There is a view of Naples which has been photographed and printed and painted until we are all tired of it. It is a view taken from the hill which makes the northern horn of the Bay; there is a big pine tree in the foreground and Vesuvius smoking in the background, and I will bargain that most people who read this have seen that view upon a postcard, or in a shop window, and that a good many of them would rightly say that it was the most hackneyed thing in Europe.
Now some years ago I had occasion to go to Naples, a town I had always avoided for that very reason—that one heard of it until one was tired and that this view had become like last year's music-hall tunes.
I went, not of my own choice but because I had to go, and when I got there I made as complete a discovery as ever Columbus made or those sailors who first rounded Africa and found the Indian Seas.
Naples was utterly unlike anything I had imagined. Vesuvius was not a cone smoking upon the horizon—it was a great angry pyramid toppling right above me. The town was not a lazy, dirty town with all the marks of antiquity and none of energy. It was alive with commerce and all the evils and all the good of commerce. It was angrily alive; it was like a wasp nest.
I will state the plain truth at the risk of being thought paradoxical. Naples recalled to me an American seaboard town so vividly that I could have thought myself upon the Pacific. I could have gone on for days digging into all this new experience, turning it over and fructifying it. My business allowed me not twenty-four hours, but the vision was one I shall never forget, and it was as completely new and as wholly creative, or re-creative, of the mind, as is that land-fall which an adventurous sailor makes when he finds a new island at dawn upon a sea not yet travelled.
Every one, therefore, should go out to discover, five miles from home, or five hundred. Every one should assure himself against the cheating tedium which books and maps create in us, that the world is perpetually new: and oddly enough it is not a matter of money.
VII ON INNS
Here am I sitting in an Inn, having gloomily believed not half an hour ago that Inns were doomed with all other good things, but now more hopeful and catching avenues of escape through the encircling decay.