemen's studs. But Naples is the
true purgatory of horseflesh. The horses here must possess
some vital tenacity unknown elsewhere.
The Neapolitans, too, contrive
to infuse some of their own devil-may-care hilarity even
into their beasts, dressing them up with flowers,
feathers, bells, and gay trappings, so that what with the
shouting, laughter, jokes, and flogging of the party he
draws, the poor brute seems really to be enjoying his
holiday instead of doing the labor of four horses. A
Neapolitan cabriolet is a "sight" of itself. Look, dear
reader! This is no rare show. A medley of priest and
woman, thief and peasant, beggar and bride, characteristic
Neapolitans every soul of them, with a baby screaming for
joy in the basket under the axle, twenty-one in all, over
head and ears in frolic, with but one half-starved horse
to shake them to their journey's end. They manage, too, to
get a speed out of these quadruped victims that is really
astonishing to pedestrians, and often puts them in no
little danger of their limbs. I can compare one of these
parties in full chorus only to a jovial war-whoop—one's
hair stands on end as they dash by, and one laughs as if
it were his last chance.
On an unimpeachable morning
toward the end of April, when the weather was literally
faultless, the air the breath of heaven itself, not a
cloud to dim the lustre of a sky whose lucidity seemed to
realize infinity, while the "Bay" slept tranquil under the
balmiest of zephyrs, and the distant islands and headlands
lay robed in translucency as if defying criticism—on such
a day I awoke in Naples, satisfied, nay, disgusted with
its chaos of sights and sounds, and cast about me for some
quiet retreat where I might, if but for a few short hours,
become oblivious to its soulless turmoil.
"Eureka." The dead city flashed
on my mind. I have it! To Pompeii, then, I would go...