Part 3
... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be spoken of with praise.
"Whose villa is that?" asked I.
"Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know."
At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.
Everywhere there was an air of consternation. The Austrians had just re-occupied the town, and the streets were full of the "hated barbarians," rattling about with long swords and standing on guard at the doors of public buildings. The walls bristled with military notices. Among others I read one exhorting all well-disposed people to surrender arms of every kind by a certain day at a place named. The people seemed to be stupefied, and gazed in dull wonder upon the soldiers.
Out of the square, ringing with Austrian sabres, we stepped into the Duomo, dim and lofty and hushed, untouched by revolutions or triumphs. A few inodorous sinners were kneeling and praying. They were very poor and ignorant. But this was their palace, and they looked as if they knew that the great Emperor of the barbarians had not one more gorgeous or solemn.
We tried to secure seats in the post for Milan. There was no place. We applied at the offices of public and private diligences. It was still impossible. The evening was cool and clear, and we considered. The distance to Milan was but eight hours of our walking, and we were making a walking tour. And although we had scarcely bargained for a promenade over the plains of Lombardy in an August sun--yet this perfect moon? Should we turn back without seeing the Goths encamped around the most glorious of Gothic cathedrals?
It was nine o'clock when we shouldered our knapsacks and set forth. The dwellers in romantic Como, standing at their doors, looked wonderingly upon the four pedestrians marching in regular resolute tramp along the streets, evidently moving upon Milan. The small children plainly thought us a part of the imperial and royal army. "Here come the Austrians," whispered one boy to another, as he gazed at the gray wide-awakes and knapsacks.
The mild Francis looked at him with the air of an army which would respect persons and property so long as it was unmolested, and wished the boy so soft a _buona notte_ that he smiled gently, and I am sure his dreams were not disturbed.
We passed out of the gate of Como full against the round rising moon, and took the broad hard highway for Milan. We passed a few wagons loaded with the furniture of some fugitive rolling slowly along. As we pushed on, the idea of penetrating by night and on foot into a country at war was stimulating and novel. But what consciousness of war could survive in the deep peace of that night? The fields were covered with high corn, and the hard straight road went before us in dim perspective. There were no other travellers. Two or three empty vetturas or a wine cart straggled lazily by, the little bells upon the horses tinkling, and the drivers fast asleep. Nor were the villages many. As we passed a group of half a dozen houses a fellow was sleeping soundly upon a bench at a door. When we broke in upon the silence of night by asking the name of the village, he sprang up nimbly and limped rapidly out of sight as if the question had been a pistol-shot and had wounded him. Everybody was nervous "in questo momento." Towards midnight we stopped at a house which should have been near the point at which we meant to sleep until sunrise, and roused an old lady who shrilly chirped and twittered her terror through the slide in the door. But satisfying her that we were neither Croats nor cannibals, she told us that we were yet a mile or two from Balasina.
It was now twelve o'clock, and the land seemed sunk in a sleep of death. There was no sound but our own echoes as we entered the dreary, dismal village, which, like all Italian villages, is merely a dirty street bordered with gloomy houses. They looked so hopeless with their grim stone fronts, high-barred windows out of reach, and huge gates, as if expecting nothing but hostility, that when we stopped before the inn we felt like the wretched wights who beheld the dungeons of an ogre; and when Edmund exclaimed in what seemed a terrible voice, so still was the night, "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" we started as if he had joked in church. Then the vision of a pleasant inn hung for a moment in our minds, and the sense of the preposterous contrast awakened a loud peal of laughter which died away echoing among those houses which were as hospitable as sea-crags. While we stood debating, a group of peasants, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, passed spectrally by, staring steadily at us, as if they would not be unwilling to strike a final blow for the kingdom of Italy.
They disappeared, and we struck a resounding blow upon the door of the albergo, and another and another. After a while there was a sound of stealthily unbarring window-shutters, followed by a voice demanding the reason of the tumult. We explained that we were friends who wanted beds for the night. No, that was impossible, "the voice replied far up the height;" there were no beds, and we had better push on to the next tavern. We expostulated in many tongues with the dimly-visioned head that now appeared, pleading that we were strangers from a far country who were very tired and sleepy. The head disappeared for a few moments and we heard a low colloquy. Then the great gate of the albergo swung sullenly open, and we stepped into a dim court, and the dimly-visioned face became a face like a dull razor, it was so thin-featured and stupid. The man asked us to stop, and, stepping aside, he called a woman's name, then stood waiting, his wretched dozing face illuminated by the weak lustre of a long-wicked tallow-candle which he held. Presently he moved on along the windows of the court conversing with an invisible within the house. When those murmuring arrangements were made, he led us up a dirty stone staircase, trying to open various doors with keys that did not fit the locks; and finally, after a desperate wrestle with one, he swore fiercely in a thin, wiry voice that made the blood run cold, and then smashed the door of the chamber, carrying away wood-work and lock together. It was a vast room of immense discomfort, and after barricading the disabled door with tables and chairs, we lay down and fell asleep upon beds which could furnish no dreams.
