“Then do you think, dear Mary, that material progress, or what we generally call improvements, conduces, on the whole, to human happiness?”
“Ah! there lies the really difficult question, and one which I have again and again striven to answer satisfactorily to myself. Happiness is a term generally used to cover more than it has any right to do. There is only one real happiness, and that is what man finds in himself, in union with his God. That happiness is positive, and there is no other positive. We begin it here, but with great drawbacks and frequent interruptions. We complete it in the light of glory. But outside that, hanging on to the skirts and fringes of real happiness, there are contentment, pleasure, ease, and last, but not least, comfort. No one can impart happiness, pure and simple, to another. The nearest approach to doing so is in a reciprocal affection. But God alone can satisfy the soul of man. What we can confer on others and on ourselves are various degrees of those lesser goods which I have enumerated. Now, all these enter into the general plan of God's dealings with his creatures. The animal world is susceptible of them in its degree, and we ourselves in a far higher degree. As they enter into the general scheme, I am at liberty to conclude, not only from my own sensations, which might delude me, but from that very fact, that they are of very great importance, and that everything which augments the sum of them is a blessing. They are the ore out of which we coin our charities to others. They are therefore essentially God's gifts, to be given by us again.”
“I know what you mean, Mary. I shall never forget the pleasure I had in taking one of your air-cushions to that poor woman at T——, who was dying of cancer, and to whom the slightest pressure of even an ordinary pillow was so painful. Now, air-cushions are a comparatively modern invention. Dear mother used to say no one ever heard of mackintoshes and gutta-percha in her day.”
“No, Jane, nor yet of lucifer matches. It was terrible work to have to nurse the sick through the night, with a flint and steel and tinder as the only way of striking a light. I think I see now my old nurse, with her large frilled night-cap, hammering away for what [pg 351] seemed to us children a good three minutes, because the rush-light had gone out, and baby was crying. I can remember I had for that flint and steel very much the same feelings an Indian has for his fetish. I used to wonder how the flint hid the fire in its cold bosom, and why sometimes it seemed to require so many more persuasive knocks than at others before it gave out its sparks. But for the matter of that, as a child I had secretly embraced the earliest form of religion, the animism of the lower races of savages—and I lent a soul to all inanimate, and even all inorganic, matter. I believe, if we could but find it out, all children do so more or less. The external world is so wonderful to them that they vaguely imagine a personality and a consciousness to exist in everything. There is not a little girl who does not, in her heart, believe that her doll is something more than wax and sawdust; and I would not give much for her, if she did not. The exuberance of faith leads to an exuberance of tenderness; and the girl who believes in her doll has the germ of a good mother in her.”
“You seemed just now to attach a great importance to comfort, Mary. I am surprised at that.”
“It arises, in a measure, from my own personal experience. Besides which, comfort may mean almost anything; for it is generally whatever we are used to. I remember so well, years ago, when the sorrows of my life first threatened to overpower me, how thankfully I felt the warm, soft arms of mere outward well-being so closely round me. To me they were no more than comforts, because all my life I had been used to them. To others they would have seemed luxuries. When I used to go up to London alone to my father's house, and find all ready to my hand—well-appointed servants, large, warm rooms, and a good table, with nothing of meanness, or sparing, or pinching in the unextravagant but perfectly organized home that was open to me—I used often to lean back in my easy-chair, and say to myself, ‘I am very unhappy; but, thank God, I am not uncomfortable!’ Later on, you know, it was not so. I was a Catholic, and doors that had been open to me before were closed for ever. Then came the time for discomfort. If I wanted to go to London, I had to go to a lodging. The furniture was shabby and dirty; the fires smoked; the food was badly cooked. I drove about in hired vehicles, perished with cold, and shaken to death. I knew I was in no way degraded by it all; but it was new and painfully strange to me, and I felt degraded by an amount of discomforts which in my youth I had never approached. It did not, in itself, make me unhappy, but it added a thousandfold to the suffering from real causes for unhappiness. I used to say they were the splinters of my cross, though not my cross itself. Ever since then, I never see a person in sorrow without being anxious to make them at least comfortable. There is nothing, you see, approaching to asceticism in my view, dear Jane; but, at any rate, one is not bound to be ascetic for others.”
