Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 2

by Andrew Dickson White

[17] I have given a more full discussion of this subject in my "History of the Warfare of Science with Theology," Vol. I, p. 3.

During this journey, having revisited Orvieto, Perugia, and Assisi, I returned to Florence, and again enjoyed the society of my old friends, Professor Willard Fiske, Professor Villari, with his accomplished wife, and Judge Stallo, former minister of the United States in Rome.

The great event of this stay was an earthquake. Seated on a pleasant April evening in my rooms at the house built by Adolphus Trollope, near the Piazza dell' Independenza, I heard what seemed at first the rising of a storm; then the rushing of a mighty wind; then, as it grew stronger, apparently the gallop of a corps of cavalry in the neighboring avenue; but, almost instantly, it seemed to change into the onrush of a corps of artillery, and, a moment later, to strike the house, lifting its foundations as if by some mighty hand, and swaying it to and fro, everything creaking, groaning, rattling, and seeming likely to fall in upon us. This movement to and fro, with crashing and screaming inside and outside the house, continued, as it seemed to me, about twenty minutes—as a matter of fact, it lasted hardly seven seconds; but certainly it was the longest seven seconds I have ever known. At the first uplift of the seismic wave my wife and I rose from our seats, I saying, "Stand perfectly still." Thenceforward, not a word was uttered by either of us until all was over; but many thoughts came,—the dominant feeling being a sense of our helplessness in the presence of the great powers of nature. Neither of us had any hope of escaping alive; but we calmly accepted the inevitable, thinking each moment would be, the last. As I look back, our resignation and perfect quiet still surprise me. That room, at the corner of the Villino Trollope, which an ill-founded legend makes the place where George Eliot wrote "Romola," is to me sacred, as the place where we two passed "from death unto life."

Nearly all that night we remained near the doors of the house, ready to escape any new shocks; but only one or two came, and those very light. Crowds of the population remained out of doors, many dwellers in hotels taking refuge in carriages and cabs, and staying in them through the night.

Next morning I walked forth to find what had happened,—first to the cathedral, to see if anything was left of Giotto's tower and Brunelleschi's dome, and, to my great joy, found them standing; but, as I entered the vast building, I saw one of the enormous iron bars which take the thrust of the wide arches of the nave pulled apart and broken as if it had been pack-thread; there were also a few cracks in one of the piers supporting the dome, but all else was as before.

At the Palazzo Strozzi a crowd of people were examining sundry crevices which had been made in its mighty walls: and at various villas in the neighborhood, especially those on the road to San Miniato, I found that the damage had been much worse. A part of the tower of one villa, occupied by an English lady of literary distinction, had been thrown down, crashing directly through one of the upper rooms, but causing no loss of life; the villa of Judge Stallo, at the Porta Romana, was so wrecked that he was obliged to leave it; and in the house of another friend a heavy German stove on the upper floor, having been thrown over, had come down through the ceiling of the main parlor, crashing through the grand piano, and thence into the cellar, without injury to any person. One of the professors whom I afterward met told me that he was giving a dinner-party when, suddenly, the house was lifted and shaken to and fro, the chandeliers swinging, broken glass crashing, and the ladies screaming, and, in a moment, a portion of the outer wall gave way, but fortunately fell outward, so that the guests scrambled forth over the ruins, and passed the night in the garden. Perhaps the worst damage was wrought at the Convent of the Certosa, where some of the beautiful old work was irreparably injured.

It was very difficult next morning to get any real information from the newspapers. They claimed that but three persons lost their lives in the city: it was clearly thought best to minimize the damage done, lest the stream of travel might be scared away. I remarked at the time that we should never know fully what had occurred until we received the American papers; and, curiously enough, several weeks afterward a Californian showed me a very full and minute account of the whole calamity, with careful details, given in the telegraphic reports of a San Francisco newspaper on the very morning after the earthquake.

On the way to America I passed a short time, during the month of June, in London, meeting various interesting people, a most pleasant occasion to me being a dinner given by Mr. Bayard, the American minister, at which I met my classmate Wayne MacVeagh, formerly attorney-general of the United States, minister to Constantinople and ambassador to Rome, full, as usual, of interesting reminiscence and witty suggestion. Very interesting also to me was a talk with Mr. Holman Hunt, the eminent pre-Raphaelite artist. He told me much of Tennyson dwelling upon his morbid fear that people would stare at him. He also gave an account of his meeting with Ruskin at Venice, when Ruskin took Hunt to task for not having come to see him more frequently in London; to which Hunt replied that, for one reason, he was very busy, and that, for another, he did not wish to be classed with the toadies who swarmed about Ruskin. Whereupon Ruskin said that Hunt was right regarding the character of most of the people about him. Hunt also spoke of the ill treatment of his beautiful picture, "The Light of the World." From him, or from another source about that time, I learned that formerly the Keble College people had made much of it; but that, some one having interpreted the rays passing through the different openings of the lantern in Christ's hand as typifying truth shining through different religious conceptions, the owners of the picture distrusted it, and had recently refused to allow its exhibition in London.

It surprised me to find Holman Hunt so absorbed in his own art that he apparently knew next to nothing about that of other European masters,—nothing of Puvis de Chavannes at Paris; nothing of Menzel, Knaus, and Werner at Berlin.

Having returned to America, I was soon settled in my old homestead at Cornell,—as I supposed for the rest of my life. Very delightful to me during this as well as other sojourns at Cornell after my presidency were sundry visits to American universities at which I was asked to read papers or make addresses. Of these I may mention Harvard, Yale, and the State universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, at each of which I addressed bodies of students on subjects which seemed to me important, among these "The Diplomatic Service of the United States," "Democracy and Education," "Evolution vs. Revolution in Politics," and "The Problem of High Crime in the United States." To me, as an American citizen earnestly desiring a noble future for my country, it was one of the greatest of pleasures to look into the faces of those large audiences of vigorous young men and women, and, above all, at the State universities of the West, which are to act so powerfully through so many channels of influence in this new century. The last of the subjects above-named interested me painfully, and I was asked to present it to large general audiences, and not infrequently to the congregations of churches. I had become convinced that looseness in the administration of our criminal law is one of the more serious dangers to American society, and my earlier studies in this field were strengthened by my observations in the communities I had visited during the long journey through our Southern and Pacific States, to which I have just referred. Of this I shall speak later.