that accounts for a good deal of the appreciation and even
the criticism of works of art.

IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS

If the joke of the door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in
any sense as some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being
voluntary. In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember
hearing in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three
months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I had
always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make
laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of
jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an infection of humor seemed to
spread from them to all the lower classes, who were as ready to joke as
the lower classes of Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of
them. The joking habit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena,
and at Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with
_bonhomie._ But the Romans were preferably serious, at least with the
average American, though, if I had tried them in their English instead
of my Italian, it might have been different. At times I thought, they
felt the weight of being Romans, as it had descended to them from
antiquity, and that the strain of supporting it had sobered them. In any
case, though there was shouting by night, and some singing of not at all
the Neapolitan quality and still less the Neapolitan quantity, there was
no laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.

Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which
would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman
dog. It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly
man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the
tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder
seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the
younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts
of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then
a cabman drove out of the mellee very excitedly, and then turned and
drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted
cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another's
backs and their heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders.
On the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one
of those strange images whom you