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Before Method and Models
OX F OR D ST U DI E S I N T H E H I STORY
OF E C ON OM IC S
Series Editor:
Steven G. Medema, PhD, University Distinguished Professor of Economics,
University of Colorado Denver
This series publishes leading-edge scholarship by historians of economics
and social science, drawing upon approaches from intellectual history,
the history of ideas, and the history of the natural and social sciences.
It embraces the history of economic thinking from ancient times to the
present, the evolution of the discipline itself, the relationship of economics
to other fields of inquiry, and the diffusion of economic ideas within the
discipline and to the policy realm and broader publics. This enlarged
scope affords the possibility of looking anew at the intellectual, social, and
professional forces that have surrounded and conditioned economics’
continued development.
Before Method
and Models
The Political Economy of Malthus
and Ricardo
RYA N WA LT E R
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197603055.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Para Carolina: muchas gracias por compartir tu vida conmigo.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the
Australian Research Council (DE130101505), which allowed me to commit to
a long-term project of this type. I am also grateful to Terry Peach, who spon-
sored my stay as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Manchester, where he
cured me of my residual attachment to the ‘corn model’ reading of Ricardo.
Sergio Cremaschi was a perfect host in Bergamo, as were Dennis Grube and
Jason Sharman in Cambridge, and Richard Whatmore in St Andrews. Special
thanks are due to Alexandre Mendes Cunha for the chance to preview the casu-
istry chapter at his Center for European Studies in Belo Horizonte, and to Gilbert
Faccarello, Masashi Izumo, and Hiromi Morishita, who kept their guests safe
after the earthquake in Sapporo in 2018. The most important setting for the de-
velopment of this book’s argument, however, has been my own institution, the
University of Queensland. For my university boasts a rare bird: a research in-
stitute dedicated to intellectual history, formerly the Centre for the History
of European Discourses and now the Institute for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities. The core of the argument that is presented here was rehearsed there
during a Fellowship in 2017, and I thank all those who provided feedback of such
quality during my seminars.
Many colleagues found time to read chapters and offer help along the way,
some despite being sorely pressed by their own deadlines. I am obliged to
Lorenzo Cello, Alex Cook, Knud Haakonssen, Nick Heron, Ian Hesketh, Ben
Huf, Gary Ianziti, Amy Jelacic, Leigh Penman, Mark Philp, Anna Plassart, and
Richard Van den Berg. David Kearns has seen all the chapters in various states in
his invaluable roles of research assistant and friend. Sergio Cremaschi and Niall
O’Flaherty were kind enough to share draft manuscripts with me.
The support of four friends has been indispensable to this project from the
beginning. Ian Hunter has always been willing to discuss my work in detail, and
I am conscious of what a privilege this represents. Keith Tribe has been unfailing
in both offering support and exemplifying the scholarly attitude since my PhD
days. Conal Condren has been instructing me on how to study language for more
than a decade, patiently. Richard Devetak encouraged me to return to Brisbane
to pursue intellectual history in the subtropics and then provided the camarad-
erie that I needed to stay the course when it became difficult.
viii Acknowledgements
I would like to tally a final debt due to Donald Winch who passed away in
2017, to his discipline’s great loss. In 2015, he agreed to meet me at the White
Hart in Sussex so that I could pitch him the idea for this book. After hearing how
many traps I was planning to walk into, it took him two pints to set me straight.
I am glad that he did.
Contents
Conventions xi
Introduction 1
PA RT I
PA RT I I
PA RT I I I
The texts under study in what follows belong to a pattern of thought that is patri-
archal in the strict sense: the government of the polity by politicians and legis-
lators was discussed using metaphors and presuppositions that drew on the old
idea of a father’s government of a household. This is most visible in the tendency
for ‘economy’ to be written with the ligature, hence ‘œconomy’, disclosing that
the term is cognate with the Greek oikos (household) and oikonomia (the art of
house-holding). Accordingly, gendered language has been used throughout this
book to convey the original meaning of the texts. This is most commonly done in
relation to the figure of the ‘statesman’, who was projected (and then addressed)
as the agent of governmental action. While it seems likely that British political
economy played a leading role in the ultimate demise of this discursive figure, we
do not know as much as we should about this process and its long-term effects. It
is clear, however, that the statesman was alive and well in the period being exam-
ined here.
