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Roman Holidays, and Others

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7422 · 557,378 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Roman Holidays, and Others

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7422]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2018

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAN HOLIDAYS, AND OTHERS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred and David Widger






[Illustration: 01 GLIMPSE OUTSIDE OF MODERN ROME]


ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

By W. D. Howells

ILLUSTRATED





  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
  Copyright, 1908, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.
  Published October, 1908.




CONTENTS


I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA

II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN

III. ASHORE AT GENOA

IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE

V. POMPEII REVISITED

VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

VIII. OVER AT PISA

IX.. BACK AT GENOA

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL





ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS




I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.


No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly
imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and
gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of
Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful
afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very
boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had
certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the
theatre, while studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of
the orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which
the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent
itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his
thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous
reality before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea,
which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those precipices
and grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow and green, while
half a score of cascades shot straight down their fronts in shafts of
snowy foam, and over their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung
long reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from the sea the
island is all, with its changing capes and promontories and bays and
inlets, one immeasurable mountain; and on the afternoon of our approach
it was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of which we could only see one
leg indeed, but that very stout and athletic.

There were breadths of dark woodland aloft on this mountain, and
terraced vineyards lower down; and on the shelving plateaus yet farther
from the heights that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered
white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there were set white
villas. These, as the ship coquetted with the vagaries of the shore,
thickened more and more, until after rounding a prodigious headland we
found ourselves in face of the charming little city of Funchal: long
horizontal lines of red roofs, ivory and pink and salmon walls, evenly
fenestrated, with an ancient fortress giving the modern look of things a
proper mediaeval touch. Large hotels, with the air of palaces, crowned
the upland vantages; there were bell-towers of churches, and in one
place there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red of the
densely flowering creeper on the side of some favored house. There was
an acceptable expanse of warm brown near the quay from the withered but
unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade, and in the fine
roadstead where we anchored there lay other steamers and a lead-colored
Portuguese war-ship. I am not a painter, but I think that here are the
materials of a water-color which almost any one else could paint. In the
hands of a scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled
drop-curtain. I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful
goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves you not only
sated but vindictive; you wish to mock it.

The afternoon saddened more and more, and one could not take an interest
in the islanders who came out in little cockles and proposed to dive for
shillings and sixpences, though quarters and dimes would do. The
company's tender also came out, and numbers of passengers went ashore in
the mere wantonness of paying for their dinner and a night's lodging in
the annexes of the hotels, which they were told beforehand were full.
The lights began to twinkle from the windows of the town, and the dark
fell upon the insupportable picturesqueness of the prospect, leaving one
to a gayety of trooping and climbing lamps which defined the course of
the streets.

The morning broke in sunshine, and after early breakfast the launches
began to ply again between the ship and the shore and continued till
nearly all the first and second cabin people had been carried off. The
people of the steerage satisfied what longing they had for strange
sights and scenes by thronging to the sides of the steamer until they
gave her a strong list landward, as they easily might, for there were
twenty-five hundred of them. At Madeira there is a local Thomas Cook &
Son of quite another name, but we were not finally sure that the alert
youth on the pier who sold us transportation and provision was really
their agent. However, his tickets served perfectly well at all points,
and he was of such an engaging civility and personal comeliness that I
should not have much minded their failing us here and there. He gave the
first charming-touch of the Latin south whose renewed contact is such a
pleasure to any one knowing it from the past. All Portuguese as Funchal
was, it looked so like a hundred little Italian towns that it seemed to
me as if I must always have driven about them in calico-tented
bullock-carts set on runners, as later I drove about Eunchal.

It was warm enough on the ship, but here in the town we found ourselves
in weather that one could easily have taken for summer, if the
inhabitants had not repeatedly assured us that it was the season of
winter, and that there were no flowers and no fruits. They could not, if
they had wished, have denied the flies; these, in a hotel interior to
which we penetrated, simply swarmed. If it was winter in Funchal it was
no wintrier than early autumn would have been in one of those Italian
towns of other days; it had the same temperament, the same little
tree-planted spaces, the same devious, cobble-paved streets, the same
pleasant stucco houses; the churches had bells of like tone, and if
their facades confessed a Spanish touch they were not more Spanish than
half the churches in Naples. The public ways were of a scrupulous
cleanliness, as if, with so many English signs glaring down at them,
they durst not untidy out-of-doors, though in-doors it was said to be
different with them. There are three thousand English living at Funchal
and everybody speaks English, however slightly. The fresh faces of
English girls met us in the streets and no doubt English invalids
abound.

We shipmates were all going to the station of the funicular railway, but
our tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a clattering
little horse-car, which climbed with us through up-hill streets and got
us to the station too soon. Within the closed grille there the
handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if
such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once,
though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a
train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most
amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we
would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off down a pink-and-cream
colored avenue near by and admired so much the curtains of
red-and-yellow flowers--a cross between honeysuckles and trumpet
blossoms--overhanging a garden-wall that two friendly boys began to
share our interest in them. One of them mounted the other and tore down
handfuls of the flowers, which they bestowed upon us with so little
apparent expectation of reward that we promptly gave them of the
international copper coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the
station doubtless feeling guiltier than they. Had we not been accessory
after the fact to something like theft and, as it was Sunday, to
Sabbath-breaking besides? Afterward flowers proved so abundant in
Madeira in spite of its being winter, that we could not feel the larceny
a serious one, and the Sunday was a Latin Sabbath well used to being
broken. The pony engine which was to push our slanting car over the
cogged track up the mountain arrived with due ceremony of bell and
whistle, and we were let through the grille by the station-master as
politely as if we had been each his considered guest. Then the climb
began through the fields of sugar-cane, terraced vineyards, orchards of
fruit trees, and gardens of vegetables planted under the arbors over
which the grapes were trained. One of us told the others that the
vegetables were sheltered to save them from being scorched by the summer
sun, and that much of the work among them was done by moonlight to save
the laborers from the same fate. I do not know how he had amassed this
knowledge, and I am not sure that I have the right to impart it without
his leave. I myself saw some melons lolling on one of the tiled roofs of
the cottages where they had perhaps been pushed by the energetic forces
of the earth and sky. The grape-vines were quiescent, partly because it
was winter, as everybody said, and partly because the wine culture is no
longer so profitable in the island. It has been found for the moment
that Madeira is bad for the gout, and this discovery of the doctors is
bad for the peasants (already cruelly overtaxed by Portugal), who are
leaving their homes in great numbers and seeking their fortunes in both
of the Americas, as well as the islands of all the seas. It must be a
heartbreak for them to forsake such homes as we saw in the clean white
cottages, with the balconies and terraces.

But there were no signs of depopulation either of old or young. Smiling
mothers and fathers of all ages, in their Sunday leisure and their
Sunday best, watched our ascent as if they had never seen the like
before, and our course was never so swift but we could be easily
overtaken by the children; they embarrassed us with the riches of the
camellias which they flung in upon us, and they were accompanied by
small dogs which barked excitedly. Our train almost grazed the walls of
the door-yards as we passed through the succession of the one- and
two-story cottages, which dotted the mountain-side in every direction.
When the eye could leave them it was lured from height to height, and at
each rise of the track to some wider and lovelier expanse of the sea. We
could see merely our own steamer in the roadstead, with the Portuguese
war-ship, and the few other vessels at anchor, but we could never
exhaust the variety of those varied mountain slopes and tops. Their
picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would beggar any
thesaurus of its descriptive reserves, and yet leave their beauty almost
unhinted. A drop-curtain were here a vain simile; the chromatic glories
of colored postal-cards might suggest the scene, but then again they
might overdo it. Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I
do not see how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It
can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated: low
lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into outlying
hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep, till they reach
uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken upward into the
everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur resuming in its unity every
varying detail.

[Illustration: 02 FUNCHAL BAY]

I dwell rather helplessly upon the scenery, because it was what we
professedly went up or half up, or one-tenth or-hundredth up, the
mountain for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the
toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt
anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch,
we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people
at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness
from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a
facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly
Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at
prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress to give us
the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of every sort, sex,
and age, and some, from the hands they held out, with fingers reduced to
their last joints, looked as if they might be lepers, but I do not say
they were. What I am sure of is that the faces of the worshippers--men,
women, and children--when they came out of the church were of a
gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might well have
passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which seemed as often blue
as black, and if they had no great beauty they were seldom quite ugly. I
wish I could think we strangers, as they gazed curiously, timorously at
us, struck them as favorably.

An involuntary ferocity from the famine which we began to feel may have
glared from our visages, for we had eaten nothing for three hours, which
was long for saloon passengers. At the first restaurant which we found,
and in which we all but sat down at table, our coupons were not good,
but this was not wholly loss, for we recouped ourselves in the beauties
of the walk on which we wandered along the mountain-side to the right of
the restaurant. At the point where we were no longer confident of our
way an opportune native appeared and Jed us over paths paved with fine
pebbles, sometimes wrought into geometric patterns, and always through
pleasing sun and shade, till we reached a pretty hotel set, with its
gardens before it, on a shelf of level land and commanding a view of our
steamer and the surrounding sea. Tropic growths, which I will venture to
call myrtle, oleander, laurel, and eucalyptus, environed the hotel, not
too closely nor densely, and our increasing party was presently
discovered from the head of its steps by a hospitable matron, who with a
cry of comprehensive welcome ran within and was replaced by a
head-waiter of as friendly aspect and much more English. He said our
coupons were good there and that our luncheon would be ready in two
minutes; for proof of the despatch with which we should be served he
held up the first and second fingers of his right hand. Restored by his
assurance, we did not really mind waiting twice the tale of all his ten
fingers, and we spent our time variously in wandering about the plateau,
among the wonted iron tables and chairs in front of the hotel, in being
photographed in a fairy grotto behind it, and in examining the visitors'
book in the parlor. The names of visitors from South Africa largely
prevailed, for the Cape Town steamers, oftener than any others, touch at
Madeira, but there was one traveller of Portuguese race who had written
his name in bold characters above the cry, “Long live the Portuguese
Republic.” Soon after the Portuguese monarchy ceased to live for a time
in the person of the murdered king and his heir, but it is doubtful if
the health of the potential republic was as great as before.

That bright Sunday morning no shadow of the black event was forecast,
and we gave our unstinted sympathy to our unknown co-republican. The
luncheon, when we were called to it, had merits of novelty and quality
which I will celebrate only as regards the delicate fish fresh from the
sea, and the pease fresh from the garden, with poached eggs fresh from
the coop dropped upon them. The conception of chops which followed was
not so faultless, though the fruit with which we ended did much to
repair any error of kid which may have mistaken itself for lamb. Perhaps
our enthusiasm was heightened by the fine air which had sharpened our
appetites. At any rate, it all ended in an habitual transaction in real
estate by which I became the owner of the place, without expropriating
the actual possessor, and established there those castles in Spain
belonging to me in so many parts of the world.

There remained now nothing for us to do but to toboggan down the
mountain, and we overcame our resolution not to do so far enough to go
and look at the toboggans under the guidance of our head-waiter. When
once we had looked we were lost. The toboggans were flat baskets set on
iron-shod runners, and well cushioned and padded; they held one, two, or
three passengers; the track on which they descended was paved, in gentle
undulations, with thin pebbles set on edge and greased wherever the
descent found a level. A smiling native, with a strong rope attached to
the toboggan, stood on each side of it, and held it back or pulled it
forward, according to the exigencies of the case. It is long since I
slid down hill on a sled of my own, and I do not pretend to recall the
sensation; but I can remember nothing so luxurious in transportation as
the swift flight of the Madeira toboggan, which you temper at will
through its guides and guards, but do not wish to temper at all when
your first alarm, mainly theoretical, passes into the gayety ending in
exultant rejoicing at the bottom of the course.

Our two toboggan men were possibly vigilant and reassuring beyond the
common, but one was quite silently so; the other, who spoke a little
English, encouraged us from time to time to believe that they were
“strong mans,” afterward correcting himself in conformity to the rules
of Portuguese grammar, which make the adjective agree in number with the
noun, and declaring that they were “strongs mans.” We met many toboggan
men who needed to be “strongs mans” in their ascent of our track, with
their heavy toboggans on their heads; but some of them did not look
strong, and our own arrived spent and panting at the bottom. Something
like that is what always spoils pleasure in this world. Even when you
have paid for it with your money, some one else has paid with his person
twice as much, and you have not equalled his outlay when you have tipped
him your handsomest.

A shilling apiece seemed handsome for those “strongs mans,” but
afterward there were watches of the nights when the spirit grieved that
the shilling had not been made two apiece or even half a crown, and I
wish now that the first reader of mine who toboggans down Madeira would
make up the difference for me in his tip to those poor fellows. I do not
mind if he adds a few pennies for the children who ran before our
toboggan and tossed camellias into it, and then followed in the hopes of
a reward, which we tried not to disappoint.

The future traveller need not add to the fee of the authorized and
numbered guide who took possession of us as soon as we got out of our
basket and led us unresisting to a waiting bullock sled. He invited
himself into it, and gave himself the best of characters in the
autobiography into which he wove his scanty instruction concerning the
objects we passed. A bullock sled is not of such blithe progress as a
toboggan, but it is very comfortable, and it is of an Oriental and
litter-like dignity, with its calico cushions and curtains. One could
not well use it in New York, but it serves every purpose of a cab in
Funchal, where we noted a peculiar feature of local commerce which I
hesitate to specify, since it cast apparent discredit upon woman. It
was, as I have noted, Sunday; but every shop where things pleasing or
even useful to women were sold was wide open, and somewhat flaringly
invited the custom of our fellow-passengers of that sex; but there was
not a shop where such things as men's collars were for sale, or anything
pleasing or useful to man, but was closed and locked fast. I must except
from this sweeping statement the cafes, but these should not count, for
women as well as men frequented them, as we ascertained by going to a
very bowery one on the quay and ordering a bottle of the best and dryest
Madeira. We wished perhaps to prove that it was really not bad for gout,
or perhaps that it was no better than the Madeira you get in New York
for the same price. Even with the help of friends, of the sex which
could have been freely buying native laces, hats, fans, photographs,
parasols, and tailor-made dresses, we could not finish that bottle.
Glass after glass we bestowed on our smiling guide, with no final effect
upon the bottle and none upon him, except to make him follow us to the
tender and take an after-fee for showing us a way which we could not
have missed blindfold. It was rather strange, but not stranger than the
behavior of the captain of the tender, who, when he had collected our
tickets, invited a free-will offering for collecting them, and mostly
got it.

