I often wondered what it was—the best—which these people got out of their trip abroad. The heavy Germans I saw I always suspected of having solid Teutonic understanding and appreciation of everything; the English were uniformly polite, reserved, intelligent, apparently discriminating. But these Americans! If you told them the true story of Antinous, whose head I saw them occasionally admiring; or forced upon them the true details of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the Medici, or even the historical development of Art, they would fly in horror. They have no room in their little crania for anything save their own notions,—the standards of the Methodist Church at Keokuk. I think, sometimes, perhaps it is because we are all growing to a different standard, trying to make life something different from what it has always been, or appeared to be, that all the trouble comes about. Time will remedy that. Life,—its heavy, interminable processes,—will break any theory. I conceive of life as a blind goddess, pouring from separate jars, one of which she holds in each hand, simultaneously, the streams of good and evil, which mingling, make this troubled existence, flowing ever onward to the sea.
It was also while I was at Florence that I finally decided to change my plan and visit Venice. “It is a city without a disappointment,” a publisher-friend of mine had one time assured me, with the greatest confidence. And so, here at Florence, on this first morning, I altered my plans; I changed my ticket at Thomas Cook’s and crowded Venice in between Florence and Milan. I gave myself a stay of four days, deciding to lengthen it if I chose.
I really think that every traveler of to-day owes a debt of gratitude to Thomas Cook & Sons. I never knew, until I went abroad what an accommodation the offices of this concern are. Your mail is always courteously received and cared for; your routes and tickets are changed and altered at your slightest whim; your local bank is their cash-desk and the only advisers you have, if you are alone and without the native tongue at your convenience, are their clerks and agents at the train. It does not make any difference to me that that is their business and that they make a profit. In a foreign city where you are quite alone you would grant them twice the profit for this courtesy. And it was my experience, in the slight use I made of their service, that their orders and letters of advice were carefully respected and that when you came conducted by Thomas Cook, whether you took the best or the worst, you were politely and assiduously looked after.
One of the most amusing letters that I received while abroad was from this same publisher-friend who wanted me to go to Venice. Not so long before I left Rome, he had arrived with his wife, daughter, and a young girl friend of his daughter whose first trip abroad they were sponsoring. At a luncheon they had given me, the matter of seeing the Pope had come up and I mentioned that I had been so fortunate as to find some one who could introduce me, and that it was just possible, if they wished it, that my friend would extend his courtesy to them. The young girls in particular were eager, but I was not sure. I left Rome immediately afterward, writing to my British correspondent, bespeaking his interest in their behalf, and at the same time to my publisher-friend that I was doing so. As an analysis of girlhood vagaries, keen and clever, read his letter:
My Dear Dreiser:
The young woman who thinks she wants to see the Pope goes under the name of Margaret,—but I wouldn’t try very hard to bring it about, because if Margaret went, my daughter would want to go, and if Margaret and my daughter went, my wife would feel out in the cold. (The old man can stand it.)
Margaret’s motives are simply childish curiosity, possibly combined with a slight desire to give pleasure to the Holy Father.
But don’t try to get that Papal interview for Margaret unless you can get it for all the ladies. You will introduce a serpent into my paradise.
No serpent was introduced because I couldn’t get the interview.
And the cells and cloister of San Marco,—shall I ever forget them? I went there on a spring morning (spring in Italy) when the gleaming light outside filled the cloister with a cool brightness, and studied the frescoes of Fra Angelico and loitered between the columns of the arches in the cloister proper, meditating upon the beauty of the things here gathered. Really, Italy is too beautiful. One should be a poet in soul, insatiable as to art, and he should linger here forever. Each poorest cell here has a small fresco by Fra Angelico, and the refectory, the chapter house, and the foresteria are filled with large compositions, all rich in that symbolism which is only wonderful because of the art-feeling of the master. I lingered in the cells, the small chambers once occupied by Savonarola, and meditated on the great zealot’s imaginings. In a way his dream of the destruction of the Papacy came true. Even as he preached, the Reformation was at hand, only he did not know it. Martin Luther was coming. The black cross was over Rome! And also true was his thought that the end of the old order in Italy had come. It surely had. Never afterwards was it quite the same and never would it be so again. And equally true was his vision of the red cross over Jerusalem, for never was the simple humanism of Jesus so firmly based in the minds of men as it is to-day, though all creeds and religious theories totter wearily to their ruin. Savonarola was destroyed, but not his visions or his pleas. They are as fresh and powerful to-day, as magnetic and gripping, as are any that have been made in history.