References to Adam Smith’s works and letters follow the conventions estab-
lished in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith,
6 volumes (Oxford, 1976–1987). Hence, in lieu of titles, the following abbrevi-
ations are used, and, where appropriate, the original divisions of the work are
given (such as book, section, chapter) along with the paragraph in lieu of page
numbers.
Corr = Correspondence
EPS = Essays on Philosophical Subjects
LJ(A) = Lectures on Jurisprudence: Report of 1762–1763
LJ(B) = Lectures on Jurisprudence: Report dated 1766
TMS = The Theory of Moral Sentiments
WN = An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
All other multivolume works are referenced in full in the notes, excepting these
titles, which are abbreviated as follows:
Works = The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (eds. E. A. Wrigley and David
Souden, 8 vols.)
Works and Correspondence = The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo
(ed. Piero Sraffa, 11 vols.)
xii Conventions
Writings and Speeches = The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (eds.
Paul Langford and William B. Todd, 9 vols.)
In the editions just named, the base text for Ricardo’s Principles of Political
Economy is the third edition (1821), with short variants provided in edi-
torial notes at the bottom of the page and long passages at the end of the rele-
vant chapter. In the case of Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy, the second
edition (1836) is the base text, with short variants provided in editorial notes
and long passages at the end of volume 6. Since Part III of this book focuses on
the second edition (1819) of Ricardo’s Principles and the first edition (1820) of
Malthus’s Principles, it has been necessary to use the editorial apparatuses to re-
construct the second and first editions, respectively. For the sake of simplicity,
editorial notes are not referenced, only page numbers and, when necessary, the
notes of Malthus and Ricardo.
The titles of primary sources in English have been shortened and their capit-
alization modernized. When quoting from primary sources, a lowercase initial
letter has occasionally been changed to an uppercase, and vice versa. All pound
signs are modernized.
Introduction
This book’s key premise is that the notion that there was such a thing as ‘classical
political economy’ is a distorting myth. The fact that this myth plays a central role
in our histories of economic thought suggests that we have a poor understanding
of the thought of the past and of the historical process by which economics came
to assert itself so forcefully in the modern world. What follows, therefore, is an
attempt at revision: to use contextual intellectual history to expose the short-
comings in our existing knowledge and to then establish a more reliable account
of what Malthus, Ricardo, and their peers thought they were doing when they
wrote texts of political economy.
Malthus and Ricardo form the focus because they are central to all accounts
of classical political economy and because they played leading roles in the long-
term process by which economic reason came to assert itself in British political
life. More specifically, Malthus and Ricardo were the first self-styled ‘theorists’
who explicitly attacked their ‘practical’ opponents for being untheoretical in
matters of political economy. This strategy was tremendously successful. Above
all, it spurred the emergence of Tory political economists who claimed theoret-
ical equality with their Whig rivals, thus helping political economists in general
to achieve the institutional traction that they needed to reform the British state,
most visible in changes to the Poor Laws (1834), Bank of England (1819, 1844),
and Corn Laws (1846). The presumption of political economists to prospect such
reforms to their societies outside of any institutional office has been an aspect
of our (Anglo-American) politics ever since. But it is nearly impossible to grasp
this fact when the category ‘classical political economy’ organizes the historical
materials, not least because it usually does so in service to a polemic regarding
the competing merits of neoclassical, Marxist, and post-Keynesian economics in
the present.