When we were safely and gladly on board our steamer again, we had
nothing to do, until the deck-steward came round with tea, but watch the
islanders swarming around us in their cockles and diving for sixpences
and shillings, which they caught impartially with their fingers and
toes. With so many all shouting and gesticulating, one could not venture
one's silver indiscriminately; one must employ some particular diver,
and I selected for my investments a poor young fellow who had lost an
arm. With his one hand and his two feet he never failed of the coin I
risked, and I wish they had been many enough to enable him to retire
from the trade, which even in that mild air kept him visibly shivering
when out of the water. I do not know his name, but I commend him to
future travellers by the token of his pathetic mutilation.

By-and-by we felt the gentle stir of the steamer under us; the last
tender went ashore, and the divers retired in their cockles from our
side. Funchal began to rearrange the lines of her streets, while keeping
those of her roofs and house-walls and terraced gardens. We passed out
of the roadstead, we rounded the mighty headland by which we had
entered, and were once more in face of that magnificent drop-curtain,
which had now fallen upon one of the most vivid and novel passages of
our lives.

[Illustration: 03 BOATS AND DIVING BOYS, FUNCHAL]




II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN


There is nothing strikes the traveller in his approach to the rock of
Gibraltar so much as its resemblance to the trade-mark of the Prudential
Insurance Company. He cannot help feeling that the famous stronghold is
pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of that institution. As
the lines change with the ship's course, the resemblance is less
remarkable; but it is always remarkable, and I suppose it detracts
somewhat from the majesty of the fortress, which we could wish to be
more entirely original. This was my feeling when I first saw Gibraltar
four years ago, and it remains my feeling after having last seen it four
weeks ago. The eye seeks the bold, familiar legend, and one suffers a
certain disappointment in its absence. Otherwise Gibraltar does not and
cannot disappoint the most exacting tourist.

[Illustration: 04 GIBRALTAR FROM THE BAY]

The morning which found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the
bland afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking
coracles surrounded our steamer, with crews eager to plunge into the
hissing brine for shillings or equivalent quarters. The whitecaps looked
snow cold as they tossed under the sharp north wind, and the tender
which put us ashore had all it could do to embark and disembark us
upright, or even aslant. But, once in the lee of the rocky Africa
breathed a genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits
faintly shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook's carriages which
warmed us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or
four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly well
kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the pictures of
Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and were curtained and
cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are yet unknown in southern
Europe, and these mediaeval arks bounded over the stones with a violence
which must once have been characteristic of those in the illustrations.
But the English of our English-speaking driver was all that we could
have asked for the shillings we paid Cook for him, or, if it was not, it
was all we got. He was an energetic young fellow and satisfyingly
Spanish in coloring, but in his eagerness to please he was less grave
than I could now wish; I now wish everything in Spain to have been in
keeping.

What was most perfectly, most fittingly in keeping was the sight of the
Moors whom we began at once to see on the wharves and in the streets.
They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their caliph,
if he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick out of his
kingdom and established his own race and religion in the Peninsula.
Moslem costumes can have changed very little in the last eleven or
twelve hundred years, and these handsome fellows, who had come over with
fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could
not have been handsomer when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of
coops and baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with
bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a
head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's
brother out of the _Arabian Nights;_ the sparse mustache and
short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted
on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom
in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean,
dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American
kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys
are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental
race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a
market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be
much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more picturesque.
Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the
red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers, with blue, blue eyes and
incredible red and yellow hair, lounging or hurrying orderlies with
swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless privates no doubt bent 'upon
quite definite business or pleasure. Now and then an English groom led
an English horse through the long street from which the other streets in
Gibraltar branch up and down hill, for there is no other level; and now
and then an English man or woman rode trimly by.

The whole place is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The
strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute
protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and
maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the
London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In the shops the
saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our driver, indeed, looked
more Spanish than he spoke English.

His knowledge of our rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of
certain conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain
why we could not see the old disused galleries of the fortifications. I
do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt if we really did so, but
we embittered life for that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon
them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him
to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the
blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who
directed us to a certain government office for a permit. There our
application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to
another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by incidentally
learning that the galleries could not be seen till after three o'clock.
As our ship sailed at that hour, we were probably saved a life-long
disappointment.

Everywhere the rock of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town;
but the fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really
distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the top.
Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the war-like harness
of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks
and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks.
But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The
strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed, which
will be never, since it is hard to imagine how it can ever be even
attempted by a hostile force. This is not saying, I hope, that an
American fleet could not batter it down, nor leave one letter of the
insurance advertisement after another on the face of the precipice.

There is a pretty public garden at Gibraltar in that part of the town
which is farthest from the steamer's landing, and this proved the end of
our excursion in our state coach. We found other state coaches there,
and joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and
trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We
made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the
climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft
that it required great force of character to keep from buying the
flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is
a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly
failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in
the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military
memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them,
there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely
good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a
head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who
imagined our wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking
more of the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true
friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that morning
at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but we turned from
the poetic experience of this omelette in the greedy hope of better
things. Better things there could not be, but the fish was as good as
the fish at Madeira, and the belief of the chops that they were lamb and
not kid seemed better founded.

There had been an excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have
as good at some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and
the lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and Spanish undertones,
was not cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific
charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English
dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the
waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and
what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as if we
had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The table-waiter took an extra fee for
confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in
Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was
certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.

It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of
house rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin
Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and their
dark-green shutters. There is an English residential quarter at the east
end of the town, where the houses may be different, for all I know; the
English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us
to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in
grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed
nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have
infected it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should
not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small
house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it
dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course, it is an
artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the town in turn
lives upon the fortress.

The English plant themselves nowhere without gathering English
conveniences or conventions about them; Americans would not always think
them comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a hunt,
there is a lending library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is
bridge, there is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do
not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard,
because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they
will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf
links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the invaders as Gib,
and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn, though in summer it is
frightfully hot, held out on the knees and insteps of the rock to the
burning African sun, which comes up every morning over the sea after
setting Sahara on fire.

[Illustration: 05 GIBRALTAR FROM THE NEUTRAL GROUND]

All this foreign life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life
which has so long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of
outlasting the English. I do not know what the occupations and
amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough.
There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the
two, which would form a curious inquiry, but would probably not lend
itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another
neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in
order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many
more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used
then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his _Tales of the
Alhambra,_ and his history of _The Conquest of Granada,_ and we read
Prescott's histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world
and the new. We read _Don Quixote,_ which very few read now, and we read
_Gil Blas,_ which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain
a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could
happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among
the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in
Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain.
But now, I saw, was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching
with us asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral
territory and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth
had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming immediately true.
It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of Spanish travel that the
driver of the state coach which we first engaged should, when we
presently came back, have replaced himself by another for no other
reason than, perhaps, that he could so provide us with a worse horse. I
am not sure of this theory, and I do not insist upon it, but it seems
plausible.

As soon as we rounded the rock of Gibraltar and struck across a flatter
country than I supposed could be found within fifty miles of Gibraltar,
we were swept by a blast which must have come from the Pyrenees, it was
so savagely rough and cold. It may be always blowing there as a Spanish
protest against the English treatment of the neutral territory; in fact,
it does not seem quite the thing to build over that space as the English
have done, though the structures are entirely peaceable, and it is not
strange that the Spaniards have refused to meet them half-way with a
good road over it, or to let them make one the whole way. They stand
gravely opposed to any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish
documents the place is styled “Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great
Britain,” and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun
no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also
mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a year, and many people
living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses
that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its
pathos, but as a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make
that road through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that
our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes almost
flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always extended toward us.
They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones
recognized the _bouffe_ quality of their calling. One pleasant
starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in
his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the
spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given
nothing.

A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached,
and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief
public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of
examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an American
frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long
javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among
the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that
town are closed every day at nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife,
and everybody is shut either in or out, it may easily happen with
shoppers in haste to get through that they bring dutiable goods into
Spain; but the official javelins rectify the error.

We left our belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in
Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a
pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It
was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual
yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if
prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and
dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe
restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles. An
alguazil--I am certain he was an alguazil, though he looked like an
Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked hat--loitered into a police
station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street
except those _bouffe_ boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us
postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms.
Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely
without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that
we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish
picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda
shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time
it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the
customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by the populace from a poetic
admirer, I do not know, but I hope it is now in the keeping of some
dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will wear it while murmuring through her
lattice to her _novio_ on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to
be worn as a veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and
_could_ hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the grille,
with one little olive hand, so that the _novio_ would think it was a
black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift from him, it would be all
right, anyway.

Our visit to Spain did not wholly realize my early dreams of that
romantic land, and yet it had not been finally destitute of incident.
Besides, _we_ had not gone very far into the country; a third block
might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on the steamer
before three o'clock, and we dared not go beyond the second.  Even
within this limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance
was satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent
street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western
American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops
and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It
was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense
of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience,
and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it, and were young and
hopeful, and had some one to share one's youth and hope, that Spanish
street, which was all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its
charm. I do not say that even for age there was not a railway station by
which one might have got away, though there was no sign of any trains
arriving or departing--perhaps because it was not one o'clock in the
morning, which is the favorite hour of departure for Spanish trains.

When we turned to drive back over the neutral territory the rock of
Gibraltar suddenly bulked up before us, in a sheer ascent that left the
familiar Prudential view in utterly inconspicuous unimpressive-ness.
Till one has seen it from this point one has not truly seen it. The vast
stone shows like a half from which the other half has been sharply cleft
and removed, that the sense of its precipitous magnitude may
unrelievedly strike the eye; and it seems to have in that moment the
whole world to tower up in from the level at its feet. No dictionary,
however unabridged, has language adequate to convey the notion of it.




III. ASHORE AT GENOA


The pride of Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to
the level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the
Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe is the
rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the snow-topped
Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly rounded, velvety
heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard of the Palisades above
the point where they have been blasted away for road-making material if
one wishes to keep up one's spirits. The last time I came home the
Mediterranean way I had a struggle with myself against excusing our
sandy landscape, when we came in sight of it, with its summer cottages
for the sole altitudes, to some Italian fellow-passengers who were not
spellbound by its grandeur. I had to remember the Rocky Mountains, which
I had never seen, and all the moral magnificence of our life before I
could withhold the words of apology pressing to my lips. I was glad that
I succeeded; but now, going back by the same route, I abandoned myself
to transports in the beauty of the Mediterranean coast which I hope were
not untrue to my country. Perhaps there is no country which can show
anything like that beauty, and America is no worse off than the rest of
the world; but I am not sure that I have a right to this consolation.
Again there were those

  “Silent pinnacles of aged snow,”

flushed with the Southern sun; in those sombre slopes of pine; again the
olives climbing to their gloom; again the terraced vineyards and the
white farmsteads, with villages nestling in the vast clefts of the
hills, and all along the sea-level the blond towns and cities which
broidei the hem of the land from Marseilles to Genoa. One is willing to
brag; one must be a good American; but, honestly, have we anything like
that to show the arriving foreigner? For some reason our ship was
abating the speed with which she had crossed the Atlantic, and now she
was swimming along the Mediterranean coasts so slowly and so closely
that it seemed as if we could almost have cast an apple ashore, though
probably we could not. We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice
for Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because our
course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed Nice long
before we did. It did not matter; all those places were alike beautiful
under the palms of their promenades, with their scattered villas and
hotels stretching along their upper levels, and the ranks of shops and
dwellings solidly forming the streets which left the shipping of their
ports to climb to the gardens and farms beyond the villas. Cannes,
Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that
their fair succession, or did they follow in another order? Once more it
did not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft
January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them suffused
in dim rose before we drifted into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk
beside a steamer which had left New York on the same day as ours. By her
vast size we could measure our own and have an objective perception of
our grandeur.  We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but
you cannot be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your
magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a due
sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could not help
pitying the people on that other ship, who must have suffered shame from
our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she was of nearly the same
tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do with the case.

[Illustration: 06 DAUGHTERS OF CLIMATE ALONG THE RIVIERA]

After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the
Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce
like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it
looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the
thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European
towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into
one's word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray
are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers.
The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye
has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern
Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not
refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something
businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true
to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.

I had not been in Genoa since 1864 except for a few days in 1905, and I
saw changes which I will mostly not specify. Already at the earlier date
the railway had cut through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and
left the old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce
noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars.
But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened
hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the
offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty
wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and
wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part
of its structure.

Let this stand for a type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and
has passed or is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is
full of very living Italians, the quickest-witted people in the world,
who are alert to seize every chance for bettering themselves financially
as they have bettered themselves politically. For my part, I always
wonder they do not still rule the world when I see how intellectually
fit they are to do it, how beyond any other race they seem still
equipped for their ancient primacy. Possibly it is their ancient primacy
which hangs about their necks and loads them down. It is better to have
too little past, as we have, than too much, as they have. But if
antiquity hampers them, they are tenderer of its vast mass than we are
of our little fragments of it; tenderer than any other people, except
perhaps the English, have shown themselves; but when the time comes that
the past stands distinctly in the way of the future, down goes the past,
even in Italy. I am not saying that I do not see why that railroad could
not have tunnelled under the Doria garden rather than cut through it;
and I am waiting for that new building to justify its behavior toward
that poor old Hercules; but in the mean time I hold that Italy is for
the Italians who now live in it, and have to get that better living out
of it which we others all want our countries to yield us; and that it is
not merely a playground for tourists who wish to sentimentalize it, or
study it, or sketch it, or make copy of it, as I am doing now.

All the same I will not deny that I enjoyed more than any of the
improvements which I noted in Genoa that bit of the old Doria
palace-grounds which progress has left it. The gray edifice looks out on
the neighboring traffic across the leanness of a lovely old garden, with
statues and stone seats, and in the midst a softly soliloquizing
fountain, painted green with moss and mould. When you enter the palace,
as you do in response to a custodian who soon comes with a key and asks
if you would like to see it, you find yourself, one flight up, in a long
glazed gallery, fronting on the garden, which is so warm with the sun
that you wish to spend the rest of your stay in Genoa there. It is
frescoed round with classically imagined portraits of the different
Dorias, and above all the portrait of that great hero of the republic. I
do not know that this portrait particularly impresses you; if you have
been here before you will be reserving yourself for the portrait which
the custodian will lead you to see in the ultimate chamber of the rather
rude old palace, where it is like a living presence.

