A Traveler at Forty

by Theodore Dreiser

The wonder of Florence grew a little under the Professor’s quiet commercial analysis, for after exhausting this matter of reproducing so cheaply, we proceeded to a discussion of the present conditions of the city.

“It’s very different commercially from anything in America or the north of Europe,” he said, “or even the north of Italy, for as yet we have scarcely anything in the way of commerce here. We still build in the fashion they used five hundred years ago—narrow streets and big cornices in order to keep up the atmosphere of the city, for we are not strong enough commercially yet to go it alone, and besides I don’t think the Italians will ever be different. They are an easy-going race. They don’t need the American “two dollars a day” to live on. Fifty centimes will do. For one thousand dollars (five thousand lire) you can rent a palace here for a year and I can show you whole floors overlooking gardens that you can rent for seventeen dollars a month. We have a garden farther out that we use as a workshop here in Florence, in the heart of the city, which we rent for four hundred dollars a year.”

“What about the Italian’s idea of progress? Isn’t he naturally constructive?” I asked Mr. Jesuram.

“Rarely the Italian. Not at this date. We have many Jews and Germans here who are doing well, and foreign capital is building street-railways. I think the Italians will have to be fused with another nation to experience a new birth. The Germans are mixing with them. If they ever get as far south as Sicily, Italy will be made over; the Germans themselves will be made over. I notice that the Italians and Germans get along well together.”

I thought of the age-long wars between the Teutons and the Italians from the fifth to the twelfth century, but those days are over. They can apparently mingle in peace now, as I saw here and farther north.

It was also while I was in Florence that I first became definitely and in an irritated way conscious of a certain aspect of travel which no doubt thousands of other travelers have noted for themselves but of which, nevertheless, I feel called upon to speak.

I could never come in to the breakfast table either there, or at Rome, or in Venice, or Milan, without encountering a large company of that peculiarly American brand of sightseers, not enormously rich, of no great dignity, but comfortable and above all enormously pleased with themselves. I could never look at any of this tribe, comfortably clothed, very pursy and fussy, without thinking what a far cry it is from the temperament which makes for art or great originality to the temperament which makes for normality—the great, so-called sane, conservative mass. God spare me! I’ll admit that for general purposes, the value of breeding, trading, rearing of children in comfort, producing the living atmosphere of life in which we “find” ourselves and from which art, by the grace of great public occasions may rise, people of this type are essential. But seen individually, dissociated from great background masses, they are—but let me not go wild. Viewed from the artistic angle, the stress of great occasions, great emotion, great necessities, they fall into such pigmy weaknesses, almost ridiculous. Here abroad they come so regularly, Pa and Ma. Pa infrequently, and a little vague-looking from overwork and limited vision of soul; Ma not infrequently, a little superior, vain, stuffy, envious, dull and hard. I never see such a woman as that but my gorge rises a little. The one idea of a pair like this, particularly of the mother, is the getting her children (if there be any) properly married, the girls particularly, and in this phase of family politics Pa has obviously little to say. Their appearance abroad, accompanied by Henry and George, Junior, and Mary and Anabel, is for—I scarcely know what. It is so plain on the face of it that no single one of them has the least inkling of what he is seeing. I sat in a carriage with two of them in Rome, viewing the ruins of the Via Appia, and when we reached the tomb of Cæcilia Metella I heard:

“Oh, yes. There it is. What was she, anyhow? He was a Roman general, I think, and she was his wife. His house was next door and he built this tomb here so she would be near him. Isn’t it wonderful? Such a nice idea!”

So far as I could make out from watching this throng the principal idea was to be able to say that they had been abroad. Poor old Florence! Its beauty and its social significance passed unrecognized. Art, so far as I could judge from the really unmoved spectators present, was for crazy people. The artist was some weird, spindling, unfortunate fool, a little daft perhaps, but tolerable for a strange furore he seemed to have created. Great men made and used him. He was, after his fashion, a servant. The objectionable feature of a picture like Botticelli’s “Spring” would be the nudity of the figures! From a Rubens or a nude Raphael we lead brash, unctuous, self-conscious Mary away in silence. If we encounter, perchance, quite unexpectedly a “Leda” by Michelangelo or a too nude “Assumption” by Bronzino, we turn away in disgust. Art must be limited to conventional theories and when so limited is not worth much anyhow.

It was amazing to see them strutting in and out, their good clothes rustling, an automobile in waiting, noisily puffing the while they gather aimless “impressions” wherewith to browbeat their neighbors. George and Henry and Mary and Anabel, protesting half the time or in open rebellion, are duly led to see the things which have been the most enthusiastically recommended, be they palaces or restaurants.