"You might say that the moment when Lorenzino killed Alessandro was the most auspicious for a deed of that kind. The Medici had only recently been restored; Alessandro was the first ruler in Florence, who had worn a t.i.tle; no more reckless, brutal, and insolent tyrant ever lived, and his right, even such as the Medici might have, to play the despot was involved in the doubt of his origin; the heroism of the great siege ought still to have survived in the people who withstood the forces of the whole German Empire for fifteen months; it seems as if the taking off of that single wretch should have ended the whole Medicean domination; but there was not a voice raised to second the homicide"s appeal to the old love of liberty in Florence. The Medici party were able to impose a boy of eighteen upon the most fiery democracy that ever existed, and to hunt down and destroy Alessandro"s murderer at their leisure. No," added the old man thoughtfully, "I think that the friends of progress must abandon a.s.sa.s.sination as invariably useless. The trouble was not that Alessandro was alive, but that Florence was dead.
a.s.sa.s.sination always comes too early or too late in any popular movement. It may be," said Mr. Waters, with a carefulness to do justice to a.s.sa.s.sination which made Colville smile, "that the modern scientific spirits may be able to evolve something useful from the principle, but considering the enormous abuses and perversions to which it is liable, I am very doubtful of it--very doubtful."
Colville laughed. "I like your way of bringing a fresh mind to all these questions in history and morals, whether they are conventionally settled or not. Don"t you think the modern scientific spirit could evolve something useful out of the old cla.s.sic idea of suicide?"
"Perhaps," said Mr. Waters; "I haven"t yet thought it over. The worst thing about suicide--and this must always rank it below political a.s.sa.s.sination--is that its interest is purely personal. No man ever kills himself for the good of others."
"That"s certainly against it. We oughtn"t to countenance such an abominably selfish practice. But you can"t bring that charge against euthanasy. What have you to say of that?"
"I have heard one of the most benevolent and tender-hearted men I ever knew defend it in cases of hopeless suffering. But I don"t know that I should be prepared to take his ground. There appears to be something so sacred about human life that we must respect it even in spite of the prayers of the sufferer who asks us to end his irremediable misery."
"Well," said Colville, "I suspect we must at least cla.s.s murder with the ballet as a means of good. One might say there was still some virtue in the primal, eldest curse against bloodshed."
"Oh, I don"t by any means deny those things," said the old man, with the air of wishing to be scrupulously just. "Which way are you walking?"
"Your way, if you will let me," replied Colville. "I was going to your house to ask you to take a walk with me."
"Ah, that"s good. I was reading of the great siege last night, and I thought of taking a look at Michelangelo"s bastions. Let us go together, if you don"t think you"ll find it too fatiguing."
"I shall be ashamed to complain if I do."
"And you didn"t go to Rome after all?" said Mr. Waters.
"No; I couldn"t face the landlord with a pet.i.tion so preposterous as mine. I told him that I found I had no money to pay his bill till I had seen my banker, and as he didn"t propose that I should send him the amount back from Rome, I stayed. Landlords have their limitations; they are not imaginative, as a cla.s.s."
"Well, a day more will make no great difference to you, I suppose," said the old man, "and a day less would have been a loss to me. I shall miss you."
"Shall you, indeed?" asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart.
"It"s very nice of you to say that."
"Oh no. I meet few people who are willing to look at life objectively with me, and I have fancied some such willingness in you. What I chiefly miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably that is because my opportunities of meeting the best minds are few, and my means of conversing with them are small. If I had not the whole past with me, I should feel lonely at times."
"And is the past such good company always?".
"Yes, in a sense it is. The past is humanity set free from circ.u.mstance, and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised."
As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville made some ineffectual gasps at response, and the old man continued: "What I mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and vital forces."
"Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair worldly success?"
"The blossom of decay."
"Oh! what black pessimism!"
"Not at all! Men fail, but man succeeds. I don"t know what it all means, or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me. Walking along in the full sun, in the midst of men, or sometimes in the solitude of midnight, poring over a book, and thinking of quite other things, I have felt that I had almost surprised it."
"But never quite?"
"Oh, it isn"t too late yet."
"I hope you won"t have your revelation before I get away from Florence, or I shall see them burning you here like the great _frate_."
They had been walking down the Via Calzioli from the Duomo, and now they came out into the Piazza della Signoria, suddenly, as one always seems to do, upon the rise of the old palace and the leap of its tower into the blue air. The history of all Florence is there, with memories of every great time in bronze or marble, but the supreme presence is the martyr who hangs for ever from the gibbet over the quenchless fire in the midst.
"Ah, they _had_ to kill him!" sighed the old man. "It has always been so with the benefactors. They have always meant mankind more good than any one generation can bear, and it must turn upon them and destroy them."
"How will it be with you, then, when you have read us "the riddle of the painful earth"?"
"That will be so simple that every one will accept it willingly and gladly, and wonder that no one happened to think of it before. And, perhaps, the world is now grown old enough and docile enough to receive the truth without resentment."
"I take back my charge of pessimism," said Colville. "You are an optimist of the deepest dye."
They walked out of the Piazza and down to the Lung" Arno, through the corridor of the Uffizzi, where the ill.u.s.trious Florentines stand in marble under the arches, all reconciled and peaceful and equal at last.
Colville shivered a little as he pa.s.sed between the silent ranks of the statues.
"I can"t stand those fellows, to-day. They seem to feel such a smirk satisfaction at having got out of it all."
They issued upon the river, and he went to the parapet and looked down on the water. "I wonder," he mused aloud, "if it has the same Sunday look to these Sabbathless Italians as it has to us."
"No; Nature isn"t puritan," replied the old minister.
"Not at Haddam East Village?"
"No; there less than here; for she"s had to make a harder fight for her life there."
"Ah, then you believe in Nature--you"re a friend of Nature?" asked Colville, following the lines of an oily swirl in the current with indolent eye.
"Only up to a certain point." Mr. Waters seemed to be patient of any direction which the other might be giving the talk. "Nature is a savage.
She has good impulses, but you can"t trust her altogether."
"Do you know," said Colville, "I don"t think there"s very much of her left in us after we reach a certain point in life? She drives us on at a great pace for a while, and then some fine morning we wake up and find that Nature has got tired of us and has left us to taste and conscience.
And taste and conscience are by no means so certain of what they want you to do as Nature was."
"Yes," said the minister, "I see what you mean." He joined Colville in leaning on the parapet, and he looked out on the river as if he saw his meaning there. "But by the time we reach that point in life most of us have got the direction which Nature meant us to take, and there"s no longer any need of her driving us on."
"And what about the unlucky fellows who haven"t got the direction, or haven"t kept it?"
"They had better go back to it."
"But if Nature herself seemed to change her mind about you?"
"Ah, you mean persons of weak will. They are a great curse to themselves and to everybody else."
"I"m not so sure of that," said Colville. "I"ve seen cases in which a strong will looked very much more like the devil."
"Yes, a perverted will. But there can be no good without a strong will.
A weak will means inconstancy. It means, even in good, good attempted and relinquished, which is always a terrible thing, because it is sure to betray some one who relied upon its accomplishment."
"And in evil? Perhaps the evil, attempted and relinquished, turns into good."