It is the picture of a very old man in a flat cap, sitting sunken
forward in his deep chair, with his thin, long hands folded one on the
other, and looking wearily at you out of his faded eyes, in which dwell
the memories of action in every sort and counsel in every kind. Victor
in battles by land and sea, statesman and leader and sage, he looks it
all in that wonderful effigy, which shuns no effect of his more than
ninety years, but confesses his great age as a part of his greatness
with a pathetic reality.  The white beard, with “each particular hair”
 defined, falling almost to the pale, lean hands, is an essential part of
the presentment, which is full of such scrupulous detail as the eye
would unconsciously take note of in confronting the man himself and
afterward supply in the remembrance of the whole. As if it were a part
of his personality, on a table facing him, covered with maps and papers,
sits the mighty admiral's cat, which, with true feline im-passiveness,
ignores the spectator and gives its sole regard to the admiral. There
are possibly better portraits in the world than this, which was once by
Sebastiano del Piombo and is now by Titian; but I remember none which
has moved me more.

We tried in vain for a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance
at the riches of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed
around the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the
pillars were “All inlady, all inlady” with different marbles, and, after
a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers and the masons
were sharing between them in the prayers and repairs always going on in
cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to the hotel where we had sojourned in
great comfort three years before. Genoa has rather a bad name for its
hotels, but we had found this one charming, perhaps because when we had
objected to going five flights up the landlord had led us yet a floor
higher, that we might walk into the garden. It is so in much of Genoa,
where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid contrast
between the levels of the front door and the back gate. Many of the
streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors
touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could
change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages;
when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up
from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of
stairs. It cannot be denied, either, that the steep incline gives a
charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and driveways and
trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi (there is a Via
Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and village, and ought to be a
dozen), compactly built, but giving here and there over the houses'
shoulders glimpses of the gardens lurking behind them, is of a dignity
full of the energy which a flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts.
Without the inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never
have got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo Santo;
and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by involuntarily
straining forward from our places. But the Campo Santo was richly worth
the effort, for to visit that famous cemetery is to enjoy an experience
of which it is the unique opportunity.

I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest
expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity--in
others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all
the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was
perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had
heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation
and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only
inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of
fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough
poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors
of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful
impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a
realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact
is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and
unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are
gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which
bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early
eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and
daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I
recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back,
embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother
toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe
in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the
artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as
true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their
faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of
art used to do with their historical and scriptural people--he has put
them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to
deny him a convincing logic.  No sophistry or convention of drapery in
the scene could have conveyed its pathos half so well, or indeed at all.
It does make you shudder, I allow; it sets your teeth on edge; but then,
if you are a real man or woman, it brings the lump into your throat; the
smile fails from your lip; you pay the tribute of genuine pity and awe.
I will not pretend that I was so much moved by the meeting in heaven of
a son and father: the spirit of the son in a cutaway, with a derby hat
in his hand, gazing with rapture into the face of the father's spirit in
a long sack-coat holding his marble bowler elegantly away from his side,
if I remember rightly. But here the fact wanted the basis of simplicity
so strong in the other scene; in the mixture of the real and the ideal
the group was romanticistic.

There are innumerable other portrait figures and busts in which the
civic and social hour is expressed. The women's hair is dressed in this
fashionable way or that; the men's beards are cut in conformity to the
fashion or the personal preference in side whiskers or mustache or
imperial or goatee; and their bronze or marble faces convey the
contemporary character of aristocrat or bourgeois or politician or
professional. I do not know just what the reader would expect me to say
in defence of the full-length figure of a lady in _decollete_ and
trained evening dress, who enters from the tomb toward the spectator as
if she were coming into a drawing-room after dinner. She is very
beautiful, but she is no longer very young, and the bare arms, which
hang gracefully at her side, respond to an intimation of _embonpoint_ in
the figure, with a slightly flabby over-largeness where they lose
themselves in the ample shoulders. Whether this figure is the fancy of
the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished
to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not
know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father
and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was
that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings
from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo
Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her
ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable and
touching dignity.

If I am giving the reader the impression that I went to the Campo Santo
in my last stop at Genoa, I am deceiving him; I record here the memories
of four years ago. I did not revisit the place, but I should like to see
it again, if only to revive my recollections of its unique interest. I
did really revisit the Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived
the pleasure I had known before in its wonderful Van Dycks. Most
wonderful was and will always be the “Boy in White,” the little serene
princeling, whoever he was, in whom the painter has fixed forever a
bewitching mood and moment of childhood.  “The Mother with two Children”
 is very well and self-evidently true to personality and period and
position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that “Boy in White,”
 though she and her children are otherwise so wonderful. Now that I speak
of her, however, she rather grows upon my recollection as a woman
greater than her great world and proudly weary of it.

[Illustration: 07 TYPICAL MONUMENT IN THE CAMPO SANTO]

She was a lady of that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold
grandeur and splendor, renews at once all one's faded or fading sense of
the commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her
greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since Rome
began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state their
business men housed themselves in and environed themselves with! Their
palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public edifices of our
less simple State capitols could equal in size and not surpass in cost.
Their _folie des grandeurs_ realized illusions in architecture, in
sculpture, and in painting which the assembled and concentrated feats of
those arts all the way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire
blocks eastward could not produce the likeness of. We have the same
madness in our brains; we have even a Roman megalomania, but the effect
of it in Chicago or Pittsburg or Philadelphia or New York has not yet
got beyond a ducal or a princely son-in-law. The splendors of such
alliances have still to take substantial form in a single instance
worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the commercial republics
of Italy. This does not mean that our rich people have not so much money
as the Italians of the Renaissance, but that perhaps in their _folie des
grandeurs_ they are a different kind of madmen; it means also that land
and labor are dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our
pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort rather
than size in their houses, and do not like the cold feet which the
merchant princes of Italy must have had from generation to generation. I
shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics when I went to the
Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly urge the reader to do so
when he goes.

He will not so much need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless
a _tramontana_ is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in
any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking cab-horse we
could find, and he turned out better than his driver, who asked a
fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to show his tariff, when his
wickedness was apparent from the printed rates. He explained that the
part we were looking at was obsolete, and he showed us another part,
which was really for drives outside the city; but we agreed to pay it,
and set out hoping for good behavior from him that would make up the
difference. Again we were deceived; at the end he demanded a franc
beyond even his unnatural fare. I urged that one should be reasonable;
but he seemed to think not, and to avoid controversy I paid the
extortionate franc. I remembered that just a month before, in New York,
I had paid an extortionate dollar in like circumstances.

Nevertheless, that franc above and beyond the stipulated extortion
impoverished me, and when we came to take a rowboat back to our steamer
I beat the boatman down cruelly, mercilessly. He was a poor, lean little
man, with rather a superannuated boat, and he labored harder at the oar
than I could bear to see without noting his exertion to him. This was
fatal; instantly he owned that I was right, and he confessed, moreover,
that he was the father of a family, and that some of his children were
then suffering from sickness as well as want. What could one do but make
the fare up to the first demand of three francs after having got the
price down to one and a half? At the time it seemed to me that I was
somehow by this means getting the better of the cabman who had obliged
me to pay a franc more than his stipulated extortion, but I do not now
hope to make it appear so to the reader.




IV. 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.

[Illustration: 08 NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE]

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 themselves in the general unison.
This embraces the clatter of the cabs, which are seldom less than fifty
years old, and of a looseness in all their joints responsive to their
effect of dusty decrepitude. Their clatter penetrates the volumed tread
of the myriad feet in a city where, if you did not see all sorts of
people driving, you would say the whole population walked. Above the
manifold noises gayly springing to the sky spreads and swims the clangor
of the church-bells and holds the terrestrial uproar in immeasurable
solution. It would be rash to say that the whole population of Naples is
always in the street, for if you look into the shops or cafes, or, I
dare say, the houses, you will find them quite full; but the general
statement verifies itself almost tiresomely in its agreement with what
everybody has always said of Naples. It is so quite what you expect that
if you could you would turn away in satiety, especially from the
swarming life of the poor, which seems to have no concealments from the
public, but frankly works at all the trades and arts that can be carried
on out-of-doors; cooks, eats, laughs, cries, sleeps, wakes, makes love,
quarrels, scolds, does everything but wash itself--clothes enough it
washes for other people's life. There is a reason for this in the fact
that in bad weather at Naples it is cold and dark and damp in-doors, and
in fine so bright and warm and charming without that there is really no
choice. Then there is the expansive temperament, which if it were shut
up would probably be much more explosive than it is now. As it is, it
vents itself in volleyed detonations and scattered shots which language
can give no sense of.

For the true sense of it you must go to Naples, and then you will never
lose the sense of it. I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke
up the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in the
Castel dell' Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the cab-drivers
quarrelling, and the cries of the street vendors, and the dogs barking,
and the children wailing, and their mothers scolding, and the clatter of
wheels and hoops and feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful
Neapolitan noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after
my first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old. As soon
as possible, when the short but sweet Vincenzo had brought up my
breakfast of tea and bread-and-butter and honey (to which my appetite
turned from the gross superabundance of the steamer's breakfasts with
instant acquiescence), and announced with a smile as liberal as the
sunshine that it was a fine day, I went out for those impressions which
I had better make over to the reader in their original disorder.
Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the day before, was now of a soft,
smoky white, and the sea, of a milky blue, swam round the shore and out
to every dim island and low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was
full of people on foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey
pleasure-carts, and the familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and
beggars began with my first steps toward what I remembered as the
Toledo, but what now called itself, with the moderner Italian
patriotism, the Via Roma. The sole poetic novelty of my experience was
in my being offered loaves of bread which, when I bought them, would be
given to the poor, in honor of what saint's day I did not learn. But it
was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over the
book-counter was charming, since it was a condition of her flirtation
with the far younger man beside me who wanted something far more
interesting from her than any brief sketch of the history of Naples, in
either English or Italian or French or, at the worst, German. She was
very pretty, though rather powdered, and when the young man went away
she was sympathetically regretful to me that there was no such sketch,
in place of which she offered me several large histories in more or less
volumes. But why should I have wanted a history of Naples when I had
Naples itself? It was like wanting a photograph when you have the
original. Had I not just come through the splendid Piazza San
Ferdinando, with the nobly arcaded church on one hand and the
many-statued royal palace on the other, and between them a lake of
mellow sunshine, as warm as ours in June?

What I found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in
1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the “Elegy” used to be called on his
title-pages) found them in 1740. “The streets,” he wrote home to his
mother, “are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much
that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively kind
of animals, more industrious than Italians usually are; they work till
evening; then they take their lute or guitar (for they all play) and
walk about the city or upon the seashore with it, to enjoy the fresco.”
 There was, in fact, a bold gayety in the aspect of the city, without the
refinement which you do not begin to feel till you get into North Italy.
When I came upon church after church, with its facade of Spanish
baroque, I lamented the want of Gothic delicacy and beauty, but I was
consoled abundantly later in the churches antedating the Spanish
domination. I had no reason, such as travellers give for hating places,
to be dissatisfied with Naples in any way. I had been warned that the
customs officers were terrible there, and that I might be kept hours
with my baggage. But the inspector, after the politest demand for a
declaration of tobacco, ordered only a small valise, the Benjamin of its
tribe, opened and then closed untouched; and his courteous forbearance,
acknowledged later through the hotel porter, cost me but a dollar. The
hotel itself was inexpressibly better in lighting, heating, service, and
table than any New York hotel at twice the money--in fact, no money
could buy the like with us at any hotel I know of; but this is a theme
which I hope to treat more fully hereafter. It is true that the streets
of Naples are very long and rather narrow and pretty crooked, and full
of a damp cold that no sunlight seems ever to hunt out of them; but then
they are seldom ironed down with trolley-tracks; the cabs feel their way
among the swarming crowds with warning voices and smacking whips; even
the prepotent automobile shows some tenderness for human life and limb,
and proceeds still more cautiously than the cabs and carts--in fact, I
thought I saw recurrent proofs of that respect for the average man which
seems the characteristic note of Italian liberty; and this belief of
mine, bred of my first observations in Naples, did not, after twelve
weeks in Italy, prove an illusion. If it is not the equality we fancy
ourselves having, it is rather more fraternity in effect.

[Illustration: 09 OUT-DOOR LIFE IN OLD NAPLES]

The failure of other researches for that sketch of Neapolitan history
left me in the final ignorance which I must share with the reader; but
my inquiries brought me prompt knowledge of one of those charming
features in which the Italian cities excel, if they are not unique. I
remember too vaguely the Galleria, as they call the beautiful glazed
arcade of Milan, to be sure that it is finer than the Galleria at
Naples, but I am sure this is finer than that at Genoa, with which,
however, I know nothing in other cities to compare. The Neapolitan
gallery, wider than any avenue of the place, branching in the form of a
Greek cross to four principal streets, is lighted by its roof of glass,
and a hundred brilliant shops and cafes spread their business and
leisure over its marble floor. Nothing could be architecturally more
cheerful, and, if it were not too hot in summer, there could be no doubt
of its adaptation to our year, for it could be easily closed against the
winter by great portals, and at other seasons would give that out-door
expansion which in Latin countries hospitably offers the spectacle of
pleasant eating and drinking to people who have nothing to eat and
drink. These spectators could be kept at a distance with us by porters
at the entrances, while they would not be altogether deprived of the
gratifying glimpses.

I do not know whether poverty avails itself of its privileges by
visiting the Neapolitan gallery; but probably, like poverty elsewhere,
it is too much interested by the drama of life in its own quarter ever
willingly to leave it. Poverty is very conservative, for reasons more
than one; its quarter in Naples is the oldest, and was the most
responsive to our recollections of the Naples of 1864. Overhead the
houses tower and beetle with their balconies and bulging casements,
shutting the sun, except at noon, from the squalor below, where the
varied dwellers bargain and battle and ply their different trades,
bringing their work from the dusk of cavernous shops to their doorways
for the advantage of the prevailing twilight. Carpentry and tailoring
and painting and plumbing, locksmithing and copper-smithing go on there,
touching elbows with frying and feeding, and the vending of all the
strange and hideous forms of flesh, fish, and fowl. If you wish to know
how much the tentacle of a small polyp is worth you may chance to see a
cent pass for it from the crone who buys to the boy who sells it smoking
from the kettle; but the price of cooked cabbage or pumpkin must remain
a mystery, along with that of many raw vegetables and the more revolting
viscera of the less-recognizable animals.