This book must therefore confront the enduring presence of anachronism
in the history of economic thought. The primary cause is that practitioners are
willing to approach the past through the categories and controversies of the pre-
sent. Traditionally, this practice has been defended by specifying the proper aim
of research as recovering the ‘analytical system’ of a past thinker,1 or the ‘history
1 George J. Stigler, ‘Does Economics Have a Useful Past?’, History of Political Economy 1/2 (1969),
217–30, at 220.
Before Method and Models. Ryan Walter, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197603055.003.0001
2 Introduction
2 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
[1954]), 38–43.
3 See, for example, Mark Blaug, ‘On the Historiography of Economics’, Journal of the History of
Reconstruction’, in Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, and John B. Davis, eds., A Companion to the
History of Economic Thought (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 553–70.
5 See, for example, the essays; Marcella Corsi, Jan Kregel, and Carlo D’Ippoliti, eds., Classical
Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia (London: Anthem Press, 2018); and Steven
Kates, Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020).
6 See, for example, Ivan Moscati’s figuring of historians as commentators who tell the story of
the ‘game’ of economics for the ‘players’—economists who do not have either the time or interest
to tell its story but who might benefit from a fair recounting nevertheless: Ivan Moscati, ‘More
Economics, Please: We’re Historians of Economics’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30/
1 (2008), 85–92, at 88. A shopping list of reasons is provided by Steven Kates, who was moved to
write when the European Research Council attempted to remove the history of economic thought
from the list of subfields in economics: Steven Kates, Defending the History of Economic Thought
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013), 21.
7 The late Donald Winch was a rare example of someone who was trained in economics but tran-
sitioned to being a professional intellectual historian. The specialist nature of intellectual history and
the closure of economics to humanist scholarship now makes a trajectory such as Winch’s difficult to
follow. See Keith Tribe, ‘Donald Winch 1935–2017’, The European Journal of the History of Economic
Thought 25/1 (2018), 196–201, at 196.
8 Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths
are destructive for received accounts since one of the routine effects of contextual
intellectual history is to reveal the tendency for academic disciplines to project
imaginary auto-histories onto the past.9 In this respect, this book is indebted to
the pioneering work of Keith Tribe and Donald Winch, who have led the attempt
to produce genuinely historical accounts of economic thought.10
If intellectual history does not deal with phantoms, then the question becomes
one of determining what can be identified as a valid object of historical ana-
lysis. For intellectual historians, the short answer is texts, understood to include
written records of wide variety, including philosophical treatises, government
reports, the popular press, and much else besides. Unlike the conjectural na-
ture of an analytical system that silently moves an author’s thoughts behind their
back or an economic analysis existing independently of the texts and contexts
from which it is divined, positing historical texts as a thing in the world does
not need to be underwritten by either teleology or metaphysics. That is, one can
point to texts as physical objects, examine their literal contents and organization,
and often identify their publication histories, none of which can be done to an
analytical system or other hypothetical objects. The intellectual historian’s con-
fidence regarding the existence of texts as their object of study comes at a cost,
however, for the historiographical horizon must be lowered to allow the messy,
contextual features of the composition and reception of texts in historical time to
come into view.
While shifting to the study of texts allows historians to ground their work in
textual evidence, it does create a set of issues regarding the tools that should be
used to sift that evidence. Indeed, some of the best historians in the world have
been working through this question for decades without reaching a consensus. It
should therefore be acknowledged that the approach adopted here draws on the
so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history, associated most closely with
the names of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.11 In terms of their technical
approach, Pocock and Skinner have both emphasized the need to attend to lin-
guistic evidence when attempting to determine what a text might have meant to
the society or milieu in which it was produced.
9 For a classic exposé of the ‘mythologies’ that typically underwrite rational reconstruction,
see Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8/
1 (1969), 3–53. Reprinted as Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 1: c hapter 4.