Mary and I were sitting side by side in the railway-carriage, I having come from my seat opposite in order the better to hear. But now I returned to my old place, just as we paused at the station of Caserta, and saw the largest palace in Europe, now empty and almost deserted, not far off.
The great object in our visit to Naples was to be as near as possible to our friends, the Vernons. We were to go first to a hotel, and then look out for a villa at Posilippo, near the one occupied by themselves, which was called Casinelli, from the family of that name to whom it belonged. We had written to Ida Vernon to beg she would choose our hotel and our rooms. She had lodged us at a very comfortable pension on the Chiaja, and wrote us word we must, on reaching the station at 10 o'clock at night, look out for their servant, Monica; and that she would wear a red handkerchief pinned across, gold earrings, and a blue skirt. We were not to expect the universal black hair and eyes of the Italian woman, as hers were soft brown. The station is very large and very badly lighted. But as soon as I got out, I ran to the grating—a high iron railing, behind which stood the crowd of people, friends, servants, porters, and mere lookers-on, all pushing and squeezing to catch sight of those they expected by the train. I soon made out the blue skirt, and red kerchief, and the amiable, smiling face of Monica. She welcomed us exactly as if we had been old friends, and that it was a personal pleasure to herself that we had arrived. She had brought a carriage for us the size of a small house, but which refused (through the coachman) to take luggage. That was to follow in another kind of conveyance immediately after us. Every sort of injunction was given as to its destination, and, persuaded all was right, we rumbled over the large flags of the streets of Naples to the far end of the Chiaja, where we were to lodge. There were flowers in our room and a note from Ida; and the next morning we were to meet, after a separation of seven years. Meanwhile, our impedimenta was slowly grinding its way past our door, up the steep hill of Strada Nuova, on to Posilippo, where our friends reside—a good twenty minutes from our abode—down the hill, through the vineyard, and up to the door of the Villa Casinelli, where, arriving about midnight, they thundered and thumped till the tired Monica had donned once more the blue skirt, while Lucia was screaming that there were robbers. Ida came forth in a warm wrapper; Elizabeth's tall figure was draped in white; Helen peeped out of the half-open door; and the good Padre Cataldo, their chaplain, in beretta and soutane, had to emerge from his little sanctum, at the furthest end of the long, narrow house, before peace could be restored, and our mountain of huge black trunks, portmanteaus, and leather bags could be induced to retrace their needless steps, climb again that zig-zag road up the steep tufa rock, and reach us, worn out with waiting and feverish with impatience for night-gear, at about one o'clock in the morning.
Brilliant sunshine, streaming into the room the next day, woke us up to the sense of the joyous, bounding life of these delicious climes. O noisy Naples! what clamorous cries, what vibrating shouts, what shrill feminine voices, fill thy glaring streets through the livelong day and far into the unrestful night. The horses neigh as they do not neigh in any more tranquil climes. The usually silent ass is here a garrulous animal. The dogs bark and snarl in a dialect special to Naples. The women scream like cockatoos, and never address each other in lower tones than as if shouting [pg 353] a word of command on board a man-of-war in a gale of wind. Their habits are not conversational, but screamational; and the most cordial civility is communicated like a threat, while an affectionate compliment is conveyed in sounds sufficient to startle the most supine into lively attention. Young girls hiss and squeal; infants bellow and roar. It is noise, noise, all day long; and over all a remorseless sunshine on white, glaring pavements of flag-stones a quarter of a yard square and more, like the pavement of the ancient Romans, such as we still see it in the Via Sacra near the Colosseum, and which resounds to the metallic tread of donkey, mule, and horse, or to the softer, shuffling pit-a-pat of the herds of bearded goats that traverse the city at early morn and eventide.
Mary's bed-room opened into a large loggia full of flowers—geraniums, petunias, and carnations in full blossom, though it was only the month of March; but so had they blossomed more or less all through the winter. A few orange-trees in tubs were there with golden fruit and star-like flowers. Then the blue sky and the bluer bay! Yes, it was the plenitude of life that one only knows in the South, with the delicious sense of the pleasure of mere existence, which tempts one to adopt the dolce far niente, and makes living and breathing seem a full accomplishment of the day's duties.