The poor people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of
your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare,
perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because
they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always
crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there
into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the
fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the
Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last of the
imperial Hohenstaufen line, was less appropriately beheaded by the
Angevines. The open spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking
alleys, but if you have the intelligent guide we had you approach them
through the triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that
is something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the
guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.

He had been six years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he
had got work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That
was in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then
another, and came away at last through some call home, honoring and
loving the Americans as the kindest, the noblest, the friendliest people
in the world. I tried, politely, to persuade him that we were not all of
us all he thought us, but he would not yield, and at one place he
generously claimed a pre-eminence in wickedness for his
fellow-Neapolitans. That was when we came to a vast, sorrowful prison,
from which an iron cage projected into the street. Around this cage
wretched women and children and old men clustered till the prisoners
dear to them were let into it from the jail and allowed to speak with
them. The scene was as public as all of life and death is in Naples, and
the publicity seemed to give it peculiar sadness, which I noted to our
guide. He owned its pathos; “but,” he said, “you know we have a terrible
class of people here in Naples.” I protested that there were terrible
classes of people everywhere, even in America. He would not consent
entirely, but in partly convincing each other we became better friends.
He had a large black mustache and gentle black eyes, and he spoke very
fair English, which, when he wished to be most impressive, he dropped
and used a very literary Italian instead. He showed us where he lived,
on a hill-top back of our gardened quay, and said that he paid twelve
dollars a month for a tenement of five rooms there. Schooling is
compulsory in Naples, but he sends his boy willingly, and has him
especially study English as the best provision he can make for him--as
heir of his own calling of cicerone, perhaps. He has a little farm at
Bavello, which he tills when it is past the season for cultivating
foreigners in Naples; he expects to spend his old age there; and I
thought it not a bad lookout. He was perfectly well-mannered, and at a
hotel where we stopped for tea he took his coffee at our table unbidden,
like any American fellow-man. He and the landlord had their joke
together, the landlord warning me against him in English as “very bad
man,” and clapping him affectionately on the shoulder to emphasize the
irony. We did not demand too much social information of him; all the
more we valued the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now
rather poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of
business. I could have told him that the American nobles were
increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have
known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was himself a
moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact
everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the
Socialist party.

He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa
Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a
secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where
the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius,
perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am
thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me
observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the
sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the
world-old sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival
antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune. The
sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill sanctuary
above them, and-he was so full of rheumatism that you could almost hear
it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful sage, and satisfied with
the fee which my guide gave him and which he made small, as he
explained, that the sacristan might not be discontented with future
largesse. I need not say that each church we visited had its tutelary
beggar, and that my happy youth came back to me in the blindness of one,
or the mutilation of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At
Santa Chiara I could not at first make out what it was which caused my
heart to rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was
closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice in a
cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and open it, just
as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the past.

Our day ended at sunset--a sunset of watermelon red--with a visit to the
Castel Nuovo, where my guide found himself at home with the garrison,
because, as he explained, he had served his term as a soldier. He was
the born friend of the custodian of the castle church, which was the
most comfortable church for warmth we had visited, and to which we
entered by the bronze gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the
Aragonese victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was
newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the battles
between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people
one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater
advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on by the house of Aragon
and then that of Bourbon for the next six hundred years after the
Angevines had retired from the banquet is problematical. History is a
very baffling study, and one may be well content to know little or
nothing about it. I knew so little or had forgotten so much that I
scarcely deserved to be taken down into the crypt of this church and
shown the skeletons of four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put
to death--two laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by
dividing crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and
dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met them,
poor things, too late in my life to wish for their further
acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story and
make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader's imagination,
along with most other facts of my observation in Naples.

I was at some pains to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if
I could have found more of them no doubt I should have been more
interested in these skeletons. For forty-odd years I had remembered the
prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets branching from a busy
avenue and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps.
When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and in a
few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of such a public
staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even
than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side
with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables
of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I
tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups
bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I
think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead
level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there
are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined
markets.

[Illustration: 10 UP-STAIRS STREET IN OLD NAPLES]

Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the
hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those
days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered
then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere
pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded,
statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and
the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my
day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of
the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and
the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a
file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means
of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a
splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare
legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged
and those who importuned with postal-cards. This terrible traffic
pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting
traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost
impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own
that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell,
or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor
problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should
take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such
acquired slang as “Skiddoo to twenty-three”? One who had no postal-cards
had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his
price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached
by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of
strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed--in fact, he went away
singing. He did not take with him the divine beauty of the afternoon
light on the sea and mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were
content with our bargain.

In fact, it would be impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that
incomparable environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know,
the night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six days
out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and five days of
at least a May or September warmth; and though one day was shrill and
stiff with the _tramontana,_ it was of as glorious sunshine as the rest.
The gale had blown my window open and chilled my room, but with that sun
blazing outside I could not believe in the hurricane which seemed to
blow our car up the funicular railway when we mounted to the height
where the famous old Convent of San Martino stands, and then blew us all
about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our search for the
right way to the monastery. It was worth more than we suffered in
finding it; for the museum is a record of the most significant events of
Neapolitan history from the time of the Spanish domination down to that
of the Garibaldian invasion; and the church and corridors through which
the wind hustled us abound in paintings and frescos such as one would be
willing to give a whole week of quiet weather to. I do not know but I
should like to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it
from my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars at
their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the more easily
could the sun warm us through in spite of the _tramontana._

[Illustration: 11 NAPLES AND THE CASTEL ST. ELMO FROM THE MOLE]

I do not know that Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which
Venice and Genoa are excellent. Those cities were adorned by their sons
with palaces of an outlook worthy of their splendor. But in the other
Italian cities the homes of her patricians were crowded into the narrow
streets where their architecture fails of its due effect. It is so with
them in Naples, and even along the Villa Nazionale, where many palatial
villas are set, they seclude themselves in gardens where one fancies
rather than sees them. These are, in fact, sometimes the houses of the
richest bourgeoisie--bankers and financiers--and the houses which have
names conspicuous in the mainly inglorious turmoil of Neapolitan history
help unnoted to darken the narrow and winding ways of the old city. A
glimpse of a deep court or of a towering facade is what you get in
passing, but it is to be said of the sunless streets over which they
gloom that they are kept in a modern neatness beside which the dirt of
New York is mediaeval. It is so with most other streets in Naples,
except those poorest ones where the out-door life insists upon the most
intimate domestic expression. Even such streets are no worse than our
worst streets, and the good streets are all better kept than our best.

I am not sure that there are even more beggars in Naples than in New
York, though I will own that I kept no count. In both cities beggary is
common enough, and I am not noting it with disfavor in either, for it is
one of my heresies that comfort should be constantly reminded of misery
by the sight of it--comfort is so forgetful. Besides, in Italy charity
costs so little; a cent of our money pays a man for the loss of a leg or
an arm; two cents is the compensation for total blindness; a sick mother
with a brood of starving children is richly rewarded for her pains with
a nickel worth four cents. Organized charity is not absent in the midst
of such volunteers of poverty; one day, when we thought we had passed
the last outpost of want in our drive, two Sisters of Charity suddenly
appeared with out-stretched tin cups. Our driver did not imagine our
inexhaustible benovelence; he drove on, and before we could bring him to
a halt the Sisters of Charity ran us down, their black robes flying
abroad and their sweet faces flushed with the pursuit. Upon the whole it
was very humiliating; we could have wished to offer our excuses and
regrets; but our silver seemed enough, and the gentle sisters fell back
when we had given it.

That was while we were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of the
prospect along the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored
postal-card will suffice better than the most hectic word-painting. The
worst of Italy is the superabundance of the riches it offers ear and eye
and nose--offers every sense--ending in a glut of pleasure. At the point
where we descended from our carriage to look from the upland out over
the vast hollow of land and sea toward Pozzuoli, which is so interesting
as the scene of Jove's memorable struggle with the Titans, and just when
we were really beginning to feel equal to it, a company of minstrels
suddenly burst upon us with guitars and mandolins and comic songs much
dramatized, while the immediate natives offered us violets and other
distracting flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to
neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those
restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not
know whether you are eating the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a cook or a composer.

It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of
the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a
Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with
us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to climb four nights of
stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest
postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the
balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin
which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of
the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort
rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for
false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know
by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current pieces. At
the bookseller's they would not take a perfectly good five-franc piece
because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes of all the bad money one
innocently takes for good? One fraudulent franc I made a virtue of
throwing away; but I do not know what I did with a copper refused by a
trolley conductor as counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously,
and perhaps I gave that copper in charity.

As we drove hotelward through the pink twilight we met many carriages of
people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do not
know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world severely from
their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly appointed coachmen and
footmen ought to be both, and that old gentlemen who frown over their
white mustaches have no right to their looks if they are neither. It
was, at any rate, the hour of the fashionable drive, which included a
pause midway of the Villa Nazionale for the music of the military band.

The band plays near the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at
the earlier hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and
wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of
fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the
bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry tentacles the food
lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is it to see it rise and reach
with those prehensile members, as with the tails of a multi-caudate ape,
some rocky projection of its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow,
and vanish there in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and
bloom of the deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men's “bones are coral
made” seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly
wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not pleasure
in store for the traveller who turns from them to the company of shad
softly and continuously circling in their tank, and regarding the
spectators with a surly dignity becoming to people in better society
than others. One large shad, imaginably of very old family and
independent property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his
flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him. Mostly his expression
is very severe; but in milder moments he offers a perverse resemblance
to some portraits of Washington.

All our days in Naples died like dolphins to the music which I have
tried to impart the sense of. The joyful noises which it was made up of
culminated for us on that evening when a company of the street and boat
musicians came into the hotel and danced and sang and played the
tarantella. They were of all ages, sexes, and bulks, and of divers
operatic costumes, but they were of one temperament only, which was glad
and childlike. They went through their repertory, which included a great
deal more than the tarantella, and which we applauded with an enthusiasm
attested by our contributions when the tambourine went round. Then they
repeated their selections, and at the second collection we guests of the
hotel repeated our contributions, but in a more guarded spirit. After
the second repetition the prettiest girl came round with her photographs
and sold them at prices out of all reason. Then we became very
melancholy, and began to steal out one by one. I myself did not stay for
the fourth collection, and I cannot report how the different points of
view, the Southern and the Northern, were reconciled in the event which
I am not sure was final. But I am sure that unless you can make
allowance for a world-wide difference in the Neapolitans from yourself
you can never understand them. Perhaps you cannot, even then.




V. POMPEII REVISITED


Because I felt very happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation,
and being alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by
the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to myself
that I would do something that would surprise him, and I gave him his
fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was surprised, for he ran
after me into the station, as I supposed, to extort more. He was holding
out a franc toward me, and I asked the guide who was bothering me to
take him to Pompeii (where there are swarms of guides always on the
grounds) what the matter was. “It is false,” he explained, and this
proved true, though whether the franc was the one I had given the driver
or whether it was one which he had thoughtfully substituted for it to
make good an earlier loss I shall now never know. I put it into my
pocket, wondering what I should do with it; the question what you shall
do with counterfeit money in Italy is one which is apt to recur as I
have hinted, and in despair of solving it at the moment I threw the
false franc out of the car-window; it was the false franc I have already
boasted of throwing away.

This was, of course, after I got into the car, and after I had suffered
another wrong, and was resolved at least to be good myself. I had taken
first-class tickets, but, when we had followed several conductors up and
down the train, the last of them said there were no first-class places
left, though I shall always doubt this. I asked what we should do, and
he shrugged. I had heard that if you will stand upon your rights in such
a matter the company will have to put on another car for you. But I was
now dealing with the Italian government, which has nationalized the
railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted the rolling stock; and
when the conductor found us places in a second-class carriage, rather
than quarrel with a government which had troubles enough already I got
aboard. I suppose really that I have not much public spirit, and that
the little I have I commonly leave at home; in travelling it is
burdensome. Besides, the second-class carriage would have been
comfortable enough if it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had
not been washed since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the
destruction of Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.

The country through which we made the hour's run was sympathetically
squalid. We had, to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean
enough; but the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while
the earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging
manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it had
been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with
stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters of
life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco shanties
which the men and women working in the fields would lurk in at
nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building, and at one
place there was a large macaroni manufactory, with far stretches of the
product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We passed
through towns where women and children swarmed, working at doorways and
playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies everywhere winter
melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them, such as you can buy at
the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and will keep buying when once you
know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the
street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices
arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of
some savage prince.

Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from
arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city
is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after
you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass
through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets
where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the
houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted
with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and
stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's
fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and
moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the
roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns
and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted
in the favorite hue of ruin.

Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to
this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and
vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of
the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of
death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in
the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where
one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect
was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted
men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been
when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It
was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of
the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip instead of
built up, a good third had been added to the count of its streets and
houses. There were not, so far as I could see, more ruts from
chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the thoroughfares, but some
convincingly two-storied dwellings had been exhumed, and others with
ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations;
there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors
were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the
stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the
revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain
impressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the
dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York were dug out
two thousand years after their submergence by an eruption of Orange
Mountain. The identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested
to the archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally
unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist's word for the fact.
One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns and vague
foundations and broken altars. Among the later discoveries certain of
the public baths are in the best repair, both structurally and
decoratively, and in these one could replace the antique life with the
least wear and tear of the imagination.

[Illustration: 12 EXCAVATING AT POMPEII]

I could not tell which the several private houses were; but the
guide-books can, and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their
names would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In
Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new ones
were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older ones. Not
more recognizably than these, they had been devoted to the varied uses
known to advanced civilization in all ages: there were dwellings, and
taverns and drinking-houses and eating-houses, and there were those
houses where the feet of them that abide therein and of those that
frequent them alike take hold on hell. In these the guide stays the men
of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the
frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so
indulged had not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can
be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which
poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain
the same from age to age, will poison life forever.