10 In particular, Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1978) and Keith Tribe, The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in
Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and Donald Winch, Riches
and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
11 For programmatic statements, see Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1 and J. G. A. Pocock, Political
Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4 Introduction
For Pocock, the key task has been to ascertain the political language or idiom
that an author mobilized. From here it becomes possible to determine if the
author altered this language and, if so, if the alteration endured. By contrast,
Skinner has typically identified a smaller target than languages: key terms and
the accepted conventions for deploying them in a given milieu. This allows spe-
cific instances of word use, or an author’s ‘speech acts’, to be assessed in terms of
their conventionality or originality. A great deal has been said regarding the rela-
tive appeal of these competing principles and how they should be mobilized in
practice.12 When the issue is reduced to its core claim, however, the injunction is
clear enough: examine which words are used in a text, what they may have been
intended to mean by the person who wrote them, and what they may have meant
to the people who read them, with openness to the possibility that the answers to
these questions may not be the same.
What does all this mean for the history of economic thought in general? It
means that if historians of economic thought redescribe the texts under study
with a present-day vocabulary then they doctor the (linguistic) evidence.13
Or, to put the same point the other way around, such doctoring is essential to
the project of rational reconstruction, or a history of economic analysis as it
has also been called, since the historian only knows what counts as economic
analysis from the point of view of their proficiency with a contemporary vo-
cabulary. For contextual intellectual history, by contrast, contextualized lin-
guistic evidence must lie at the core of any interpretation of what a text meant
to its author and readers in a given time and place, and this requires that the
language of a text must be handled with great care and clearly distinguished
from the historian’s present-day vocabulary. To be plain, this does not mean
that today’s historian must write like their dead subjects, but it does mean
that they must acquire the languages of the dead as best they can, explain how
they worked, and signal to the reader when they need to switch between the
12 The most thoughtful (if challenging) commentary comes from Conal Condren, The Status
and Appraisal of Classic Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Conal Condren, The
Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). A great
deal has also been written by those who refuse the discipline of identifying historical contexts before
reading texts, and this rejection of context by philosophers and historians of rival persuasions has
ghosted its career from the beginning. On this point, see the indispensable account in Ian Hunter,
‘The Contest over Context in Intellectual History’, History & Theory 58/2 (2019), 185–209.
13 What has been termed the ‘Piltdown effect’. See Condren, The Language of Politics in
Seventeenth-Century England, 13. In short, our conceptual vocabulary is first dug into the evidence to
be studied, such that when we then claim to have made a discovery, it is on the basis of doctored evi-
dence; we have no ancestor with a human cranium and the jaw of an ape, but a fabricated skull of this
type was dug into the Piltdown earth and then ‘discovered’ (Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Piltdown Revisited’,
in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1980), 108–24).
Introduction 5
voices of past and present in the course of making texts intelligible in histor-
ical terms.14
What do these precepts mean for the study of Malthus and Ricardo in par-
ticular? They direct attention to the language that is used in their texts and to the
language that is used by economists today, with a standing suspicion that when
the latter is substituted for the former the consequence will be to compromise
historical understanding in favour of transforming past texts into participants
in today’s debates. As anyone familiar with the history of economic thought will
know, such substitution is routine. As regards the ambition at work in this book,
to acquire historical knowledge of Malthus and Ricardo, the consequences of
language substitution are greatest in relation to three linked terms: classical polit-
ical economy, model, and method. This claim can be substantiated with reference
to some influential examples of the history of economic thought in its recon-
structive mode.
Let us begin with the term ‘classical political economy’. It has been known for
some time that this category tends to unify the authors who are grouped within
its boundaries without historical warrant.15 Its origins seem to lie in Karl Marx’s
jaundiced reading of political economy, with the term coined in the context of
Marx making a polemical assessment of his predecessors. The closest that one
comes to finding an explicit definition of classical political economy in Marx’s
corpus is two consecutive footnotes towards the end of c hapter 1 of the first
volume of Capital (1867), in Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism. Marx’s
general point was that although Smith and Ricardo deserved credit for making
scientific advances in relation to the role of labour in creating value, their cat-
egories and modes of thought were bourgeois. This is said to appear most clearly
in Ricardo’s treatment of the commodity-form as natural when in fact it was re-
liant on the capitalist mode of production and thus specific to a particular histor-
ical stage. This is the context in which Marx wrote that value was ‘the weak point
of the classical school of Political Economy’.16 A similar point is made regarding
‘classical economy’ in the second note, following which Marx clarified his usage:
14 On the notion that the historian’s procedure involves distinguishing their own ‘historical stand-
point’ from that occupied by those about whom they write, see W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the
Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 120.
