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There is money in the literature of decay, and those who work for money have "verily their reward." But these performances are not the work of men. They have no relation to literature, or art, or human life. These are not in decadence because imitations are sold on street-corners or tossed into our laps on railway trains.
The Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German.
Not even on the night preceding his wedding was an Auld Licht ever known to stay out after ten o'clock. So weekly conclaves at street-corners came to an end at a comparatively early hour, one Coelebs after another shuffling silently from the square until it echoed, deserted, to the town-house clock.
till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom; but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance!
I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
His disciples everywhere pray in places quite as public as the street-corners forbidden in the next chapter of St. Matthew, and give their alms publicly or in secret as seems to them best. It may be contended that in this spiritual interpretation of Christ's commands it is very easy to go too far and "interpret" all the meaning out of them.
Nor is there any government, however despotic, that ventures to deny to the least of its subjects the privilege of a sociable chat. Not the Thirty Tyrants even the clubbed post-captains of old Athens could stop the wagging tongues at the street-corners.
When we ventured out, we were followed by the gaze of the old town: people standing in their doorways, old women popping their heads from the chamber-windows, and stalwart men idle on Saturday at e'en, after their week's hard labor clustering at the street-corners, merely to stare at our unpretending selves.
When the same boys stood on the street-corners and cast sheep's eyes at the girls, the business-like Joseph stood in the store-door and contemplated these same boys with eyes such as a hungry cat casts upon a brood of young birds who he expects to eat when they grow older.
And arm in arm they swung into the dark avenue, singing "Barney Riley" in resonant undertones, while overhead the chilly little Western stars looked down through pallid convolutions of moving clouds, and the wind in the gas-lit avenue grew keener on the street-corners. "Cooler followed by clearing," observed Boots in disgust. "Ugh; it's the limit, this nipping, howling hemisphere."
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