Florentine Notes - Page 2

interest; but
they make us ask ourselves why we should expect the Italians to
persist in manners and practices which we ourselves, if we had
responsibilities in the matter, should find intolerable. The
Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith on the
carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for what
struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these
observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the
occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the
merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no
better example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment
should keep all Florence standing and strolling, densely packed
for hours, in the cold streets. There was nothing to see that
mightn't be seen on the Cascine any fine day in the year--nothing
but a name, a tradition, a pretext for sweet staring idleness.
The faculty of making much of common things and converting small
occasions into great pleasures is, to a son of communities
strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic
of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and vexes
him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a
moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual
sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than
the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his
mood is wisest when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to
all the senses as the sign of an unconscious philosophy of
life, instilled by the experience of centuries--the philosophy
of people who have lived long and much, who have discovered no
short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention of effort,
and so have come to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact
that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on the
lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its
holiday in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own
temper an affair quite independent of the splendour of the
compensation decreed on a higher line to the weariness of its
legs. That the corso was stupid or lively was the shame or
the glory of the powers "above"--the fates, the gods, the
forestieri, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy.
Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the
houses, obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently,
patiently, gently, and never pushing, nor trampling, nor
swearing, nor staggering. This liberal margin for festivals in
Italy gives the masses a more than man-of-the-world urbanity in
taking their pleasure.

Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside
an unsophisticated young person of either sex is