Marion smiled quietly. “I should have said,” he replied, “that in the history of Italy, both past and present, there had been more pride felt and expressed than can be found in the histories of all the other nations of the earth put together; and that, besides this self-gratulation, no other nation on earth had been so praised, and loved, and feared, and sought as Italy. It has had every kind of boast—war-like, splendid, learned, poetic, and artistic. It has gone on through the centuries supreme in beauty and in interest, never failing to draw all hearts and eyes, and changing one attraction into another,
instead of losing attraction. And all its changes have been ordered and harmonious till now. But I find neither beauty nor dignity in a manufacturing, trading Rome. She throws away her own unique advantages in seeking to vie with her younger and more vigorous sisters. The rôle does not suit her.”
“We will see!” the Italian said hotly. “We will make the trial, and find out for ourselves if our life and strength are so decayed that we can no longer boast of anything but ruins.”
“I beg your pardon; but you have already tried, and failed,” the other returned. “You have proved yourselves only strong in complaint, but worthless in action. The only vigor I have heard of as shown by liberal Rome was in throwing flowers on Victor Emanuel when he entered, and now in cursing him for having taxed you to the verge of starvation. He isn’t afraid of you, and takes no pains to conciliate you. The only vigor here, of the kind you praise, is in the northern men he has brought down with him; and in another generation, if they should stay so long, the blood in their hearts will have thickened to the rich, slow ichor of Roman veins. No, sir! You cannot succeed in being yourselves and everybody else. You are no longer the world, but only a part of it, and must be content to see yourselves surpassed in many things. Your true dignity is in not contending for the prize which you will never win. If you had sat here quietly, a mere looker-on, a judge, perhaps, of the contests going on in the world, who could have said surely that you might not win any success by the mere half trying? You have proved
your own weakness, and merely exchanged an easy master for a hard one. You do not govern yourselves so much under the king as you did under the pope, and the complaints which were listened to in the old time nobody listens to now. You have been coaxed and petted for generations; now you are treated with contempt.”
The Italian was pale, less with anger at such plain speaking than with the bitter consciousness that it was true. “You have not seen the end yet,” was all he could say. “Great changes are not wrought here so easily as in America. There it was simply Greek meeting Greek, and there was no history or tradition in the way. Here, besides our visible opponents, who may be half a dozen nations, we have to fight against generations of ghosts.”
“O my country! how you have bewitched the world,” exclaimed the American. “I grant you there is a difference, sir, and it is even greater than you think; for it is a difference of nature as well as of circumstances. Italy is Calliope, with the scroll in her hand, and her proper position is a meditative and studious one; America is Atalanta, the swift runner, young, strong, and disdainful, with apples of gold to fling and stop her pursuers. Do you wish your muse to come down and join in the dusty race?”
“Do you know,” the Signora asked of Marion, joining the two, “Victor Emanuel, they say, has a special devotion to the good thief?”
The Italian rose. He had a great regard for the Signora, but, as she never spared him when politics was in question, he thought discretion the better part of valor.
“How odd it is,” the lady remarked,