The pictures on the walls of the newly excavated houses are not
strikingly better than those I had not forgotten; but of late it has
been the purpose to leave as many of the ornaments and utensils in
position as possible. The best are, as they ought to be, gathered into
the National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more
living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it
is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall
life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave
its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that
one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One should not
perhaps

  “Go visit it by the pale moonlight,”

but if one could have it all to one's self by day, such a gray day as we
had for it, there is no telling what might happen. One thing only would
certainly happen: one would get lost. It never was a town of large area;
and, like all spaces that have been ruined over, it looked smaller than
it would have looked if all its walls were standing with all their roofs
upon them. Still, it was a mesh of streets, out of which you would in
vain have sought your way if you had been caught in it alone; though it
is mostly so level that if you had mounted a truncated column almost
anywhere you could have looked over the labyrinth to its verge.

It was not much crowded by visitors; though there were strings of them
at the heels of the respective guides, with, I thought, a prevalence of
the Germans, who are now overrunning Italy; I am sorry to say they are
not able to keep it cheap, at least for other nationalities. Among these
I noted two little smiling, shining, twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks
for the capture of that classical antiquity which could never really
belong to them. Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what
keeps us alien even more than the want of a common Christian tradition.

  “The glory that was Greece
  And the grandeur that was Rome”

could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they
put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and
were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were
fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with
them I shall believe so.

[Illustration: 13 THE STREET OF TOMBS, POMPEII]

Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate,
thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to
find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or
Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous
people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got
tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had,
without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of
Tombs, where the tombs are in so much better repair than the houses. For
myself, I remembered the amphitheatre so perfectly from 1864 that I did
not see how I could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had
already turned into literature; and though Pompeii is but small, the
amphitheatre is practically as far from the Street of Tombs, after you
have walked about the place for two hours, as the Battery is from High
Bridge. There is no Elevated or Subway at Pompeii, and even the lines of
public chariots, if such they were, which left those ruts in the lava
pavements seem to have been permanently suspended after the final
destruction in the year 79.

We were not only very tired, but very hungry, and we asked our guide to
take us back the shortest way. I suggested a cross-cut at one point, and
he caught at the word eagerly, and wrote it in his note-book for future
use. He also acted upon it instantly, and we cut across the back yards
and over the kitchen areas of several absent citizens on our way back.
Our guide was as good and true as it is in the nature of guides to be,
but absolute goodness and truth are rather the attributes of American
travellers; and you will not escape the small graft which the guides are
so rigorously forbidden to practise.  Pompeii is no longer in the
keeping of the Italian army; with the Italian instinct of
decentralization the place has claimed the right of self-government, and
now the guides are civilians, and not soldiers, as they were in my far
day. They do not accept fees, but still they take them; and our guide
said that he had a brother-in-law who had the best restaurant outside
the gate, where we could get luncheon for two francs.  As soon as we
were in the hands of the runner for that restaurant the price augmented
itself to two francs and a half; when we mounted to the threshold, lured
on by the fascinating mystery of this increase, it became three francs,
without wine. But as the waiter justly noted, in hovering about us with
the cutlery and napery while he laid the table, a two-fifty luncheon was
unworthy such lords as we. When he began to bring on the delicious
omelette, the admirable fish, the excellent cutlets, he made us observe
that if we paid three francs we ought to eat a great deal; and there
seemed reason in this; at any rate, we did so. The truth is, that
luncheon was worth the money, and more; as for the Vesuvian wine, it had
the rich red blood of the volcano in it, and it could not be bought in
New York for half a franc the bottle, if at all; at thrice that sum in
Naples it was not a third as good.

If there had been anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we
could not have done it, we were so spent with our two hours' walk
through Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating.
Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day forty-three
years before when I had broiled over the same ground under the blazing
sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference in the muscles and
emotions of twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of
the white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a
much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than had
accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year 1864. During
most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its
ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully,
however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession
and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the
fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition
of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the
Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of
municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, and the
general adoption of automobiling. These things, and others like them,
had perhaps not aged Pompeii so much as they had aged me, but their
subjective effect was the same, and upon the whole I was not altogether
sorry to have added scarcely a new impression of the place to those I
had been carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were
plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens,
columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater
Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so
well.

This, at least, was what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in
the National Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian
things, new and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show
there beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a few
streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things than all the
lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against
Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under
that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and
the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have
been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle
slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than
alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is
curiously without pathos; Newport in ruins might not be touching;
possibly all skeletons or even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii
is a skeleton, or at the most a mummy, of the past.

Seeing what antiquity so largely was, however, one might be not only
resigned but cheerful in the ef-facement of any particular piece of it;
and for a help to this at Pompeii I may advise the reader to take with
him a certain little guide-book, written in English by a very courageous
Italian, which I chanced to find in Naples. Though it treats of the
tragical facts with seriousness, it is not with equal gravity that one
reads that sixteen years before the Vesuvian eruption “the region had
been shaken by strong sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants
to forsake precipitately their habitations. But being the amazement up,
they got one's home again as soon as the earth was quiet and all fear
and sadness went off by memory.” Signs of the final disaster to follow
were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were crossed by
currents of carbonic acid; “the domestic animals were also very sensible
of the approaching of the scourge; they lost the habitual vivacity, and
having the food in disgust, had from time to time to complain with
mournful wailings, without justified reasons.... The sky became of a
thick darkness,... interrupted only by flashes of light which the
lava reverberated, by the bloody gliding of the thunderbolts, by the
incandescence of enormous projectiles, thrown to an incommensurable
highness.... Death surprised the charming town; houses and streets
became the tombs of the unhappies hit by an atrocious torture.”

The author's study of the life of Pompeii is notable for diction which,
if there were logic in language, would be admirable English, for while
yet in his mind it must have been “very choice Italian.” He tells us
that “Pompei's dwellings are surprising by their specific littleness,”
 and explains that “Pompei inhabitants, for the habitudes of the climate
could allow, lived almost always to the open sky,” just as the Naples
inhabitants do now. “They got home only to rest a little, to fulfill
life wants, to be protected by bad weather. They spent much time during
the day in forum, temples, thermes, tennis-court, or intervened to
public sports, religious functions and meetings.... Few houses only
had windows. The sunlight and ventilation to the ancients was given
through empty spaces in the roofs.... Hoofs knocked under the weight
of materials thrown out by Vesuvius; it is undoubted, however, that
roofs were provided with covers or supported terraces. In the middle of
the roofs was cut an overture through which air and light brought their
benefits to the underlaid ambients.... Proprietor disposed the locals
according to his own delight.... So that, there were bed, bath,
dining, talking and game rooms.” In the peristyle “the ground was
gardened, the area shared in flower beds, had narrow paths; herbs,
flowers, shrubs were put with art well in order on flower beds,
delighted from time to time by statues of various subjects,” as may be
noted in the actual restorations of some of the Pompeian houses.

As for their spiritual life, “Pompeian's religion, like by Roman people,
was the Paganism. Deities were worshipped in the temples with prayers,
sacrifices, vows, and festivities.... Banquets to the Deity were
joined to prayers. In fact, dining tables were dressed near the altars,
and all around them on dining beds, _tricli-nari,_ placed Divinities
statues as these were assembled to own account to the joyous banquet.”
 Auspices or auguries “gave interpretation to thunders, lightnings,
winds, rain crashes, comets, or to bird songs and flights....
Horuspices inquired the divine will on the animal bowels, sacrificed to
the altar; they took out further indications by fleshes and bowels
flames when burnt on the altar.”

An important feature of Pompeian social life was the bath, which “was
one of the hospitality duty, and very often required in several
religious functions.... Large and colossal edifices were quite
furnished with all the necessary for care and sport. Besides localities
for all kind of bath--cold, warm, steam bath--didn't want parks, alleys,
and porticos in order to walk; lists rings for gymnastic exercises,
conversation and reading rooms, localities for theatrical
representations, swimming stations, localities for scientific
disquisitions, moral and religious teachings. The most splendid art
works adorned the ambient.”

When we pass to the popular amusements we are presented with the
materials of pictures vividly realized in _The Last Days of Pompeii,_
but somewhat faded since. “In the beginning gladiators' rank was made by
condemned to death slaves and war prisoners. Later also thoughtless
young men, who had never learned an advantageous trade, became
gladiators.” In the arena they engaged in sham fights till the
spectators demanded blood. Then, “sometimes one provided one's self nets
for wrapping up the adversary, who, hit by a trident much, frequently
die. When the gladiator was deadly wounded, forsaking the arm, struck
down and stretching the index, asked the people grace of life. The
spectators decided up his destiny, turning the thumb to the breast, or
toward the ground. The thumb turned toward the ground was the unlucky's
death doom, and he had without fail the throat cut off.”

Such, dimly but unmistakably seen through our Italian author's
well-reasoned English, were the ancient Pompeians; and, upon the whole,
the visitor to their city could not wish them back in it. I preferred
even those modern Pompeians who followed us so molestively to the train
with bargains in postal-cards and coral. They are very alert, the modern
Pompeians, to catch the note of national character, and I saw one of
them pursuing an elderly American with a spread of hat-pins, primarily
two francs each, and with the appeal, evidently studied from some fair
American girl: “Buy it, Poppa! Six for one franc. Oh, Poppa, buy it!”

I had again lavished my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had
my Utah friend, who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to
secure a first-class carriage. “When I can't go first-class in Italy,
I'll go home.” I promptly and proudly agreed with him, but I concealed
my morning's experience of the fact that in Italy you may sometimes go
second class when you have paid first. I agreed with him, however, in
not minding the plunder of Italian travel, since, with all the
extortions, it would come to a third less than you expected to spend.
His was the true American spirit.




VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS




I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS


“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” the traveller asks rather
anxiously than defiantly when he finds himself a stranger in a strange
place, and he is apt to add, if he has not written or wired ahead to
some specific hotel, “Which of mine inns shall I take mine ease in?” He
is the more puzzled to choose the more inns there are to choose from,
and his difficulty is enhanced if he has not considered that some of his
inns may be full or may be too dear, and yet others undesirable.

The run from Naples in four hours and a half had been so flattering fair
an experience to people who had last made it in eight that they arrived
in Rome on a sunny afternoon of January preoccupied with expectations of
an instant ease in their inn which seemed the measure of their merit.
They indeed found their inn, and it was with a painful surprise that
they did not find the rooms in it which they wanted. There were neither
rooms full south, nor over the garden, nor off the tram, and in these
circumstances there was nothing for it but to drive to some one else's
inn and try for better quarters there. They, in fact, drove to half a
dozen such, their demands rising for more rooms and sunnier and quieter
and cheaper, the fewer and darker and noisier and dearer were those they
found.

The trouble was that they found in the very first alien hotel where they
applied an apartment so exactly what they wanted, with its four rooms
and bath, all more or less full south, though mostly veering west and
north, that they carried the fatal norm in their consciousness and
tested all other apartments by it, the earlier notion of single rooms
being promptly rejected after the sight of it. The reader will therefore
not be so much, astonished as these travellers were to learn that there
was nothing else in Rome (where there must be about five hundred hotels,
_hotels garnis,_ and pensions) that one could comparatively stay even
overnight in, and that they settled in that alluring apartment
provisionally, the next day being Sunday, and the crystalline Saturday
of their arrival being well worn away toward its topaz and ruby sunset.
Of course, they continued their search for several days afterward,
zealously but hopelessly, yet not fruitlessly, for it resulted in an
acquaintance with Roman hotels which they might otherwise never have
made, and for one of them in literary material of interest to every one
hoping to come to Rome or despairing of it. The psychology of the matter
was very curious, and involved the sort of pleasing self-illusion by
which people so often get themselves over questionable passes in life
and come out with a good conscience, or a dead one, which is practically
the same thing. These particular people had come to Rome with
reminiscences of in-expensiveness and had intended to recoup themselves
for the cost of several previous winters in New York hotels by the
saving they would make in their Roman sojourn. When it appeared, after
all the negotiation and consequent abatement, that their Roman hotel
apartment would cost them hardly a fifth less than they had last paid in
New York, they took a guilty refuge in the fact that they were getting
for less money something which no money could buy in New York. Gradually
all sense of guilt wore off, and they boldly, or even impudently, said
to themselves that they ought to have what they could pay for, and that
there were reasons, which they were not obliged to render in their
frankest soliloquies, why they should do just what they chose in the
matter.

The truth is that the modern Roman hotel is far better in every way than
the hotel of far higher class, or of the highest class, in New York. In
the first place, the managers are in the precious secret, which our
managers have lost, of making you believe that they want you; and,
having you, they know how to look after your pleasure and welfare. The
table is always of more real variety, though vastly less stupid
profusion than ours. The materials are wholesomer and fresher and are
without the proofs, always present in our hotel viands, of a
probationary period in cold storage. As for the cooking, there is no
comparison, whether the things are simply or complexly treated; and the
service is of that neatness and promptness which ours is so ignorant of.

Your agreement is usually for meals as well as rooms; the European plan
is preferably ignored in Europe; and the _table d'hote_ luncheon and
dinner are served at small, separate tables; your breakfast is brought
to your room. Being old-fashioned, myself, I am rather sorry for the
small, separate tables. I liked the one large, long table, where you
made talk with your neighbors; but it is gone, and much facile
friendliness with it, on either hand and across the board. The rooms are
tastefully furnished, and the beds are unquestionable; the carpets
warmly cover the floor if stone, or amply rug it if of wood. The
steam-heating is generous and performs its office of “roasting you out
of the house” without the sizzling and crackling which accompany its
efforts at home. The electricity really illuminates, and there is always
an electric lamp at your bed-head for those long hours when your remorse
or your digestion will not let you sleep, and you must substitute some
other's waking dreams for those of your own slumbers. Above all, there
is a lift, or elevator, not enthusiastically active or convulsively
swift, but entirely practicable and efficient. It will hold from four to
eight persons, and will take up at least six without reluctance.

