m Genoa stood
firm. What he proposed to do, he said, was worthy of the rewards that he
asked; they were due to the importance and grandeur of his scheme, and so
on. Nor did he fail to point out that the bestowal of them was a matter
altogether contingent on results; if there were no results, there would
be no rewards; if there were results, they would be worthy of the
rewards. This action of Columbus's deserves close study. He had come to
a turning-point in his life. He had been asking, asking, asking, for six
years; he had been put off and refused over and over again; people were
beginning to laugh at him for a madman; and now, when a combination of
lucky chances had brought him to the very door of success, he stood
outside the threshold bargaining for a preposterous price before he would
come in. It seemed like the densest stupidity. What is the explanation
of it?

The only explanation of it is to be found in the character of Columbus.
We must try to see him as he is in this forty-second year of his life,
bargaining with notaries, bishops, and treasurers; we must try to see
where these forty years have brought him, and what they have made of him.
Remember the little boy that played in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello,
acquainted with poverty, but with a soul in him that could rise beyond it
and acquire something of the dignity of that Genoa, arrogant, splendid
and devout, which surrounded him during his early years. Remember his
long life of obscurity at sea, and the slow kindling of the light of
faith in something beyond the familiar horizons; remember the social
inequality of his marriage, his long struggle with poverty, his long
familiarity with the position of one who asked and did not receive; the
many rebuffs and indignities which his Ligurian pride must have received
at the hands of all those Spanish dignitaries and grandees--remember all
this, and then you will perhaps not wonder so much that Columbus, who was
beginning to believe himself appointed by Heaven to this task of
discovery, felt that he had much to pay himself back for. One must
recognise him frankly for what he was, and for no conventional hero of
romance; a man who would reconcile his conscience with anything, and
would stop at nothing in the furtherance of what he deemed a good object;
and a man at the same time who had a conscience to reconcile, and would,
whenever it was necessary, laboriously and elaborately perform the act of
reconcilia