15 As observed in Winch, Riches and Poverty, 8–9, 15.
16 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. from the
Third German Edition, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), 84 n1. The quotation corres-
ponds to note 27 on page 41 in the first German edition, and here, as in the other cases, Marx is
using ‘klassische politische Oekonomie’: Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie
(Hamburg, 1867).
6 Introduction
17 Marx, Capital, 85 n1. The quotation corresponds to note 24 on pages 34–5 in the first German
and the review by Keith Tribe in Economy and Society: Keith Tribe, ‘Ricardian Histories’, Economy
and Society 10/4 (1981), 451–66.
Introduction 7
algebra without danger.20 Having the ‘pure analytics’ in view, Hollander con-
cludes that the ‘classics inhabited a “Marshallian” not a “Marxian” universe’.21 For
any professional intellectual historian, this is textbook anachronism, since writ-
ings from c. 1770–1830 are redescribed using language dating from the twen-
tieth century and then judged to belong to a universe dating from the 1870s!
Yet Hollander is adamant that his historiography is not anachronistic: ‘I have
been engaged in “historical” not “rational reconstruction” ’.22 This defence by fiat
gives a sense of the field’s traditional closure to historical approaches and of its
continuing preoccupation with the ‘classics’ as pointing towards either Marx or
Marshall.
This question of political economy’s true nature was complicated by Piero
Sraffa, whose Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960)
has had disproportionate influence on historians of economic thought. Sraffa
aligned his work with the ‘old classical economists’ who were supposedly ‘sub-
merged and forgotten’ by marginal analysis.23 This narrative also produces tele-
ology by linking the past with the present, only here the standard is neither Marx
nor Marshall but a composite Ricardo-Marx-Sraffa. Thus a Sraffa disciple could
repeat Marx’s claim regarding William Petty without hesitation: ‘Petty also failed
to develop a systematic analysis of the determination of wages’, as if it were even
possible that Petty could have formed this intention in the seventeenth century.24
In this example, the category ‘classical political economy’ excuses the historian
from investigating what an author was trying to do because it is taken for granted
that inside Petty was a Sraffian trying to be born. As Terry Peach has shown, the
evidence against Sraffa’s reading of Ricardo in terms of a corn-model of distribu-
tion is overwhelming, and resistance to this fact seems to be driven by the quasi-
spiritual nature of the Sraffian school’s attachment to Ricardo as their illustrious
founder.25
The reference to the so-called corn-model that is central to Sraffian political
economy directs attention to the second term that drives anachronism in the
history of economic thought, ‘model’. The idea that scientists produce models
Evelyn L. Forget and Sandra Peart, eds., Reflections on the Classical Canon in Economics: Essays in
Honor of Samuel Hollander (London: Routledge, 2000), 7–26, at 8, 18.
21 Ibid., 23
22 Ibid., 18.
23 Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of
eds., Handbook on the History of Economic Analysis, vol. 2 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing,
2016), 125–49, at 128.
25 Terry Peach, ‘On Interpreting Ricardo: A Reply to Sraffians’, Cambridge Journal of Economics
22/5 (1998), 597–616; Terry Peach, Interpreting Ricardo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). As noted in the Acknowledgements, I have also struggled to escape the ‘corn model’ view of
Ricardo.
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questa settimana?
— Mio fratello mi scrisse di prendere il vapore del 18 o del 25....