In the morning we ate grapes and peaches, and finding a wagon which we could hire, we bribed our pedestrian consciences and bowled over the beautiful road to Milan as republicans, reluctantly confessing that the imperial and royal post-roads were the best in the world.
"Yes--but not for the public benefit," said the mild Francis; "they are for the quicker transport of troops and artillery to oppress the people."
Silent, broken-hearted Milan! No, not yet visibly broken-hearted, for the Cathedral sparkled pure and lofty in the rare, blue summer air. It was the morning of the Feast of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated, and was therefore high festival. But the people had little aspect of joy. We stopped at the gate, and sat in the steady glare of the sun while our passports were closely inspected. Outside the city wall lay a wilderness of tree trunks, which had been levelled in expectation of a siege by the Austrians. They were useless now; and groups of soldiers in gray slouched hats and black plumes--a kind of Robin Hood uniform--were clustered idly and curiously about the gate. They looked worn and red and wasted, and I fancied had taken part in the fight of the burning day which had made almost as many idiots as corpses in the Austrian army.
Within the city the streets were broken up, and the paving-stones designed for barricades were merely roughly laid back again in their places. In the long vista of the streets there was no shop open. The only signs of traffic were the stands of the fruit-merchants shaded by gayly-striped awnings, and covered with piles of glowing fruit. Multitudes of brightly-dressed people strolled idly and curiously up and down, and a company of sappers and miners marched by without music, but carrying their implements and their soiled accoutrements. They were dirty and draggled, like a corps marching across a battle-field to dig a hopeless ditch. There were no carriages moving; there was no noise, no hurry, no excitement, only that scuffling murmur which makes the silence of a great city spectral. The stately Milanese women walked finely by. Their long black hair was drawn away from the forehead and folded in massive plaits; and the black veil that hung from the back of the head was partly gathered over the arm. Queen-like they walked, carrying the bright-colored fan which was raised to shield their eyes from the sun, or languidly waved against their bosoms. Forms of the Orient or of Spain, the imagination touched them with pathetic dignity--matrons of a lost country.
HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE
It was a very distinguished and agreeable company that greeted Mr. Herbert Spencer at dinner, and the speaking was capital. His own address was an interesting paper, in which he preached "the gospel of relaxation." In an interview published some time before, he had made some incisive criticisms upon American life and character, and in his dinner address he said that he was going to find fault.
"The Redcoats all talk to us like uncles or pedagogues," exclaimed Americus, impatiently. "What business have they to lecture us in this style? We are quite old enough to take care of ourselves, and quite able to run this continent without any instruction from Englishmen. Suppose that some American guest in England should say to his hosts that he wanted to give them some good advice, and point out to them a few of their defects, and then proceed to pat them on the head with patronizing praise, don't you think there would be a storm? If strangers like us, very well; if they don't like us, very well. It is a matter of supreme indifference to us."
Why, then, Americus, do we ask them how they like us? And why should the people of one country scornfully decline to hear the comments of sensible people of other countries? Every man is, or ought to be, glad to receive intelligent counsel, and to see his life from other points of view than his own. Why should not the citizen be equally sensible? We did not ask De Tocqueville to come and see us and analyze our political institutions and their operations. We did not ask Von Holst to write our constitutional history. But De Tocqueville and Von Holst have laid us and all other lovers of popular constitutional liberty under great obligations. Both of them have written better books of their kind about us than any American has written.
It is absurd to snarl that we don't care what they say, and that they had better stay at home and not lecture us. When Dickens stung us with the satire of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, he was not only accused of ingratitude--as if a man were bound to find no fault with any abuse, and not to criticise any tendency, in a country where he had been kindly welcomed--but he was told to look at home, and assured that if he wanted to depict outrageous evils and ridiculous people he had only to portray his beloved England. That was said with a fine air of indignation. But what else was Dickens doing all his life? What are his books, in this point of view, but a prolonged arraignment of the abuses and of the absurd social types of his native England? But when Henry James, Jun., draws a good-natured and shrewd sketch of the American girl abroad in Daisy Miller, although it is plainly intended to show to conventional Europe that the American girl is misjudged, we petulantly wonder why he could not choose another type to illustrate.