It must be clearly understood that the ideal of American comfort is
fully and faithfully realized, and if the English have reformed the
Italian hotels in respect of cleanliness, it is we who have brought them
quite to our domestic level in regard to heat and light. But if we want
these things in Rome, we must pay for them as we do at home, though
still we do not pay so much as we pay at home. The tips are about half
our average, but whether they are given currently or ultimately I do not
know. Who, indeed, knows about others' tips anywhere in the world? I
asked an experienced fellow-citizen what the custom was, and he said
that he believed the English gave in going away, but he thought the
spirits of the helpers drooped under the strain of hope deferred, and he
preferred to give every week. The donations, I understood, were pooled
by the dining-room waiters and then equally divided; but gifts bestowed
above stairs were for the sole behoof of him or her who took them.
Germans are said to give less than Anglo-Saxons, and it is said that
Italians in some cases do not give at all. But, again, who knows? The
Italians are said never to give drink money to the cabmen, but to pay
only the letter of the tariff. If I had done that in driving about to
look up worse hotels than the one I chose first and last, I should now
be a richer man, but I doubt if a happier. Two cents seems to satisfy a
Roman cabman; five cents has for him the witchery of money found in the
road; but I must not leave the subject of hotels for that of cabs,
however alluringly it beckons.

The reader who knows Italy only from the past should clear his mind of
his old impressions of the hotels. There is no longer that rivalry
between the coming guest and the manager to see how few or many candles
can be lighted in his room and charged in the bill; there are no longer
candles, but only electricity. There is no longer an extortion for
hearth-fires which send all the heat up the chimney; there are steam
radiators in every room. There is no longer a tedious bargaining for
rooms; the price is fixed and cannot be abated except for a sojourn of
weeks or months. But the price is much greater than it used to be--twice
as great almost; for the taxes are heavy and provisions are dear, and
coal and electricity are costly, and you must share the expense with the
landlord. He is not there for his health, and, if for your comfort, you
are not his invited guest. As I have intimated, an apartment of four
rooms with a bath will cost almost as much, with board, as the same
quarters in New York, but you will get far more for your money in Rome.
If you take a single room, even to the south, in many first-class Roman
hotels it will cost you for room and board only two dollars or two and a
half a day, which is what you pay for a far meaner and smaller room
alone in New York; and the Roman board is such, as you can get at none
but our most expensive houses for twice the money. Generally you cannot
get a single room and bath, but at present a very exclusive hotel is
going up in a good quarter which promises, with huge English signs, a
bath with every room and every room full south. One does not see just
how the universal sunny exposure is to be managed, but there can be no
question of the baths; and, with the steam radiators everywhere, the
northernmost room might well imagine itself full south.

Nearly all the hotels have a pleasant tea-room, which is called a winter
garden, because of a pair of palm-trees set under the centre of its
glass roof and the painted bamboo chairs and tables set about. This sort
of garden is found even in the hotels which are almost of the grade of
pensions and of their prices; but generally the pensions proper are
without it. Their rates are much lower, but quite as good people
frequent them, and they are often found in good streets and sometimes
open into or overlook charming gardens; the English especially seem to
like the pensions, which are managed like hotels. They are commonly
without steam-heat, which might account for their being less frequented
by Americans.

There are two supreme hotels in Rome--one in the Ludovisi quarter, as it
is called, and the other near the Baths of Diocletian, which Americans
frequent to their cost, for the rates approach a New York or London
magnificence. The first is rather the more spectacular of the two and is
the resort of all the finer sort of afternoon tea-drinkers, who find
themselves the observed of observers of all nationalities; there is
music and dress, and there are titles of every degree, with as much
informality as people choose, if they go to look, or as much state if
they go to be looked at; these things are much less cumbrously contrived
than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat unauthorized fancy,
is rather more addicted to very elect dinner-parties and suppers. Below
these two are an endless variety of first-rate and second-rate houses,
both in the newer quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been
turned into streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and
avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town which
the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the worst these
places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are not steam-heated.

It has seemed to me that there are not so many _hotels garnis_ in Rome
as there used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant
streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with breakfast in
his rooms, and likes to browse about for his luncheon and dinner, will
easily suit himself. If it comes to taking a furnished apartment for the
season, there is much range in price and much choice in place. The
agents who have them to let will begin, rather dismayingly, “Oh,
apartments in Rome are very dear.” But you learn on inquiry that a
furnished flat in the Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full
sun, may be had for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the
rents of palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred
and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and for
this you have linen and silver and all the movables and utensils you
want, as well as several vast rooms opening wastefully from one to
another till you reach the salon. The rents of the like flats, if
vacant, would be a quarter or a third less, though again the agents
begin by telling you that there is very little difference between the
rents of furnished and unfurnished flats.  The flats are in every part
of the old town and the new; and some are in noble sixteenth and
seventeenth century palaces, such as we are accustomed to at home only
in the theatre. My own experience is that everybody, especially in
houses where there are no lifts, lives on the top floor. You pass many
other floors in going up, but you are left to believe that nobody lives
on them. When you reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming
inside for their state and beauty, and outside for their magnificent
view, which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome of
St. Peter's. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all round the
horizon.

When you have taken your furnished flat, the same agency will provide
you a cook at ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a
lady's maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to
sleep out of the house. Then will come the question of provisions, and
these seem really to be dear in Rome. Meats and vegetables both are
dear, and game and poultry. Beef will be forty cents a pound, and veal
and mutton in proportion; a chicken which has been banting for the table
from its birth will be forty cents; eggs which have not yet taken active
shape are twenty-five and thirty cents throughout winters so bland that
a hen of any heart can hardly keep from laying every day. I am afraid I
am no authority on butter and milk, and groceries I do not know the
prices of; but coffee ought to be cheap, for nobody drinks anything but
substitutes more or less unabashed.

For the passing stranger, or even the protracted so-journer, whose time
and money are not too much at odds, a hotel is best, and a hotel in the
new quarter is pleasanter than one in the old quarters. Ours, at any
rate, was in a wide, sunny, and (if I must own it) dusty street, laid
out in a line of beauty on the borders of the former Villa Ludovisi,
where the aging or middle-aging reader used to come to see Guercino's
“Aurora” in the roof of the casino. Now all trace of the garden is
hidden under vast and vaster hotels and great blond apartment-houses,
and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been spared,
though it is no longer so accessible to the public. Still, there is a
garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks across the sun and dust
of its street into the useful vegetation of the famous old Capuchin
convent, with the church, to which I came so eagerly so long ago to
revere Guido's “St. Michael and the Dragon” and the decorative bones of
the good brothers braided on the walls and roofs of the crypt in the
indissoluble community of floral and geometric designs.

[Illustration: 14 THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH, ROME]

All through the months of February and March I woke to the bell that
woke the brothers to their prayers before daybreak and burst the
beauty-sleep of the hotel-dwellers, who have so far outnumbered the
monks since the obliteration of the once neighboring villa. This was, of
course, a hardship, and one thought things of that bell which the monks
were too good to say; but being awake, and while one was reading one's
self to sleep again, one could hear the beginning of the bird singing in
the modern garden in the rear which followed upon the bell-ringing. I do
not know what make or manner of bird it was that mostly sang among the
palms and laurels and statues, but it had a note of liquid gold, which
it poured till a certain flageo-lettist, whom I never saw, came to the
corner under the villa wall and blew his soul into one end of his
instrument and out of the other in the despondent breathings of most
melancholy music. Then, having attuned the spirits of his involuntary
listeners to a pensive sympathy, he closed with that international hymn
which does not rightly know whether it is “My Country, 'tis of Thee,” or
“God Save the King,” but serves equally for the patriotism of any
English or Americans in hearing. I do not know why this harmless hymn,
which the flageolettist gave extremely well, should always have seemed
to provoke the derision of the donkey which apparently dwelt in harmony
with the birds in that garden, but the flageolettist had no sooner ended
than the donkey burst into a bray, loud, long, and full of mockery, with
a close of ironical whistling and most insolent hissing; you would think
that some arch-enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race was laughing the new-felt
unity of the English and Americans to scorn. Later, but still before
daylight, came the wild cry of a boy, somewhere out of perdition,
following the deep bass invitation of his father's lost spirit to buy
his wares, whatever they were. We never knew, but we liked that boy's
despairing wail, and would not have missed it for ever so much extra
slumber. When all hope of more sleep was past there was no question of
the desirability of the boy who visibly arranged his store of oranges on
the curbstone under the villa wall, and seemed to think that they had a
peculiar attraction from being offered for sale in pairs. His cry filled
the rest of the forenoon.

The Italian spring comes on slowly everywhere, with successive snubs in
its early ardor from the snows on the mountains, which regulate the
climate from north to south. We could not see that it made more speed
behind the sheltering walls of the Capuchin convent garden than in other
places. The old gardener whom we saw pottering about in it seemed to
potter no more actively at the end of March than at the beginning of
February; on the first days of April a heap of old leaves and stalks was
sending up the ruddy flame and pleasant smell that the like burning
heaps do with us at the like hour of spring--in fact, vegetation had
much more reason to be cheerful throughout February than at any time in
March. Those February days were really incomparable. They had not the
melting heat of the warm spells that sometimes come in our Februaries;
but their suns were golden, and their skies unutterably blue, and their
airs mild, yet fresh. You always wanted a heavy coat for driving or for
the shade in walking; otherwise the temperature was that of a New
England April which was resolved to begin as it could carry out. But
March came with cold rains of whole days, and with suns that might
overheat but could not be trusted to warm you. The last Sunday of
January I found ice in the Colosseum; but that was the only time I saw
ice anywhere in Rome. In March, however, in a moment of great
exasperation from the mountains, it almost snowed. Yet that month would
in our climate have been remembered for its beauty and for a prevailing
kindness of temperature. The worst you could say of it was that it left
the spring in the Capuchin garden where it found it. But possibly, since
the temporal power was overthrown, the seasons are neglected and
indifferent. Certainly man seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent.
Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice look vacant, and the high
wall which encloses it is plastered and painted with huge advertisements
of clothiers and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and
other events out of keeping with its character and tradition.

The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the Northern lands will
tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which has
sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with
the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I, who am a
sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share them. No doubt
the Newer Rome has made mistakes, but, without defending her
indiscriminately, I am a Newer-Roman to the core, perhaps because I knew
the Older Rome and what it was like; and not all my brother and sister
sentimentalists can say as much.




II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME


Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she
seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed.
Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no
one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864
as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I
should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting,
in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in
others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so
many good things. At the same time I must own that I heard no other
foreigner praising her for her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian,
who had seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the
Ghetto should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had
perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a shame, and
an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also thought the Tiber
Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks
of other days invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters
of the town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that
overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an effect of
disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown to the lover of
the picturesque. There used to be a particular type of typhoid known as
Roman fever, but now quite unknown, thanks to the Tiber Embankments and
to the light and air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for
which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect municipal
housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley
unswept; every morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces
formerly almost impassable to the foot and quite impossible to the nose.

I am speaking literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand
why some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and
avenues, should look askance at the decency of the newer Rome and feign
it an offence against beauty and poetry, I do not see why a Londoner,
who himself lives in a well-kept town, should join with any of my
fellow-barbarians in hypocritically deploring the modern spirit which
has so happily invaded the Eternal City. The Londoner should rather
entreat us not to be humbugs and should invite us to join him in
rejoicing that the death-rate of Rome, once the highest in the civilized
world, is now almost the lowest. But the language of Shakespeare and
Milton is too often internationally employed in deploring the modernity
which has housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One
must confine one's self to instances, and one may take that of the
Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much peace and
pleasure except when I was reminded that it was formed by plotting the
lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots and building it up in attractive
hotels and apartment-houses.  Even then I did not suffer so keenly as
some younger people, who had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though
there are still villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not
really miss the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise,
and the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The villa
was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in
its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at
best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers
of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is
inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in
this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find
that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been painted.

There is no doubt but at one time, directly after the coming of the
capital, Rome was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome
has grown up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now
“stuffs out her vacant garments with her form” pretty fully. One must
not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of
them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of
the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare
them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is
said.

Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome,
was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so
called, where Zola in his novel of _Rome_ has placed most of the squalor
which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts.  In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of
himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the
scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I
found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting
anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third
time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively
lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash
hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and
misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York
I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In
this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere
in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly
as our streets look when they have just been “cleaned,” I knew that the
next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best
never have been since the days of Waring.

Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been
bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type,
fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_
standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look
over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them. Like
suburban effects are characteristic of the new wide residential streets
on the hither side of the Tiber, and on both shores the streets expand
from time to time into squares, with more or less tolerable new
monuments--say, of the Boston average--in them. The business streets
where they bear the lines of the frequently recurrent trams are spacious
and straight, and though they are not the Corso, the Corso itself, it
must be remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive,
and is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have no
space to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals betray a
glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether these palaces are
outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from what sight one can get
of them; no, not even the most besotted sentimentalist of those who
bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome when they mean Rome of the
Renaissance. How much of that Rome has been erased by modern Rome I do
not know, but I think not so much as people pretend. Some of the ugly
baroque churches have been pulled down to allow the excavation of
imperial Rome, but there are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is
said the princely proprietors of the old palaces which are let in
apartments along the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are
going to pull them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of
modern rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of
hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately domiciles,
and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they spoke of these
rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices of the sort, and I
should not be surprised if I went back to Rome after another forty-three
years to find most of them standing in 1951 where they now stand in
1908. Rome was not built in a day, and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt
within the brief period that will make me one hundred and fourteen years
old. By that time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I
can say to the few survivors: “There, you see that new Rome never went
half so far as you expected.”

But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is
for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of
which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American
pride was flattered by the sign on a handsome apartment-house going up
in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a
lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied
with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from
the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the
impassioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors.
New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to
whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and
older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or
the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage
peering over them, that now enchant the passer in the street; from the
windows of my electric-elevatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look
down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange
espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of
oleanders and of laurels

  “Shaking its loosened silver in the sun.”

Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against
the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some
sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now
possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down,
while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of
the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its
spreading shade. All these things beautifully abound in Rome now, as
they always have abounded, and there is no reason to fear that they will
cease to abound.

Rome grows, and as Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there
must forever be a great and famous capital where there has always been
one. The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it might
well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth and heaven
which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in the world. The
climate is beyond praise for a winter which is mild without being weak;
there is a summer of tolerable noonday heat, and of nights deliciously
cool; the spring is scarcely earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall
is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest
level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The
embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling
to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to
loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them away.