Quello del 18 non l’ho preso; dunque....
— E se domandasse una proroga?...
— Al punto in cui siamo?... Dopo aver fatto tutti i preparativi, dopo
essermi accommiatata da quasi tutti i miei conoscenti?... No, no,
nemmen per sogno....
— Se poi ha tanta premura di lasciarci! — egli interruppe con
amarezza.
— O professore — esclamai, e sentivo un nodo alla gola — non sia
ingiusto.... Crede che me ne vada fino al Caucaso per un
capriccio?... Avrò avuto torto ad accettar con tanta precipitazione
l’offerta di mio fratello, ma si metta al mio posto.... al posto d’una
ragazza che non è coraggiosa, che non è forte, che non ha spirito
d’iniziativa.... Vedevo non lontana la miseria, l’umiliazione di ricorrere
alla carità degli estranei, e afferrai la prima tavola di salute che mi fu
gettata.... Ormai....
— E non c’è nulla, nulla che potrebbe trattenerla? — seguitò Verdani
con calore.
Mi sforzai a dissimulare con una facezia la mia crescente emozione.
— Vuol che speri in una lotteria guadagnata senza biglietti, in un
impiego ottenuto senza le cognizioni occorrenti per esercitarlo?
La fisonomia di Verdani ebbe una contrazione dolorosa. — Non c’è
altro, non c’è proprio altro?
Dio mio! Che cos’è questo riserbo che c’impone di reprimere i nostri
slanci, di nascondere i nostri sentimenti? È una virtù o è un vizio? Io
lo vedevo soffrire; potevo forse con una parola dissipar le sue
sofferenze, infranger l’ultima tenue barriera che si ergeva fra noi e la
felicità, e non osavo dir quella parola, non osavo neanche guardarlo
in viso.
— Ebbene — ripigliò Verdani mutando posizione e venendo a
sedermisi accanto — scriverò a mia madre che m’ero ingannato.
— Sua madre? Come c’entra la sua mamma?
— Oh se c’entra!... Avevo affrettato la mia gita a Bologna per questo.
Volevo consultarla, lei che è tanto savia e buona; volevo comunicarle
un mio disegno.... S’ella lo disapprovava avrei chinato il capo in
silenzio, perchè non oserei far cosa di cui mia madre avesse a
dolersi.... Ma ell’approvò tutto; ella mi disse con la sua solita, cieca
fede in me: Ciò che tu fai è ben fatto; le persone che tu ami io le
amo; c’è sempre posto per esse nel mio cuore e nella mia casa....
Io tremavo come una foglia.
— Professore.... — balbettai confusa.
— Non mi chiami così — egli proruppe con impeto abbandonando la
mano ch’io avevo lasciata nella sua. E seguitò con voce raddolcita:
— I miei amici mi chiamano Verdani, mi chiamano Gustavo. — Egli
scosse tristamente il capo e soggiunse: — È vero ch’ella mi conosce
appena. Le son vissuto accanto parecchie settimane senza
occuparmi di lei, sfuggendola quasi.... Però, quando il caso ci
avvicinò, quando ci scambiammo le prime confidenze, quando la
seppi sul punto di prendere la via dell’esilio, provai dentro di me
qualche cosa che non avevo provato mai.... La mia scuola, i miei
studi aridi e gelati non mi bastavano più; sospiravo il momento
d’incontrarla, sospiravo l’ora del pranzo.... Mi pareva che ci fosse
una certa analogia fra i nostri caratteri; anch’ella era timida, era
riservata come sono timido e riservato io, e la semplicità de’ suoi
modi spiccava maggiormente per l’affettazione di altri.... sa bene a
chi alludo.... di altri che s’era pur fitto in capo di piacermi.... O
signorina, se fossi stato ricco, avrei ben vinto prima la mia ritrosia....