The observations of intelligent foreign critics are no more hostile than the American criticisms which they confirm. When, for instance, after a very intelligent recognition of the material advantages of this country, Mr. Spencer says that if there had been another and higher progress commensurate with the material advance there would be nothing to wish, he says nothing which very many Americans have not felt and said, and he adds an improvement from history which had occurred to many Americans, and had been strongly stated by them, that while the republics of the Middle Ages surrounded themselves with material splendor, their liberty decayed. And what is this but a contemporary statement of the old truth which Goldsmith put into memorable verse a hundred years ago,
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
Mr. Spencer's further remarks that under the forms of freedom we may lose its substance, and that in some ways, which he points out, we are losing it, is the burden of the warning of many an intelligent American, which does not need the old illustration of Caesar's introduction of the empire under republican forms, nor the warning of Burke, that "ambition, though it has ever the same general views, has not at all times the same means nor the same particular objects." So when Mr. Spencer says that paper constitutions will not work as they are intended to work, and that the real basis and bulwark of national greatness and of progressive liberty is character and not education, he says what every thoughtful American perceives and believes. He does not say, indeed, what many Americans know, and what explains the emphasis with which we insist upon education, that the perception of the desirability of general education is in itself an evidence of character. Education alone may not save a people from political trouble, but constitutional liberty will not be maintained by an ignorant people.
That our good-nature is a kind of moral indifference which is really a defect of character is another of Mr. Spencer's observations which is a corroboration of much American comment upon American life. It has an explanation in the conditions of that life for which Mr. Spencer does not make allowance. But his remark is only that of the railroad traveller last summer which this Easy Chair recorded. In a new country--if an American without incurring the penalty of high-treason may call this a new country--everybody must good-humoredly help everybody else, and make the best of everything.
Perhaps Mr. Spencer has not heard the story of the American gentleman travelling in a certain part of the country, who was quartered in a hotel, in a room of which the window opened upon the piazza where his fellow-citizens sat tilted back in chairs, talking, reading the newspapers, and expectorating. There was no shade or shutter to the window. The traveller, desiring to change his dress, for want of any other curtain hung a shirt over the window to secure his seclusion. But a watchful fellow-citizen chanced to see the unwonted attempt to escape the public eye, and the traveller was surprised in the most intimate stage of his change of raiment to see the improvised curtain suddenly torn away, and a face thrust inquiringly into the window with the remark, "I jess wanted to see what you're so---- private about." The case was an extreme one, and a laugh was certainly a better recourse than a revolver.
In everything that involves a principle, as Mr. Spencer truly says, there is profound wisdom in Hamlet's phrase, "Greatly to find quarrel in a straw." But this again is only a new face of the old wisdom _obsta principiis_. For a straw shows which way the wind blows. How can a sensible American quarrel with the shrewd and kindly insight of a quiet Englishman who, when he is asked his opinion, shows that he agrees with the asker? At the dinner Mr. Spencer did not speak as an Englishman, or a critic, or a cynic, but as a philosopher. The end of all our study and endeavor, he said, should be complete living. We do not learn for learning's sake, we are not self-denying for the sake of self-denial, but all is for fuller and richer living. Intemperate devotion to work of any kind, like all intemperance, weakens the power of right living. In America, as in England, there is this absorbing passion for work. Therefore, in the interest of a better and more truly efficient life, let us heed the gospel of relaxation and recreation.
It was, as he said, an unconventional after-dinner speech, and Carl Schurz very happily cited the speaker himself as a striking illustration--as striking as any Yankee--of the consequences of disregarding his own doctrine of the desirability of recreation for a completer life. But it was not an English uncle "tipping" his bumptious American nephew with good advice, nor a pedagogue lecturing us upon our follies and defects, nor a supercilious foreigner condescending. It was a thoughtful guest of our own kindred, of the same high and generous purpose that we attribute to the best of our countrymen, comparing notes in the most friendly way, and speaking to us not distinctively as Americans so much as men living in America. If any American of corresponding standing with Mr. Spencer should go to England and speak to Englishmen after dinner in the same simple and friendly way, they would be very foolish fellows if they listened with any less courtesy and heed than we have listened to Mr. Spencer.
