Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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.

  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 le
ast 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.

  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.