So it is said by those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the
Roman meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can
believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the prevalence
of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine, flatters January with an
illusion of June, and under our hotel windows I was witness of the
success of the sycamore leaves in keeping a grip of their native twigs
even after the new buds came to push them away. In the last days of
March a plum-tree hung its robe of white blossoms over the wall of the
Capuchin convent from the garden within; but the almond-trees had been
in bloom for six weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more
warmly flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.

Still, a mild winter and an endurable summer will not of themselves make
a great capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the
past made Rome the capital of the world, first politically and then
religiously.  Whether they will make it so hereafter remains to be seen.
In the sense of all the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my
profound faith in the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and
they will have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most
liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a pull
with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her its head
city. The only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris,
and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the
commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the
business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage
and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost
ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of
anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It
is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time
and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the
future. But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a
capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state, deep-rooted
in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race of which we are
ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire without a present equal.
Paris is France in the sense of representing the intense life of a
nation unsurpassed in the things which enlighten and ennoble the human
intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong
will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of
sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any
positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly
reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin
is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively
Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just
the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human
interests too universal and imperative for the control of a single race,
even so brilliant and so gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally
and necessarily in possession, centre about her through history,
religion, art, and make every one at home in the city which is the
capital of Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling
Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and
unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the
right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But
every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in
the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less
critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now
making, or making over.

[Illustration: 15 GLIMPSE INSIDE OF IMPERIAL ROME]

We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience
to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the
future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to
visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having
come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at
the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or
distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and
her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which
she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and
corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving
air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and
the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and
Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in
spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the
solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of
antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be
hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from
our North and West and censure and criticise and carp. I have seldom
conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome who could not improve her in
some phase or other, who could not usefully advise her, who, at the
best, did not patronize her. I offer myself as almost the sole example
of a stranger who was contented with her as she is, or as she is going
to be without his help; and I am the more confident, therefore, in
suggesting to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances
which her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully mismanaged in her
civic schemes. A good round tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon all
sojourners, if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining in such a
chorus of criticism of Rome would give them the indefeasible right to
their opinions and would help to replete a treasury which they believe
is always in danger of being exhausted.




III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM


As I have told, the first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was
at the Colosseum the day after our arrival. For some unknown reason I
was going to begin with the Baths of Caracalla, but, as it happened,
these were the very last ruins we visited in Rome; and I do not know
just what accident diverted us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped
because it was on the way to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At
any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it.

After twoscore years and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not
say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to
sell me postcards--these are a much later invention of the Enemy--but I
am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and
looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The Colosseum
itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a minion of the wicked
Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and
cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good
deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of
the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the
industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into
workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in
it that hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most
stupendous variety shows that the world has yet witnessed. The terrible
stunts in which men fought one another for the delight of other men in
every manner of murder, and wild beasts tore the limbs of those glad to
perish for their faith, can be as easily imagined there as ever, and the
traveller who visits the place has the assistance of increasing hordes
of other tourists in imagining them.

I will not be the one to speak slight of that enterprise which marshals
troops of the personally conducted through the place and instructs them
in divers languages concerning it. Save your time and money so, if you
have not too much of either, and be one of an English, French, or German
party, rather than try to puzzle the facts out for yourself, with one
contorted eye on your Baedeker and the other on the object in question.
In such parties a sort of domestic relation seems to grow up through
their associated pleasures in sight-seeing, and they are like family
parties, though politer and patienter among themselves than real family
parties. They are commonly very serious, though they doubtless all have
their moments of gayety; and in the Colosseum I saw a French party
grouped for photography by a young woman of their number, who ran up and
down before them with a kodak and coquettishly hustled them into
position with pretty, bird-like chirpings of appeal and reproach, and
much graceful self-evidencing. I do not censure her behavior, though
doubtless there were ladies among the photographed who thought it
overbold; if the reader had been young and blond and _svelte,_ in a
Parisian gown and hat, with narrow russet shoes, not too high-heeled for
good taste, I do not believe he would have been any better; or, if he
would, I should not have liked him so well.

On the earlier day which I began speaking of I found that I was
insensibly attaching myself to an English-hearing party of the
personally conducted, in the dearth of my own recollections of the local
history, but I quickly detached myself for shame and went back and
meekly hired the help of a guide who had already offered his services in
English, and whom I had haughtily spurned in his own tongue. His
English, though queer, was voluminous; but I am not going to drag the
reader at our heels laden with lore which can be applied only on the
spot or in the presence of postal-card views of the Colosseum. It is
enough that before my guide released us we knew where was the box of
Caesar, whom those about to die saluted, and where the box of the
Vestals whose fatal thumbs gave the signal of life or death for the
unsuccessful performer; where the wild beasts were kept, and where the
Christians; where were the green-rooms of the gladiators, who waited
chatting for their turn to go on and kill one another. One must make
light of such things or sink under them; and if I am trying to be a
little gay, it is for the readers' sake, whom I would not have perish of
their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience
or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could
commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible.
However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his
rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing
himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had
been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street
before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not
been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left
a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon,
the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where
crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the
half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and down, in
every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so picturesque as a
little group of monks who had climbed to a higher tier of the arches and
stood looking down into the depths where we looked up at them, denned
against the sky in their black robes, which opened to show their under
robes of white. They were picturesque, but they were not so monumental
as an old, unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping
side-whiskers, not above a purple suspicion of dye, who sat on a broken
column and vainly endeavored to collect his family for departure.
Whenever he had gathered two or three about him they strayed off as the
others came up, and we left him sardonically patient of their adhesions
and defections, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we
struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to our
carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat jerry-built
apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on into the salmon
sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we found waiting us at
our hotel, with the statues on the balustrated wall of the villa garden
behind it effectively posed in the tender light, together with the
eidolons of those picturesque monks and that monumental American.

[Illustration: 16 INTERIOR OF COLOSSEUM FROM THE SOUTH]

We could safely have stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer
brings danger of Roman fever, which people used to take in the
Colosseum, unless I am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She,
indeed, I believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the
place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights of the
season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored lights of the
fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was quite vivid enough
without that, and the vision of the Colosseum remained, and still
remains, the immense skeleton of the stupendous form stripped of all
integumental charm and broken down half one side of its vast oval, so
that wellnigh a quarter of the structural bones are gone.

[Illustration: 17 THE SACRED WAY THROUGH THE FORUM]

With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly
recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial
Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those
world-conquerors was first immensity and then beauty, as much as could
survive consistently with getting immensity into a given space. The
question is most of all poignant in the Forum, which I let wait a full
fortnight before moving against it in the warm sun of an amiable
February morning.  On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day
to dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was then
called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud among the
broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it were, sedulously
cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has since been done, and
which could not but have been done, by the eager science as much
involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the task, has resulted in a more
potent suggestion of what the Forum was in the republican or imperial
day than what that simple, old, unassuming Cow Field afforded. There
were then as now the beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the
temple porches, with their pillars; there was the “unknown column with
the buried base”; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation;
and it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the
riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of
the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried
pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the
fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of
temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the
magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination
is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple
and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make
little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in
self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field
becomes in the mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the
resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.

If the visitor would have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the
place was like when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic
reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest building
across the way from the official entrance to the Forum. One cannot say
but this is intensely interesting, and it affords the consolation which
the humble (but not too humble) spirit may gather from witness of the
past, that the fashion of this world and the pride of the eyes and all
ruthless vainglory defeated themselves in ancient Rome, as they must
everywhere when they can work their will. If one had thought that in
magnitude and multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had
but to look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but
beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas and
columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly painted and
gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the least, and crowding
severally upon one another, without relation or proportion. Their mass
is supremely tasteless, almost senseless; that mob of architectural
incongruities was not only without collective beauty, but it was without
that far commoner and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This
has come to it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word
vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome in
tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at least
paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I doubt if it
would have been even photographable to anything but a picture post-card
effect.

But as yet I wandered in the Forum safe from the realization of its
ugliness when it was in its glory. I cannot say that even now it is
picturesque, but it is paintable, and certainly it is pathetic. Stumps
of columns, high and low, stand about in the places where they stood in
their unbroken pride, and though it seems a hardship that they should
not have been left lying in the kindly earth or on it instead of being
pulled up and set on end, it must be owned that they are scarcely
overworked in their present postures. More touching are those
inarticulate heaps, cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there
together and waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and
translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must always
be remembered that when they were coherent they were only beautiful
parts of a whole that was brutally unbeautiful. We have but to use the
little common-sense which Heaven has vouchsafed some of us in order to
realize that Rome, either republican or imperial, was a state for which
we can have no genuine reverence, and that mostly the ruins of her past
can stir in us no finer emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the
sake of knowledge, and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of
human interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody,
archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their
recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the grave
of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as dramatic a
spectacle as anything one can well witness; for that soil is richer than
any gold-mine in its potentiality of treasure, and it must be strictly
scrutinized, almost by particles, lest some gem of art should be cast
aside with the accumulated rubbish of centuries. Yet this drama,
poignantly suggestive as it always must be, was the least incident of
that morning in the Forum which it was my fortune to pass there with
other better if not older tourists as guest of the Genius Loci. It was
not quite a public event, though the Commendatore Boni is so well known
to the higher journalism, and even to fiction (as the reader of Anatole
France's _La Pierre Blanche_ will not have forgotten), that nothing
which he archaeologically does is without public interest, and this
excursion in the domain of antiquity was expected to result in
identifying the site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator. It was conjectured
that the temple vowed to this specific Jupiter for his public spirit in
stopping the flight of a highly demoralized Roman army would be found
where we actually found it. Archaeology seems to proceed by hypothesis,
like other sciences, and to enjoy a forecast of events before they are
actually accomplished. I do not say that I was very vividly aware of the
event in question; I could not go now and show where the temple stood,
but when I read of it in a cablegram to the American newspapers I almost
felt that I had dug it up with my own hands.

[Illustration: 18 THE ROMAN FORUM]

Of many other facts I was at the time vividly aware: of the charm of
finding the archaeologist in an upper room of the mediaeval church which
is turning itself into his study, of listening to his prefatory talk, so
informal and so easy that one did not realize how learned it was, and
then of following him down to the scene of his researches and hearing
him speak wisely, poetically, humorously, even, of what he believed he
had reason to expect to find. We stood with him by the Arch of Titus and
saw how the sculptures had been broken from it in the fragments found at
its base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the
kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need not
have the trouble of carrying the sculptures away before burning them. A
handful of iridescent glass from a house-drain near by, where it had
been thrown by the servants after breaking it, testified of the
continuity of human nature in the domestics of all ages. A somewhat
bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of
Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or
cistern which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern
at another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like a
potter's clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have antedated
the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in the small
building which seems the provisional repository of the archaeologist's
finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split
trees still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the bones and bark were
of the same indifferent interest, but the eternal pathos of human grief
appealed from what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads on
her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in
the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of
yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of
the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the
Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the
Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose
sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.

It is the voluble sorrow common to all the emotional visitors in Rome
that the past of the different generations has not been treated by the
present with due tenderness, and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in
point. But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the wilding
growths in the Colosseum and scraped it to a bareness which nature is
again trying to clothe with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered
that it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels all up and
down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to
bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help
repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem
no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive
surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those
laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not
strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so
much better than all the other Germans put together, visited the Forum,
he liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial
charge, “Laurels, laurels, evermore laurels.” After that the emotional
tourist must be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his laurels to
Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him a perpetual crown of them.




IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS


It is not every undeserving American who can have the erudition and
divination of the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a
visit to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company
of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be had
for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I
know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who lead people
about the ruins in Rome, and instruct them in the fable, and doubtless
in the moral, of the things they see. If I had profited by their
learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than any the average
American has about him, I should now be tiring the reader with knowledge
which I am so willingly leaving him to imagine in me. If he is like the
average American, he has really once had some nodding acquaintance with
the facts, but history is apt to forsake you on the scene of it, and to
come lagging back when it is too late. In this psychological experience
you feel the need of help which the peripatetic historian supplies to
the groups of perhaps rather oblivious than ignorant tourists of all
nations in all languages, but preferably English. We Anglo-Saxons seem
to be the most oblivious or most ignorant; but I would not slight our
occasionally available culture any more than I would imply that those
peripatetic historians are at all like the cicerones whom they have so
largely replaced. I believe they are instructed and scholarly men; I
offer them my respect; and I wish now that I had been one of their daily
disciples, for it is full sixty years since I read Goldsmith's _History
of Rome._ As I saw them, somewhat beyond earshot, they and their
disciples formed a spectacle which was always interesting, and, so far
as the human desire for information is affecting, was also affecting.
The listeners to the lecturers would carry back to their respective
villages and towns, or the yet simpler circles of our ordinary city
lift, vastly more association with the storied scene than I had brought
to it or should bring away. In fact, there is nothing more impressive in
the floating foreign society of Rome than its zeal for self-improvement.
No one classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to
be a traveller he is really one of them; and it is with difficulty I
keep myself from the appearance of patronizing them in these praises,
which are for the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to
be without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of their
application reached to all the historical and actual interests, to the
religious as well as the social, the political as well as the financial;
but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially turned to the study of
antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer past. There was given last
winter a series of lectures at the American School of Archaeology by the
head of it, which were followed with eager attention by hearers who
packed the room. But these lectures, which were so admirably first in.
the means of intelligent study, seemed only one of the means by which my
fellow-tourists were climbing the different branches of knowledge. All
round my apathy I felt, where I did not see, the energy of the others;
with my mind's ear I heard a rustle as of the turning leaves of
Baedekers, of Murrays, of Hares, and of the many general histories and
monographs of which these intelligent authorities advised the
supplementary reading.

If I am not so mistaken as I might very well be, however, the local
language is less studied than it was in former times, when far fewer
Italians spoke English. My own Italian was of that date; but, though I
began by using it, I found myself so often helped for a forgotten
meaning that I became subtly demoralized and fell luxuriously into the
habit of speaking English like a native of Rome. Yet tacitly, secretly
perhaps, there may have been many people who were taking up Italian as
zealously as many more were taking up antiquity. One day in the Piazza
di Spagna, in a modest little violet of a tea-room, which was venturing
to open in the face of the old-established and densely thronged parterre
opposite, I noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall,
young Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to the
very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair. She looked like some
of those athletic-minded young women of Ibsen's plays, and the pile of
books on the table beside her tea suggested a student character.  When
she had finished her tea she put these books back into a leather bag,
which they filled to a rigid repletion, and, after a few laconic phrases
with the tea-girl, she went out like going off the stage. Her powerful
demeanor somehow implied severe studies; but the tea-girl--a massive,
confident, confiding Roman--said, No, she was studying Italian, and all
those books related to the language, for which she had a passion. She
was a Swede; and here the student being exhausted as a topic, and my own
nationality being ascertained, What steps, the tea-girl asked, should
one take if one wished to go to New York in order to secure a place as
cashier in a restaurant?

My facts were not equal to the demand upon them, nor are they equal to
anything like exact knowledge of the intellectual pursuits of the many
studious foreign youth of all ages and sexes whom one meets in Rome. As
I say, our acquaintance with Italian is far less useful, however
ornamental, than it used to be. The Romans are so quick that they
understand you when they speak no English, and take your meaning before
you can formulate it in their own tongue. A classically languaged
friend of mine, who was hard bested in bargaining for rooms, tried his
potential landlord in Latin, and was promptly answered in Latin. It was
a charming proof that in the home of the Church her mother-speech had
never ceased to be spoken by some of her children, but I never heard of
any Americans, except my friend, recurring to their college courses in
order to meet the modern Latins in their ancient parlance. In spite of
this instance, and that of the Swedish votary of Italian, I decided that
the studies of most strangers were archaeological rather than
philological, historical rather than literary, topographical rather than
critical. I do not say that I had due confirmation of my theory from the
talk of the fellow-sojourners whom one is always meeting at teas and
lunches and dinners in Rome. Generally the talk did not get beyond an
exchange of enthusiasms for the place, and of experiences of the
morning, in the respective researches of the talkers.

Such of us as were staying the winter, of course held aloof from the
hurried passers-through, or looked with kindly tolerance on their
struggles to get more out of Rome in a given moment than she perhaps
yielded with perfect acquiescence. We fancied that she kept something
back; she is very subtle, and has her reserves even with people who pass
a whole winter within her gates. The fact is, there are a great many of
her, though we knew her afar as one mighty personality. There is the
antique Rome, the mediaeval Rome, the modern Rome; but that is only the
beginning. There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church,
which divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion;
but here is a field so vast that Ave may not enter it without danger of
being promptly lost in it. There is the Rome of the visiting
nationalities, severally and collectively; there is especially the
Anglo-American Rome, which if not so populous as the German, for
instance, is more important to the Anglo-Saxons. It sees a great deal of
itself socially, but not to the exclusion of the sympathetic Southern
temperaments which seem to have a strange but not unnatural affinity
with it. So far as we might guess, it was a little more Clerical than
Liberal in its local politics; if you were very Liberal, it was well to
be careful, for Conversion lurked under many exteriors which gave no
outward sign of it; if the White of the monarchy and the Black of the
papacy divide the best Roman families, of course foreigners are more
intensely one or the other than the natives. But Anglo-Saxon life was
easy for one not self-obliged to be of either opinion or party; and it
was pleasant in most of its conditions.  In Rome our internationalities
seemed to have certain quarters largely to themselves. In spite of our
abhorrence of the destruction and construction which have made modern
Rome so wholesome and delightful, most of us had our habitations in the
new quarters; but certain pleasanter of the older streets, like the Via
Sistina, Via del Babuino, Via Capo le Case, Via Gregoriana, were our
sojourn or our resort.  Especially in the two first our language filled
the outer air to the exclusion of other conversation, and within doors
the shopmen spoke it at least as well as the English think the Americans
speak it. It was pleasant to meet the honest English faces, to recognize
the English fashions, to note the English walk; and if these were
oftener present than their American counterparts, it was not from our
habitual minority, but from our occasional sparsity through the panic
that had frightened us into a homekeeping foreign to our natures.

In like manner our hyphenated nationalities have the Piazza di Spagna
for their own. There are the two English book-stores and the circulating
libraries, in each of which the books are so torn and dirty that you
think they cannot be quite so bad in the other till you try it; there
seems nothing for it, then, but to wash and iron the different Tauchnitz
authors, and afterward darn and mend them. The books on sale are, of
course, not so bad; they are even quite clean; and except for giving out
on the points of interest where you could most wish them to abound,
there is nothing in them to complain of. There is less than nothing to
complain of in the tea-room which enjoys our international favor except
that at the most psychological moment of the afternoon you cannot get a
table, in spite of the teas going on in the fashionable hotels and the
friendly houses everywhere.  The toast is exceptional; the muffins so
far from home are at least reminiscent of their native island; the tea
and butter are alike blameless. The company, to the eye of the friend of
man, is still more acceptable, for, if the Americans have dwindled, the
English have increased; and there is nothing more endearing than the
sight of a roomful of English people at their afternoon tea in a strange
land. No type seems to predominate; there are bohemians as obvious as
clerics; there are old ladies and young, alike freshly fair; there are
the white beards of age and the clean-shaven cheeks of youth among the
men; some are fashionable and some outrageously not; peculiarities of
all kinds abound without conflicting. Some talk, frankly audible, and
others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide purr, tacit or explicit,
close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving, in that assemblage of mutually
repellent personalities, for the nonce united, would best denote the
universal content.

Hard by this tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader
will no doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps
without me; after the first time, I never climbed them. The elevator
costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there is sometimes
drama thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more or
less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator and the
young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that the elevator will
hold only eight persons, but one memorable afternoon the ticket-seller
insisted upon giving a ticket to a tall, young English girl who formed
an unlawful ninth. The elevator-man, a precisian of the old school,
expelled her; the ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again
the elder stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded
its violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into
unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator and out
of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so
much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into
her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk,
to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her
ticket violently down. “Here is your ticket!” she said in English so
severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it.
“Give me back my money!” He was too much stupefied by her decision of
character to speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got
into our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously
repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way up. This
did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in parting, and
assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only old-fashioned Romans
seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay of manners which the
comfortable classes everywhere like to note in the uncomfortable. Then
some ladies of our number went off on a platform across the house-tops
to which the elevator had brought us, as if they expected to go down the
chimneys to their apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the
Piazza Trinita de' Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost
balustrade of the Spanish Steps.

It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this,
for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than
the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the most
charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than a
post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc),
knows how the successive stairways part and flow downward to right and
left, like the parted waters of a cascade, and lose themselves at the
bottom in banks of flowers. No lovelier architectural effect was ever
realized from a happy fancy; but, of course, the pictorial effect is
richer from below, especially from the Via dei Condotti, where it opens
into the Piazza di Spagna. I suppose there must be hours of the day, and
certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the Steps
have not the sunset on them. But most of the time they have the sunset
on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the banks of daffodils
and lilies and anemones and carnations and roses and almond blossoms,
keeping the downpour of the marble cascades from flooding the piazza,
and mounts, mellowing and yellowing, up their gray stone, until it
reaches the Church of Trinita de' Monti at the top.

[Illustration: 19 SPANISH STEPS]

There it lingers, I should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown
facade in an effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once
it has blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart
ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can
bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling
yourself so. It is a charm that imparts itself more in detail and is
less exclusively the effect of perpetual sunset. From the parapet
against which you lean you have a perfecter conception of the
architectural form than you get from below, and you are never tired of
seeing the successive falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then
coming together on the broad landings and again parting and coming
together.

If there were once many models, male, female, and infant, brigands,
peasants, sages, and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems
to me there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there
for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and transfer
them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in noticeable
number. I saw some small boys in steeple-crowned soft hats and short
jackets, with their little legs wound round with the favorite bandaging
of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes
at the breast; there was a patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to
pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons;
but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls,
fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below
those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds
in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there
is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of
alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied
escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he
joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are
capable; he wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our
species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.

On a Sunday evening I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye
the people who were coming back from their promenade on the Pincian
Hill, and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps.
On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I dare
say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a little
dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the circus. Two pretty
girls, smartly dressed in hats and gowns exactly alike, and doubtless
sisters, if not twins, passed down to the same level. One was with a
handsome young officer, and walked staidly beside him, as if content
with her quality of captive or captor. The other was with a civilian, of
whom she was apparently not sure. Suddenly she ran away from him to the
verge of the next fall of steps, possibly to show him how charmingly she
was dressed, possibly to tempt him by her grace in flight to follow her
madly. But he followed sanely and slowly, and she waited for him to come
up, in a capricious quiet, as if she had not done anything or meant
anything. That was all; but I am not hard to suit; and it was richly
enough for me.

[Illustration: 20 TOWARD THE PINCIAN HILL]

Her little comedy came to its denouement just under the shoulder of the
rose-roofed terrace jutting from a lowish, plainish house on the left,
beyond certain palms and eucalyptus-trees. It is one of the most sacred
shrines in Rome, for it was in this house that the “young English poet
whose name was writ in water” died to deathless fame three or fourscore
years ago. It is the Keats house, which when he lived in it was the
house of Severn the painter, his host and friend. I had visited it for
the kind sake of the one and the dear sake of the others when I first
visited Rome in 1864; and it was one of the earliest stations of my
second pilgrimage. It is now in form for any and all visitors, but the
day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple and tasteful
keeping. A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my
pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from
somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter,
who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed
his last sigh. It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish
Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch
of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and heard
him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some
such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very gentle old man and
fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might
be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to
grieve with him for the dead poet.

Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill
within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of
Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that
bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook. Afterward I
saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for
people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and
pictures; but still the sense of that day remains. The young girl
sympathized with my sympathy, and wished to find a rose for me in the
trellis through which the rain dripped. She could not, and I suggested
that there would be roses in the spring. “No,” she persisted, “sometimes
it makes them in the winter,” but I had to come away through the reeking
streets without one.

When it rains, it rains easily in Rome. But the weather was divine the
evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish Steps. The
sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a cheerful light of
electrics shone up at me from the Via dei Condotti. I stood and thought
of as much as I could summon from the past, and I was strongest, I do
not know why, with the persecutions of the early Christians. Presently a
smell of dinner came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I
was reminded to go home to my own _table d'hote._ My one-legged beggar
seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was intercepted by
the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of matches. She was not
wakened by the fall of my ten-centime piece in her tray, but the boy
drowsing beside her roused himself, and roused her to the dreamy
expression of a gratitude quite out of scale with my alms.




V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY

[Illustration: 21 SEPULCHRE OF ROMULUS, FORUM]

My visit to the Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my
ignorance and the intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured
site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the
second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings
when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with whom I
sauntered from point to point, preying upon their knowledge for my
emotion concerning each. Information is an excellent thing--in others;
and but for these friends I should not now be able to say that this
mouldering heap of brickwork, rather than that, was Julius Caesar's
house; or just where it was that Antony made his oration over the waxen
effigy which served him for Caesar's body. They helped me realize how
the business life and largely the social life of Rome centred in the
Forum, but spared me so much detail that my fancy could play about among
its vanished edifices without inconvenience from the clutter of shops
and courts and monuments which were ultimately to hem it in and finally
to stifle it. They knew their Forum so well that they could not only
gratify any curiosity I had, but could supply me with curiosity when I
had none. For the moment I was aware that this spot or that, though it
looked so improbable, was the scene of deeds which will reverberate
forever; they taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly
supposed fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I
learned to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus,
because she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that
Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was buried in
the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of it as I could
imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the
rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the
republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it,
into which Curtius (or one of three heroes of the name) leaped at an
earlier day as a specific for the pestilence which the medical science
of the period had failed to control. In our stroll about the place we
were joined by one of the several cats living in the Forum, which
offered us collectively its acquaintance, as if wishing to make us feel
at home. It joined us and it quitted us from time to time, as the whim
took it, but it did not abandon us wholly till we showed a disposition
to believe in that lake of Curtius, so called after those three
public-spirited heroes, the first being a foreigner. Then the cat, which
had more than once stretched itself as if bored, turned from us in
contempt and went and lay down in a sunny corner near the tomb of
Romulus, and fell asleep.

[Illustration: 22 TRAJAN'S FORUM AND COLUMN]

It is quite possible that my reader does not know, as lately I did not,
that the Roman Forum is but one of several forums connected with it by
ways long centuries since buried fathoms deep and built upon many
stories high. But I am now able to assure him that in the whole region
between the Roman Forum and the Forum of Trajan, which were formerly
opened into each other by the removal of a hill as tall as the top of
Trajan's Column, you pass over other forums hidden beneath your feet or
wheels. You cannot be stayed there, however, by the wonders which
archaeology will yet reveal in them (for archaeology has its relentless
eye upon every inch of the ground above them), but you will certainly
pause at the Forum of Trajan, where archaeology, as it is in
Commendatore Boni, has had its way already. In fact, until his work in
the Roman Forum is finished, the Forum of Trajan must remain his
greatest achievement, and the sculptured column of the great emperor
must serve equally as the archaeologist's monument. I do not remember
why in the old time I should have kept coming to look at that column and
study the sculptured history of Trajan's campaigns, toiling around it to
its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one
cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level and
the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area below is
free only to a large company of those cats which seem to have their
dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of ancient Rome. People
come to feed the Trajan cats with the fish sold near by for the purpose,
and one morning, in pausing to view his column from the respectful
distance I had to keep, I counted no less than thirteen of his cats in
his forum. They were of every age and color, but much more respectable
in appearance than the cats of the Pantheon, which have no such sunny
expanse as that forum for their quarters, but only a very damp corner
beside the temple, and seem to have suffered in their looks and health
from the situation. It was afterward with dismay that I realized the
fatal number of the Trajan cats coming to their breakfast that morning
so unconscious of evil omen in the figure; but as there are probably no
statistics of mortality among the cats of Rome, I shall never know
whether any of the thirteen has rendered up one of their hundred and
seventeen lives.

However, if I allowed myself to go on about the cats of Rome, either
ancient or modern, there would be no end. For instance, in a statuary's
shop in the Via Sistina there is a large yellow cat, which I one day saw
dressing the hair of the statuary's boy. It performed this office with a
very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where
ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to
time, as it licked the boy's thick, black locks, to get the effect of
its labors. On other days or at other hours it slept under the
table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even i

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