Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,--but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask out of whose loins Dante sprung!
Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of St.Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid, marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--something in the councils of the nation.Plenty of Art, I grant you, Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!
--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the expense of every other place.I have my doubts if he had been in either of the cities he had been talking about.I was just going to say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young Marylander spoke up.
Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons? Did n't Ihear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns all America? If you have really got more brains in Boston than other folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of scribbling fools? If I like Broadway better than Washington Street, what then? I own them both, as much as anybody owns either.I am an American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes overhead, that is home to me!
He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling over him in the breeze.We all looked up involuntarily, as if we should see the national flag by so doing.The sight of the dingy ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the illusion.
Bravo! bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
Why don't they now? Why don't they now? I saw enough of hating each other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.
It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--The color burst up into my cheeks.What was I saying,--I, who would not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an allusion?
I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let himself down from his high chair.
No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very little flavor of grace.
She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that lasted some seconds.For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.
Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached into her soul as these did.It was not that they were in themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.To him it seemed as if those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.
That is my image, of course,--not his.It was not a simile that was in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
