Why a National Literature Cannot Flourish in the United States of North America — John Shaqi
Why a National Literature Cannot Flourish in the United States of North AmericaRocchietti, Joseph
General
Why a National Literature Cannot Flourish in the United States of North America
Rocchietti, Joseph
American literature; United States -- Social life and customs
Genoa is a haven where the fourth of the population are strangers; and
those who go to the italian opera, are strangers. Without mistake we
can calculate that, in that theatre, more than the half of spectators
must have been strangers. Mr. Headly says in his pamphlet, that Clara
Novello was an english woman; and he does not know if the man who
placed his hands on the patient, was an italian or not. But, were such
a man an italian, he can no more disgrace the whole italian nation,
than a Mr. Ballard can disgrace the whole Union, with his cowardly
crime, against the noble minded Miss Amelia Norman. That the spectators
in that italian theatre, must have thought the case of the so called
dying man, not in such an urgent situation as Mr. Headley did, the very
coolness with which the other man held the patient, proves it. But, if
Mr. Headley did really think the man was dying; why did not his good
american heart, force him to run to his succor? Or, at least, if he was
morally suffering, and gazing passively at the dying man as well as the
rest of those italians; why he does not suppose all those italians,
though idle as he, not to have suffered his very undecided, and painful
situation?
I was in Virginia; strangers were suspected as being abolitionists:
some strangers had been mobbed, and hung on mere suspicion. In passing
by a crowd of people assembled for an election, and seeing many persons
around two men, one white and the other black, the former holding the
second, bound with a rope like Jesus Christ, when he was dragged to
Golgotha, and the white, thinking his old prisoner an escaped slave,
with the smile of an expected gain, for which he appeared to me like
another Judas, I approached the crowd; and seeing that the poor old
black man was suffering, the rope being too tight, I remarked with
pity to those, who were laughing at his sufferings, that the rope was
torturing the poor human being! Suddenly the whole crowd felt the same
charity, and pity I felt; and many went immediately to the magistrate,
telling him they doubted the man being a slave, and soon they found he
was a free black. I was in that place as a foreigner fallen from the
clouds; no body was there to protect me, had a malicious man, for the
sake of mischief, whispered, that I was an abolitionist. Mr. Headley
could not have such an apprehension in Italy, had he acted with the
impulse of his good heart.
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