Ma come non esitare se non potevo offrirle, per ora almeno, che un
nome oscuro, una vita modesta, fatta di privazioni e di sacrifizio? Ciò
non ostante, lo vede, il coraggio lo avevo trovato; ma capisco ch’era
un sogno.... un bel sogno....
Ah, in quell’istante trovai io pure il coraggio di dire a Verdani che il
suo sogno era stato il mio sogno, che quello ch’egli mi offriva
superava di molto ciò ch’io avessi osato chiedere alla fortuna, che lo
amavo....
Egli mi strinse sul petto bisbigliando con accento ineffabile: — Elena,
anima mia....
Allorchè mi sciolsi dalle sue braccia, mi sovvenne di Odoardo. — E
mio fratello che m’aspetta, che mi ha mandato il denaro pel viaggio?
— Tuo fratello? — disse Gustavo. — Gli telegraferai che non puoi
partire. Il resto glielo spiegheremo per lettera.... Ha vissuto tanti anni
senza di te; si adatterà a vivere ancora.... In quanto al danaro, se
non vorrà lasciarlo alla sorella come regalo di nozze, ho qualche
risparmio, glielo restituirò io.... Sarà il dono che farò alla mia
fidanzata.
Gustavo mi presentò come tale alla signora Celeste, la quale mi
abbracciò con trasporto, vantandosi d’aver contribuito a questo lieto
avvenimento.... Mai, mai le passò pel capo di far sposare ad un
uomo come il professore quella caricatura della Giulia.... Sarà....
Quel giorno stesso, dopo pranzo, mi parve che una nuvola
oscurasse la fronte di Gustavo, e gliene chiesi la ragione.
Egli mi rispose con un’altra domanda: — Sei ben sicura di non
pentirti?
— O Gustavo....
— Fosti colta così di sorpresa!... Talvolta il cuore umano inganna sè
medesimo.... Amandomi oggi, t’è parso d’avermi amato anche
prima.... Se fosse un’illusione?
Non gli risposi; gli feci segno d’attendere, entrai nella mia camera e
ne presi questo libro, che deposi sul tavolino davanti a lui.
Egli m’interrogò con lo sguardo.
— È un libro — io spiegai — da leggere questa notte.... in quiete....
Non subito.... no.
A malgrado del mio divieto. Gustavo aveva sollevato la coperta
dell’album, e ne andava sfogliando le pagine.
— Una specie di diario?
— Appunto.
— Di tuo pugno?
— Di mio pugno.... Ma leggerai dopo... te ne prego.
Gustavo ubbidì a malincuore.
La mattina seguente lo vidi raggiante di contentezza. — O cara, cara
— egli mi disse. — Ora non dubito più.... Non puoi immaginarti che
gioia sia il sapere d’essere stati amati quando non s’era detto ancora
che si amava.
Io sorrisi. — Sì che me l’immagino, poichè è quello che è toccato a
me.
— Hai ragione — egli soggiunse abbracciandomi teneramente. —
Adesso però convien scrivere l’epilogo.
Mi strinsi nelle spalle.
— Che importa? Questi sfoghi dell’anima s’addicono più ai giorni
tristi che ai lieti.
— No, no — insistè Gustavo. — È una storia intima che non può
rimanere incompiuta. Devi promettermi di finirla.
Glielo promisi. Ma non trovavo mai il verso di accingermi all’opera.
Ieri egli me ne rimproverò con dolcezza. — Se tardi troppo scriverai
di maniera. Scommetto che a quest’ora hai dimenticato molti
particolari del colloquio che decise della nostra sorte.
— Non scommettere — replicai. — Perderesti.
Fra poco darò da leggere queste pagine a Gustavo, ed egli, leale
com’è, sarà costretto a riconoscere che avrebbe perduto. Sono certa
di non aver nulla dimenticato e nulla inventato; dalla prima all’ultima
pagina la mia semplice cronaca non ha che un pregio, la sincerità.
FUORI DI TEMPO E FUORI DI POSTO.
I.
II.
III.