HONOR
These are very precious words of Lovelace:
"I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more."
And Francis First's message to his mother after Pavia, "All is lost but honor," is in the same key. Yet honor has been as much travestied as liberty, and the crimes committed in its name are as many. Falstaff's is a sharp antistrophe: "What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air." But for that whiff of air how many noble lives have been sacrificed!
Alexander Hamilton knew his own time, and he decided that his refusal of Burr's challenge would be regarded as cowardly, and destroy his prestige and influence. We may say that a morally greater man would nevertheless have dared to refuse it, but we must also consider that Hamilton knew the popular estimate of his own standard of life, and would naturally test his conduct by that standard. He was a soldier and a man of the world of the eighteenth century. Dr. Nott, the echoes of whose famous sermon on Hamilton's death still linger in tradition, might have declined to fight and been justified. He was a clergyman, and popular feeling excused him from resorting to the field of honor. But it is very doubtful if it would have excused Hamilton.
He might have urged that Burr had no right to make his demand. But Hamilton knew that he had spoken most strongly of Burr, and he knew that Burr knew it. He thought Burr an unprincipled and dangerous fellow, and he said so plainly. But there was the familiar preface to Hamilton's explanation of the charges against him as Secretary of the Treasury. Could he take the lofty height of moral principle? Or could he stand upon the technical punctilio of the duel? His honor, by which he meant the consistency of his life and the standards that he acknowledged, seemed to him to allow him no alternative, and he was slain by the necessity of what is unquestionably a false sense of honor.
A man's honor, in the sense that we may attribute to the lines of Lovelace, is his most precious possession. But it is something which is wholly in his own keeping, and is not at the mercy or whim of another. He can soil it, but except himself the whole world cannot smirch it. If a man had told Dr. Channing that he lied, or had dashed a glass of wine in his face, the honor of Dr. Channing would still have remained unsullied, not because he was a minister, but because of a reason which is equally applicable to all other men--because of his moral rectitude and courage. That a ribald tongue railed at him for lying when he had spoken the truth could not affect him except with pity or wonder. Even if the charge were true and he had told a lie, he would, indeed, have soiled his own honor, but the railer would not have touched it.
This view assumes that honor is something else than notoriety, which in turn is something very different from fame or character. Notoriety is current familiarity with a man's name, which is given by much mention of it arising from any kind of conduct. Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds or noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind. But honor is absolutely individual and personal. It is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is that quality which cannot be insulted. This is the sublime instinct of which Lovelace sings. I could not so much love thee, Lucasta, purest of the pure, if I did not love purity more. _Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas._
The ordinary talk about honor is a parody of this spiritual loyalty. A man seizes another by the nose at a public table, or he slaps his face in the street, or he tells him in the sacred precincts of the club that he lies, or he posts him as a coward, or he insults his wife or daughter--such a man invites summary retaliation, and he generally gets it. But there is no question of honor involved. "Suppose your nose pulled at the opera," said a gentleman at the club, discussing the ethics of honor--"your nose, you know," he said, with horror, and unconsciously holding his own forward--"what could be a more unspeakable insult?" "Yes," answered his protagonist; "but does a man carry his honor in his nose?" Nature has provided instincts and weapons for the defence of our noses. But she has not made the nose the citadel of honor, nor has she left honor at the mercy of a sot who may choose to drench it with wine.
There was a quarrel the other day between two men, one of whom had said that the way in which the other had done something was not the way of a gentleman; the other replied that he would not stand being called ungentlemanly. There was a closing and grappling, and then one whipped out a pistol and began firing at the other, who took to the street, and most naturally but inconsiderately dodged behind innocent citizens in the street to avoid the bullets. The pursuer fired as opportunity served, while the pursued dashed into a hotel to borrow a pistol to return the broadside. Stanley might have seen such a performance in the Mmjumbo regions on the shores of Lake Nyanza or the banks of the Zambesi, but what had it to do with honor? Is that what Lovelace loved more than Lucasta? Is that what King Francis--more's the pity if this were the thing--did not lose at Pavia!
Our honor is solely in our own keeping. To have your nose pulled is not to be dishonored, but so to behave that it deserves pulling. But, Alcibiades of the clubs, remember that it is not the pulling which makes the dishonor.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
And Cassius also says what bears a very different interpretation from that which he designed:
"Well, honor is the subject of my story. I cannot tell what you and other men Think of this life; but, for my single self, I had as lief not be, as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself."