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525
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
No. DLXXI. MAY 1863. Vol. XCIII.
The title of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in
Mr Wilson’s book applies not only
to those races who lived and expired
before any history whatever
was written, but to all races, even
those who are contemporary with
us, who are incapable of delivering
a history of themselves to other
nations or their own posterity.
They are rather the un-historic, the
speechless people—speechless so far
as their posterity is concerned, on
whom his inquiries are directed.
In fact, that portion of the development
of mankind which pertains
to savage life, or to the very earliest
stages of civilisation, is the subject
of Mr Wilson’s book. The subject
is far from being new, but far from
being exhausted; and our author’s
archæological knowledge has enabled
him to invest it with a novel
interest. His position is somewhat
singular in its advantages. A European
archæologist and antiquarian,
he finds himself in that new
world where forms of human life
are still lingering akin to those
which he has been hitherto studying
by the light only of such remains
as have been preserved for
ages buried in the earth. His stone,
his bronze, his iron periods are all
found living about him. The flint
weapon dug up in London or Glasgow
from the lowest strata of human
remains, has, in this new world,
hardly fallen from the hand of the
native. The men of the stone period
are still alive, though half a century
more may see them either absorbed
in the more civilised races,
or altogether extinguished.
This combination of the knowledge
of the antiquarian with the
observations of the traveller has a
singular charm for us: but there is
another combination which is still
more attractive; it is where the
philosophical historian, familiar
with the myths of antiquity, traces
in the living barbarians around him
the same play of fancy, or the same
curious development of thought,
that he has been accustomed to
study in the obscure records of a
dead language. Mr Wilson is an
historian as well as an archæologist,
and is in both capacities an enlightened
student of such living antiquity
as may still exist in that continent,
where the earliest and the
latest forms of civilisation were destined
to meet and to recognise
each other.
Our author might, we think, have
put his materials together in a more
compact form, and arranged them
more carefully. The headings of
the several chapters lead us to expect
a more definite arrangement
than we find in the book itself:
and this must be partly our excuse
if our own observations should
seem to be of a miscellaneous character.
It must be confessed, also,
that there is sometimes a want of
precision and accuracy of language
on just those occasions where precision
is most needed, and that this
is not compensated by a rather too
lavish display of a florid species of
eloquence, better fitted for the lecture-room
than the written composition.
It is good of its kind, but
there is too much of it. We presume
that a large portion of the
book was written originally for the
lecture-room. But notwithstanding
these minor defects, we confidently
recommend these volumes as
replete with information on a variety
of interesting topics, and suggestive
of many trains of reflection.
They will assuredly repay an
attentive perusal.
Mr Wilson commences with a
glance at that problem of the “antiquity
of man” which Sir Charles
Lyell has still more lately and more
fully treated. Perhaps, if he had
written after the publication of Sir
Charles Lyell’s work, he would have
expressed himself with more distinctness
on the subject; yet he
seems substantially to have arrived
at whatever safe conclusions the
evidence hitherto collected enables
us to rest in. He has said all that
can really be said at present on the
matter. He observes that “the
closing epoch of geology must be
turned to for the initial chapters of
archæology and ethnology.” It is
plain that man could not make his
appearance upon the earth till the
earth was fitted for his habitation;
and it is a reasonable conjecture
that it would not long be so prepared
for him before, in some part
of the world, he made his appearance.
Mr Wilson is not disposed
to be incredulous as “to the traces
of fossil human bones mingling
with those of the extinct mammals
of the drift;” but we gather from
his work that he would be slow to
rest his belief on the great antiquity
of man solely on the discovery of
such flint implements as have been
dug out of the valley of the Somme
and elsewhere. We think that,
notwithstanding the confidence of
certain experts who have pronounced
that these flints have received their
form from the hand of man, there
is a well-founded suspicion that,
after all, they may have been broken
into their present shape by natural
or physical forces. They are not
ground to a point, it must be remembered,
nor sharpened to an
edge, only chipped into a wedge-like
form. When we read of great
numbers of these flints being discovered
in a certain spot, and that
a selection is made of such as seem
to have been chipped by the hand
of man, and that this selection is a
matter of acknowledged difficulty, we
may be excused for suspending our
judgment as to the fact whether
any one of them was ever the tool
or implement of a human being.
We may be excused if, in the present
state of the evidence, we require
that this testimony of the
flints be confirmed by other testimony,—by
the presence of human
bones, or of indisputable works of
human art in the same post-pliocene
formation.[2] We do not presumptuously
reject their evidence
altogether; we do not take it upon
ourselves to say that not one of the
stones collected from the valley of
the Somme has been fashioned by
man; we have little trust in our
own judgment upon such a matter;
but it is not evidence which can
stand alone. This Sir Charles Lyell
admits himself, though in some
passages of his work he seems to
forget his own admission. But
such antiquity as we can assign to
man on other evidence—by the discovery
in certain positions of human
remains or indisputable relics
of human art—is very great, and
sufficient for all the purposes of the
ethnologist. The elaborate, and, to
the geologist, highly interesting
work of Sir Charles Lyell demands
a separate and careful examination;
we here merely content ourselves
with remarking that the very great
antiquity of man—that which would
compel us to believe that he existed
for some almost immeasurable period
in the condition of the savage—rests
hitherto on unsatisfactory
grounds.
The ethnologist who believes, as
Mr Wilson does, in the unity of
the human race, requires a long
period of time for the development
of those varieties which had become
permanent prior to the epoch of the
building of the Egyptian Pyramids.
Mr Wilson takes what he requires,
but does not, as matters stand at
present, contest for more. To those
who, on the grounds of the sacred
text, would dispute his right to
even this modest inroad upon the
illimitable Past, he answers,—that
the chronology popularly supposed
to be that of the Bible is in fact
the chronology only of certain
learned interpreters, and that there
is nothing in the sacred text to exclude
the supposition that a much
longer interval may have passed
than is generally supposed between
the creation of Adam and, let us
say, the appearance of Abraham.
Interpreting the Noachian Deluge
as partial—as not, in the literal
sense of the term, universal—he
finds scope enough within the limits
of the sacred text for that slow and
gradual development of civilised
man which his archæology has
taught him to believe in. Nor does
he find any difficulty whatever in
reconciling this slow progress from
the savage to the civilised man
with what is recorded of the creation
of Adam, or the attributes of
our first parents. Their superior
excellence, he considers, consisted
in their perfect morality, in the
predominance of the benevolent
affections, and in that reason which
is one with self-knowledge: it could
not have consisted, he argues, in
knowledge of the arts and sciences;
certainly not in the knowledge of
arts quite needless in the warmth,
abundance, and security of the garden
of Paradise. When, therefore,
their descendants, deprived of this
high moral excellence, found themselves
scattered abroad upon the
earth, what could they, in fact,
have become but ignorant savages?
They would have to evolve from
their own natural sagacity those
arts of life which their new relation
to the external world rendered
necessary. They would have to
commence that long and toilsome
ascent to civilisation which the
speculative historian has so often
attempted to describe.
We feel persuaded that our author
would be unwilling that, in
any notice of his work, these explanations
should be omitted, and
therefore it is that we give them
here so prominent a place. For
ourselves, so confident are we that
scientific truth and religious truth
will be found in the end to be
inextricably combined, and to be
reciprocally sustaining each other,
that we are not very solicitous to
patch up hasty and perhaps needless
reconciliations. At present we
have to settle our science; when
this is done, it will be time to ask
ourselves what it is that needs
reconcilement.
Although the archæologist can
point with triumph to the evidence
of successive tombs, or cromlechs,
as proving the sequence of his three
ages of stone and bronze and iron,
he can nowhere carry us back to the
first stone period, and from this to
the first development of the bronze
and the iron. He can show us that
on a certain spot—say the soil on
which London stands—there have
been generations of men distinguished
by the kind of tools they had
framed for themselves. But it is the
history of men on that spot which
his materials enable him to write;
they do not enable him to write the
history of the progress of man from
his earliest condition of existence.
For the first men who lived on the
banks of the Thames had come, we
presume, from other countries; they
had had a history, and were the
products of some kind of human
society before they settled there;
and the generations that followed
might have received their arts, as
in one case we know they did, from
foreign nations. It is, after all,
therefore, from a priori speculation—from
what we infer must have
been the course of things—that we
describe mankind as proceeding from
the rudest modes of existence to
the more civilised. The testimony
which the archæologist appeals to
confirms these speculations; it can
do no more. It never brings us to
the real history of human art. We
have still to guess how men lived
at first, whether on the fruits of the
earth or by the chase; we have still
to guess how men discovered the
use of fire, how they elaborated
mere vocal signs into a grammatical
language; we have still to conjecture
when or where the first canoe
or the first house was built. We
make this remark not to detract
from the labours of the archæologist,
but simply to put the subject
on its right basis. We have nowhere
that kind of evidence which
takes us back to the first developments
of the human intellect; the
nature of these must still be matter
of inference. We still argue, to a
great extent, in a purely speculative
manner; we conclude that a progress
like that which history and
historical monuments enable us to
trace, was the kind of progress
which the first families of the earth
passed through; but we know nothing
historically of that early progress.
In the old European or Asiatic
continent we had been accustomed
to regard the earliest generations
of mankind as entirely lost in the
mists of antiquity; but, till lately,
we looked on the continent of
America as being, in respect of its
population, far more recent, and as
affording a more simple subject
for ethnological speculation. The
civilisation of Mexico and Peru, destroyed
by the Spaniards, was traced
to Egypt, or to some other portion
of the Old World. The vagrant
tribes of savages that lived upon
the chase were the still more degenerate
children of Europe. But
this new continent is now found to
have been the habitation of man at
so remote a period, that the civilisations
of Mexico and Peru, however
they originated (and they were probably
native), must rank amongst
its modern events. Ruins of more
ancient cities are found buried in
its forest, and monuments of some
forgotten worship are traced upon
the banks of its rivers. The remains
of man himself—parts of the human
skeleton—have been found in positions
which suggest an antiquity
far beyond that of the cities of the
Nile or the Euphrates. Some of
these cases are well known, and
well known on account of the disputes
and discussions they have
given occasion to; others, from
which (geologically speaking) only
a modest antiquity has been inferred,
seem to our author to be worthy
of credit. He says:—
“In the post-pliocene formations of
South Carolina, exposed along the bed
of the Ashley River, remains of the
megatherium, megalodon, and other
gigantic extinct mammals, occur, not
only associated with existing species
peculiar to the American continent, but
also apparently with others hitherto believed
to have been domesticated and
introduced for the first time by modern
European colonists. But, still more interesting
for our present purpose, as possibly
indicating the contemporaneous
existence of some of those strange extinct
mammals with man, are notices of
the remains of human art in the same
formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting
a collection of fossils from the
post-pliocene of South Carolina before
the Academy of Natural Science at
Philadelphia, remarked:—‘Dr Klipstein,
who resides near Charleston, in
digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming
a large swamp, discovered and
sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with
the request that I should go down and
visit the place, as there were indications
of the bones and teeth of the animal
still remaining in the sands which underlie
the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a
small party of gentlemen, we visited the
doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining
several other teeth and bones of
this animal, but nearly one entire tusk;
and immediately alongside of the tusk
discovered the fragment of pottery which
I hold in my hand, and which is similar
to that manufactured at the present time
by the American Indians.’
“It would not be wise,” continues
Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories on
such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly
of very widely separated periods.
The Ashley River has channeled for itself
a course through the eocene and
post-pliocene formations of South Carolina,
and where these are exposed on its
shores the fossils are washed from their
beds, and become mingled with the remains
of recent indigenous and domestic
animals, and objects of human art. But
the discovery of Dr Klipstein was made
in excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically
speaking, a comparatively recent
formation.”
After alluding to the magnificent
skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus
which is now in the British Museum,
and in companionship with which
an Indian flint arrow-head was
found, he adds:—
“Another remarkable account, preserved
in the ‘American Journal of
Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon,
with considerable portions of the
skin, found in Missouri, associated with
stone spear-heads, axes, and knives,
under circumstances which suggest the
idea that it had been entangled in a bog,
and there stoned to death, and partially
consumed by fire. Such contiguity of
the works of man with those extinct
diluvial giants warns us at least to be
upon our guard against any supercilious
rejection of indications of man’s ancient
presence in the New World as well as
the Old. If the evidence is inconsequential
or untruthful, future discoveries
will not fail to bring it to nought; if,
on the contrary, it involves glimpses of
an unseen truth, no organised scepticism
will prevent the ultimate disclosure of
its amplest revelations.”
Had man, during the whole of this
early prehistoric epoch, whatever its
duration may have been, lived like
the savage, in what we call the stone
period? Or had the use of metals
and other arts been discovered and
lost again—lost, perhaps, because human
societies had not attained that
coherence and stability necessary to
the preservation of the arts? However
this may be, it cannot be
doubted that the use of the metal
tool forms an important era in the
progress of civilisation. And Mr
Wilson mentions a fact which enables
us to understand very readily
the transition from the use of stone
to the use of metal. Copper is still
found in the New World, and probably
was at first found in the Old
World, in a pure state—in nuggets,
as an Australian gold-digger would
call them—and these could at once
be beaten into the shape of an axe
by stone hammers without the application
of fire. The fragment of
copper was to the Indian a new
kind of stone, which had the fortunate
property of malleability.
“In the veins of the copper region of
Lake Superior, the native metal occurs
in enormous masses weighing hundreds
of tons; and many loose blocks of considerable
size have been found on the
lake shore, or lying detached on the surface,
besides smaller pieces exposed on
and mingled with the superficial soil in
sufficient quantities to supply all the
wants of the nomade hunter. This,
accordingly, he wrought into chisels and
axes, armlets and personal ornaments of
various kinds, without the use of the
crucible and any knowledge of metallurgic
arts; and, indeed, without recognising
any precise distinction between
the copper which he mechanically separated
from the mass, and the unmalleable
stone or flint out of which he had
been accustomed to fashion his spear
and arrow heads.”
Whilst applauding the metal
tool, copper or iron, and acknowledging
what we owe to it, let us
not pass over the stone—that handful
of rock or flint by the aid of
which the metal, in the first instance,
was wrought and fashioned—without
its meed of gratitude. It
seems a slight unnoticeable fact
that there should be these manageable
fragments of hard substance
ready to the hand of man; that the
whole earth was not divided between
the bed of rock and the
bed of sand or clay; that there
should have been there mere stones
(mere litter, you would say), of
which the floor of the earth had
better have been swept clean. Yet
those nodules of flint formed slowly
in the chalk—yet those rolled stones
upon the deserted beach, that the
sea has fashioned for the human
palm, and left high and dry upon
the land—seem to have entered as
much into the preparation for man
as the fauna or the flora amongst
which he was to live.
Who first applied fire to the
metal, and thus made it plastic as
the clay and sharper than the stone?
who first discovered fire itself? No
one knows; nor is the question
worth asking. But there is one
thing well worth noticing: it is the
answer given to the question, and
that in the rudest of times and
amongst many various nations.
Some god bestowed it. This tendency
to look for a supernatural
giver is very soon and very widely
developed. And what is more, the
idea of a giver has called forth
amongst rude selfish people struggling
for existence, the desire to
manifest their gratitude by some
act of worship which should also
be some act of self-denial. On a
certain day of the year all lights
shall be extinguished, and one man
amongst them (endowed for the
very purpose with imaginary sanctity)
shall rekindle the flame, thus
acknowledging by this symbol its
reception from the divine Giver.
The ancient Peruvians drew their
fire on this solemn occasion at once
from the sun; they collected its
rays into a focus by a concave mirror
of polished metal, and thus
ignited some dried cotton, or bark,
or fungus. Nothing could be more
expressive and appropriate than
such a symbolic act. It is a pity
that the historian has to record that
other symbolic acts (if such they
are to be considered) were of a cruel
and hideous description. The savage
is not accustomed only to thank
God; he has, he thinks, to propitiate
His favour; and as he has
nothing to give, he destroys in honour
of the universal Bestower. The
worship of the American Indian is
tainted more than any other we read
of with the rite of human sacrifice.
Various methods for obtaining
fire have been invented, but the
earliest seems to have been by the
friction of two dry pieces of wood.
It was a progressive step, we presume,
when the bark of a certain
tree or a dried fungus was used for
tinder. However produced, it was
to the savage, in the first instance,
itself a tool, the immediate instrument
he employed to cut down the
tree which would have resisted a
long while his flint hatchet. We
thought that all known people had
made discovery of fire and converted
it to their own purposes; but the
inhabitants of the Ladrones, when
discovered by the Spaniards, are
said to have shrunk from fire as
from a thing they simply feared:
“they called it a devil, a god that
bit fiercely when it was touched,
and lived on wood, which they saw
it devour.”
Mr Wilson entitles the chapter
which treats on this subject ‘The
Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The
next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime
Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then
we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’
and so on. Why this ostentatious
use of the term Instinct?
Did men hunt after fire even before
they had seen it, as an animal might
be supposed to hunt after food even
before it had eaten? Do men build
canoes as birds their nests or beavers
their dams? What is the
leading idea of Mr Wilson when he
thus liberally applies to us the
term Instinct? We have desires
and we have intelligence suggesting
means to an end. Is it the desire
that is instinctive, or the apprehension
of the means whereby the
desire can be gratified? Men have
a desire to pass from one side of
the river to the other; perhaps the
animal they were in chase of has
swam the stream; they have observed
that wood will float, that a
large piece of wood will float with
a man on it; they procure such
piece of wood, and paddle themselves
across. The knowledge which
the man displays in all this follows
from his previous perceptions.
Perception, memory, judgment, are
all exercised in a quite normal
manner, and the desire to float
across the stream has arisen from
the peculiar circumstances in which
the man was placed. What element
of mystery is there in this transaction
which calls for the name of
Instinct? For the word Instinct
is applied to certain actions of
animals because the ordinary laws
of psychology are, or seem, inadequate
to explain them—because a
certain mystery hangs over the
event which we mark by the name
Instinct. When we see animals
acting, without the teaching of experience,
in the same sort of way
in which we act after that teaching
of experience, we, perplexed to explain
this anomaly, pronounce the
action instinctive. The bee and
the bird build in this inexplicable
manner. Probably a more minute
investigation may enable us to resolve
whatever we call Instinct into
some delicacy of the senses, or some
rapidity of the judgment, peculiar
to the animal. Meanwhile the term
is serviceable as marking a class of
unexplained phenomena. But how
is it applicable to man in his
capacity of boat-builder? The sort
of canoe he will build, the materials
he will use, the tools he will work
with, are all determined for him by
existing circumstances, and the
actual amount of his knowledge.
Or is it the vague desire to put to
sea, prompting some manner of
boat-building, that Mr Wilson calls
our “maritime instinct?” Are we
driven to sea like ducks to a
pond? The peasantry of an inland
country are not conscious of any
such instinct, and would be very
unfortunate if they possessed it.
We have no wish to expel the
terms instinct and instinctive from
our popular diction, even when applied
to human actions. There are
cases when men act with a suddenness
and decision which remind
us of the animal in his promptest
moods, and we naturally apply to
these the term instinctive; and
sometimes we apply the term to a
tendency or desire which we cannot
at the time trace to our senses,
or to the usual operations of the
mind. But when an author formally—in
the very titles of his
chapters—supplies us with “Promethean
and maritime instincts,”
we may be excused if we ask for
some precise definition of the
term.
“Speech is one of the instincts of
man, but it is by the voluntary exercise
of his intellectual faculties,
as we conceive, that he is enabled
to develop it into language.” This
sounds oracular, but, like most
oracles, it is very obscure. What
does Mr Wilson mean by speech as
contrasted with language? Is speech
the mere giving of names to things,
and language the formation of a
grammar? But grammar is only a
naming of a more complex kind, a
naming of things and events in
their more complicated relations.
And what speech was ever formed
that had not some grammar, that
was not also a language? If by
speech, in contrast to language, is
meant the mere utterance of articulate
sounds which have no meaning
attached to them, then what proof
have we that men ever passed through
a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or
could anything so purposeless be
dignified with the name of an instinct?
The desire to speak, or to
communicate our thoughts or our
wants, is sometimes spoken of as
an instinct. But the need man has
of co-operation, and the ability he
has to co-operate, and those general
sympathies and affections which
render him a social being, are sufficient
to explain this desire. Such
a desire may be contemplated as
existing apart and prior to the possession
of language, but there can
be no reason for applying the term
instinct to it, unless we apply that
term to all our desires. So strong
and inevitable is this desire to express
our thoughts, that we have
not the least doubt that, if the
human larynx had not been fitted
for speech, man would have invented
a language of signs. His
hands and feet would have talked,
if his tongue and palate did not.
His larynx being mute and all other
faculties remaining the same, he
would have talked with his fingers
and written as the Chinese write,
whose characters are signs for
things, not for words.
The maritime or boat-building
instinct has, at all events, been very
much under the control of circumstances.
Sometimes the tree was
felled and hollowed, sometimes the
bark was stretched over wicker-work,
or skins of beasts were employed,
or planks were made into a
raft. The Egyptian bound some of
his water-jugs together and made a
raft of them. Some tribes have
limited themselves to the paddle
or the oar; some have spread the
sail, and spread it very boldly. The
Malay hoists his large sail over a
couple of planks of wood sewed
together with bark, and balances
this fragile craft by means of two
long spars fastened athwart and
projecting to windward. In such
a vessel as this he will scud fearlessly
through tempestuous seas
from one island to another. We
may boast, and very justly, of our
steam-engines, our electric telegraphs,
and of other triumphant
employments of the powers of nature;
but even to this day there is
not a more pleasing or thrilling
spectacle, or a more glorious instance
of the powers of nature
turned to the service of man, than
when some solitary boatman sits, at
the helm with sail outspread, borne
by the wind along the surface of
the sea. The water floats him, the
wind speeds him; he is for the
moment master of the two great
elements. Verily the savage has
his joy, his hour of pride and exultation.
It is curious that the natives of
North America limited themselves
to the oar or the paddle. The
Peruvians appear to have been the
only people of this continent who,
at the time of its discovery by
Columbus, employed the sail. This
is a striking instance of the very
general fact, almost amounting to
a law, that when a people have attained
to a certain proficiency in
the arts, sufficient to render life
tolerable, there ensues a long pause
in the career of progress. It requires
the stimulus of an urgent
want to set at work the inventive
faculties of the savage; and when
his invention has secured to him
an agreeable existence, or what he
considers such, there intervenes the
force of habit and the attachment
to familiar customs. Fortunately
the differences of climate, or other
external circumstances, require or
suggest different inventions, even
in this early stage of society, and
thus one barbarian may be able to
teach another. A people who had
brought the canoe propelled by oars
to perfection, would probably rest
contented with it; they could not
have invented the sail themselves;
they might receive it from another
people with whom it had been, from
the commencement, their favourite
mode of traversing the sea. Our
“technological instincts,” as Mr
Wilson calls them, go to sleep in
the savage when he is no longer
pinched by hunger or cold, or
other pressing inconvenience. They
awake again in the civilised man,
with whom invention itself has become
an agreeable effort or an intellectual
triumph. Some sort of
culinary vessels are wanted, and if
these have been once shaped out of
clay, the same kind of pottery will
content a people for ages. If nature
has thrown them the calabash,
a ready-made vessel, their instinct
of pottery will not be developed at
all; they will content themselves
with the calabash.
Mr Wilson brings together in a
very pictorial manner the two extremes
of this human art of boat-building:—
“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde
the modern voyager from the New World
looks with peculiar interest on the growing
fabrics of those huge steamers, with
ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but
of iron, which have made the ocean, that
proved so impassable a barrier to the men
of the fifteenth century, the easy highway
of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar
of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer,
the intermittent glare of the
furnaces, and all the novel appliances of
iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era
of steam; but meanwhile, underneath
these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the
memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in
which we are borne back up the stream
of human industry far into prehistoric
times. The earliest recorded discovery
of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at
a depth of twenty-five feet below the
surface, on a site known by the apt designation
of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive
canoe, hewn out of a single oak,
rested in a horizontal position on its
keel; and within it, near the prow, there
lay a curiously suggestive memorial of
the mechanical arts of the remote era to
which the ancient ship of the Clyde must
be assigned. This was a beautifully finished
stone axe or celt, doubtless one of
the simple implements of the allophylian
Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged,
if not, indeed, the tool with which it had
been fashioned into shape.”
From the hollowed trunk of a
tree, hewn with a stone axe by this
“allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights
in calling him, to the iron
steam-vessel that would have carried
him and all his tribe across
the Atlantic, the advance is great
indeed. And a very curious sentiment
must arise in the man who
has seen this canoe dug up from
under the busy streets of Glasgow,
and then afterwards in another continent,
on some lake or river not
yet quite appropriated by the white
man, has watched some prowling
Indian paddling about in a canoe
not much unlike it. The past and
the present seem to live together
before him: it is not the ends of
the earth only that are brought together
for him; he appears to embrace
the first and the last of the
generations of mankind.
We turn from the rude arts of
men to their still ruder thinking—to
customs springing from some
sentiment or some strange imagination.
Of these the most universal
and the most significant are
customs connected with the burial
of the dead. To the habit of interring
with the dead man the implements
he most valued in life—his
tools or weapons—we owe the
little knowledge we possess of our
very primitive ancestors. It is
generally said that these articles
were buried with the man, that
he might have them ready for use
in another world; and, no doubt,
some vague idea of this kind has
extensively prevailed: but if we
may speculate on a subject so obscure
as the imaginations of the
savage, we should say that this
idea grew out of the custom of
burying with the dead man his
own previous possessions, and that
the custom itself at first originated
in simple regret and respect for the
dead. We cannot have any strong
sentiment without feeling the desire
in some way to manifest it.
The dead man was loudly lamented—wept
and wailed over—and the
mourners often cut and wounded
themselves as an exhibition of their
grief. Well, at such a moment, instead
of appropriating to themselves
the possessions of the deceased, the
survivors threw them into the grave
with him. They were still in a manner
his property. It would manifest
a disrespect to the dead if at
once, as soon as the hand of his
chief was cold, another man had
seized upon his spear and carried
it to his own hut. Thus this one
passionate desire to manifest grief
and respect to a late friend or chief
would sufficiently account for the
act of interring with the body the
instruments or weapons he had been
in the habit of using. The custom
once adopted, superstition would
step in and enforce it, and the imagination
would invest it with a new
significance. Some poet of the land
would first suggest that, if the
dead man rose from his tomb, he
would find himself equipped for
the chase or for war. Sometimes
the buried arms, vessels, or other
implements, were broken before
they were deposited in the grave,
which does not seem to accord with
the idea that they were laid there
for any future use. It looks like
the interpretation of a subsequent
generation when it is said that the
savage expected the broken tool or
perforated vessel, like the decayed
human body, to be restored again
and made fit for his use. Here is
an Indian, a Chinook, buried in his
canoe. Within the canoe a broken
sword is deposited. Am I to gather
that the Chinook expected a maritime
life hereafter, and even to revive
floating upon the waters? Does
not the whole act seem, at least in
its initiation, to be symbolical? All
was at an end. The man would
float no more—would fight no
more. The canoe was buried, the
sword was broken.
But whether we are right or not
in our supposition as to the origin
of this idea—namely, that the articles
buried in the tomb with the
deceased would be useful to him in
an after life—it is plain that such
an idea has been entertained, and
certainly all our learned writers
upon these ancient customs of
burial attribute this motive to our
imaginative forefathers. When, in
the old pagan burrows of the wold
of Yorkshire or elsewhere, some
British or Saxon charioteer has been
exhumed, with the iron wheel-tires
and bronzed horse-furniture (the
wreck of the decayed war-chariot),
and the skeletons of the horses,
eloquent antiquarians have not
failed to say (as Mr Wilson does)
that the dead chief was buried
thus “that he might enter the
Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne
in the chariot in which he had
been wont to charge amid the
ranks of his foes.” We presume
they find themselves justified in
this interpretation.
Here, again, we find that the new
continent sets almost before the
eyes of our traveller scenes similar
to those which, as a European archæologist,
he had been laboriously
endeavouring to reconstruct in some
remote antiquity.
“Upwards of forty years since, Black
Bird, a famous chief of the Omahaws,
visited the city of Washington, and on
his return was seized with smallpox, of
which he died on the way. When the
chief found himself dying, he called his
warriors around him, and, like Jacob of
old, gave commands concerning his burial,
which were as literally fulfilled. The
dead warrior was dressed in his most
sumptuous robes, fully equipped with
his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and
borne about sixty miles below the Omahaw
village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri,
which towers far above all the
neighbouring heights, and commands a
magnificent extent of landscape. To the
summit of this bluff a beautiful white
steed, the favourite war-horse of Black
Bird, was led; and there, in presence of
the whole nation, the dead chief was
placed with great ceremony on its back,
looking towards the river, where, as he
had said, he could see the canoes of the
white men as they traversed the broad
waters of the Missouri. His bow was
placed in his hand, his shield and quiver,
with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by
his side. His store of pemmican and his
well-filled tobacco-pouch were supplied,
to sustain him on the long journey to
the hunting-grounds of the great Manitou,
where the spirits of his fathers
awaited his coming. The medicine-men
of the tribe performed their most mystic
charms to secure a happy passage to the
land of the great departed; and all else
being completed, each warrior of the
chiefs own band covered the palm of his
right hand with vermilion, and stamped
its impress on the white sides of the devoted
war-steed. This done, the Indians
gathered turfs and soil, and placed
them around the feet and the legs of the
horse. Gradually the pile arose under
the combined labour of many willing
hands, until the living steed and its dead
rider were buried together under the memorial
mound; and high over the crest
of the lofty tumulus which covered the
warrior’s eagle plumes a cedar post was
reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers
on the Missouri the last resting-place
of Black Bird, the great chief of
the Omahaws.”
But there is one passage in Mr
Wilson’s book which, we think, to
the student of the ancient myth or
religious legend must be replete
with interest. It occurs in the
chapter which treats on the use of
tobacco and that custom of smoking
which we have imported from
the savage, much to the delectation,
no doubt, of those who inhale the
fumes of what they are pleased to
call the fragrant weed, and much,
assuredly, to the disgust and suffering
of those who are involved, most
unwillingly, in the smoke which
others are exhaling around them.
Never were two parties more sharply
divided than the smokers and
the non-smokers. The first will
doubtless agree with the Indian in
the belief that tobacco was of divine
origin. Did not two hunters of the
Susquehannas share their venison
with a lovely squaw who mysteriously
appeared before them in the
forest? and did they not, “on returning
to the scene of their feast
thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant
growing where she had
sat?” and do not Indians tell us
that the Great Spirit freely indulges
in the intoxicating fumes which
they themselves love so well? The
non-smokers hold a different faith.
They see no celestial gift in this
black, fuliginous amusement; and
if they do not ascribe to it a devilish
origin, they assert that it is enjoyed
with a devilish indifference
to those to whom their beloved
smoke is but stench and sickness.
Into this custom of tobacco-smoking
Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows
much learning on the inquiry;
but it is especially to the institution
of the pipe of peace amongst
the Indians that we would now
direct the attention of the reader.
We have, as Mr Wilson tells the
story, the complete dissection of a
myth; we see how a legend arises,
or may arise, partly from the most
trivial causes, and partly from generous
impulses and high imaginations.
Between the Minnesota and the
Missouri rivers there stands a bold
perpendicular cliff, “beautifully
marked with distinct horizontal
layers of light grey and rose or
flesh-coloured quartz.” Near this a
famous red pipe-stone is procured;
a material, we presume, better fitted
than any other for making pipes.
Traces of both ancient and modern
excavation prove that it has been
the resort, during many generations,
of Indian tribes, seeking this famous
red pipe-stone. A spot to which
independent tribes came for this
purpose, and for this only, became
neutral ground; became a spot on
which they might meet in peace—perhaps
to discuss their points of
difference. But in process of time
it became a sacred spot, and the
peace between hostile tribes was
preserved by a religious sanction.
There are marks on the rock resembling
the track of a large bird.
These were converted into the footsteps
of the Great Spirit. The
Great Spirit, therefore, at one time
descended upon the rock and taught—what
else could he be supposed
to teach?—the sacred neutrality of
the spot, and the privilege and duty
of all tribes to renew their pipes
there, and especially the calumet, or
pipe of peace. The last version of
the tradition runs thus:—
“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after
the red men were made, when all the
different tribes were at war, the Great
Spirit called them all together at the
Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the
rocks, and the red nations were assembled
in infinite numbers in the plain
below. He took out of the rock a piece
of the red stone, and made a large pipe.
He smoked it over them all; told them
that it was part of their flesh; that
though they were at war they must
meet at this place as friends; that it
belonged to them all; that they must
make their calumets from it, and smoke
them to him whenever they wished to
appease him or get his goodwill. The
smoke from his big pipe rolled over
them all, and he disappeared in the
cloud.”
The Sioux, notwithstanding this
good teaching of the very tradition
which they still repeat to the stranger,
have, by the right of the strongest,
taken possession of the sacred
neutral ground; and they, and all
other tribes of the red race, are
either being absorbed into the white
population or exterminated by it.
The development of the myth and
the people of the myth has been
therefrom alike arrested. But how
clearly we see its growth and formation!
To what a mystical faith
that flesh-coloured quartz was conducting!
And what mingling of
the divine and human would have
been suggested by the act recorded
of the Great Spirit! If these Indian
tribes had finally coalesced in one
nation, the myth would have been
exalted, and the Great Spirit would
have taught them an eternal bond of
peace and brotherhood. If civilisation
and culture had still further advanced,
this peace and brotherhood
would have embraced all mankind,
and assumed the form of the highest
moral teaching.
A considerable portion of Mr
Wilson’s book is occupied with
those ancient remains, whether in
the valley of the Mississippi or in
the forests of Central America,
which speak of a civilisation, or at
least of nations and of cities that
had existed and left their ruins behind
them, anterior to what we call
the discovery of the New World.
The subject is highly interesting,
and it loses none of its interest in
the hands of our author. He speaks
very decidedly on the great antiquity
of the mounds and the earthworks
of the valley of the Mississippi; less
decidedly on the antiquity of the
monumental pillars and other architectural
remains which were first
brought to the knowledge of the
English public through the travels
of Mr Stephens in Central America.
The work of Mr Squiers still contains,
we believe, the fullest account
we possess of those vast circular
mounds, and other extraordinary
earthworks, discovered within the
territory of the United States.
Both these writers, Mr Stephens
and Mr Squiers, produced at the
time of the publication of their several
works a very vivid impression
on the reading public of England.
Both of them broke ground into
quite new fields of inquiry, but
both of them left the mind rather
excited than informed. This was
to be expected when the subject was
of so novel and surprising a character.
Mr Squiers saw evidences of
serpent-worship and of other religious
rites which his study of the
antiquities of the Old World had
made familiar to his imagination,
in the circular mounds which he
traced in the open field: and Mr Stephens,
as he broke his way through
the forests, saw the ruins of another
Egypt stand before him.
That no tradition should exist
amongst the present race of Indians
with respect to these primitive
“mound-builders,” is not surprising;
nor would this alone indicate any
very great antiquity. Mr Wilson
thinks the state in which the skeletons
were found within the tumuli—crumbling
to dust on being
touched—is sufficient proof of their
great age. One must know all the
circumstances of the burial, all the
influences to which the skeleton has
been exposed, before any safe conclusion
can be drawn from this fact.
But, leaving undetermined the antiquity
of these remains, we think it
plain that the first discoverers of
them, whether of the mounds or of
the ruined cities, have, with the
natural enthusiasm pertaining to
all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence
they display of civilisation,
or progress in the arts. After all,
the soundest opinion seems to be
that the “mound-builders” and the
builders of the deserted cities were
but the intellectual progenitors of
those half-civilised Mexicans and
Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered
and destroyed. It is
not likely that any higher or equal
state of civilisation had been attained
and lost before the arrival
of the Spaniards.
The quite circular form of an
extensive mound or earthwork is
thought to imply a knowledge of
geometry or trigonometry, because
a modern surveyor would proceed
in a certain scientific manner to lay
out such a circle. But the slow
process of measuring a number of
radii from a given centre, and connecting
their terminal points, would
probably have sufficed for all that
these early geometers executed. Or
they might have drawn a smaller
circle, in the first instance, by a
movable radius, and then traced
a larger and a larger one outside of
this, till they had obtained one of
the requisite magnitude. Time and
labour will accomplish much, and
with very little help from art or
science. But where imagination
seems to play the subtlest tricks
with our antiquarians is in their
appreciation of the beautiful in such
relics of the fine arts as are discovered
in these mounds and cities.
We have prints given us here of
carved pipes found in the tombs,
which we are told are very beautiful.
To our eye they do not look
beautiful at all, and very little in advance
of other prints which represent
pipes carved by the present
race of Red Indians. But it is when
the antiquarian critic finds himself
amongst the remains of the rude
sculptures of Central America that
he shows himself most under the
influence of this glamour. If we
had not the pictures or engravings
by which to check the text, we should
think that Thebes and Memphis
had been long ago outrivalled on
the other side of the Atlantic.
Our readers, we are sure, have
not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book
of travels; they will remember
how he entered with his guide into
what seemed an untrodden forest
at Copan, apparently undisturbed
from its very creation; and how,
as he made his way with his axe
through the brushwood, he found
himself face to face with an upright
column of stone elaborately carved.
In the centre of this a human face
of gigantic proportions stared out
upon him. Some of these monuments
had been overpowered by
the vigorous growth of the surrounding
trees, and displaced from
their upright position by huge
branches that half encircled them;
others lay upon the ground, as if
bound down by the vines and
other great creepers of the American
forest. Nothing disturbed the
solitude of the scene except a grimacing
procession of monkeys, who
from the branches of the trees were
looking alternately at the traveller,
and at the mysterious objects which
had attracted the traveller’s attention.
As he proceeded he came
upon a truncated pyramid, with a
flight of steps leading to a broad
surface, on which evidently some
other structure had been raised;
and then again he entered a square
enclosure with steps, which might
have been intended for seats, running
up on all sides, reminding him
of a Roman amphitheatre. No
books had told him of the existence
even of this ruined city. Who had
built it, who had lived in it, no one
could say. The people of the country
could only answer him with
their “Quien sabe?” who knows?—an
answer always sufficient for
themselves. There was not even a
tradition, not even a palpable lie,
to be heard. Men were as silent
about these cities as the forest itself.
What wonder that the enthusiasm
of the traveller should be
excited, and that he should see
more than the eye—as a simple
optical instrument—disclosed to
him? Assuredly his enthusiasm
as to the beauty of the sculpture is
not supported by the drawings he
has given us. He commends to us
these drawings of the artist as being,
“next to the stones themselves,”
the most perfect materials on which
to form our judgment. And of one
thing we may be certain, that a
modern artist, trained to the correct
representation of the human figure,
would err, if he erred at all, by improving
the drawing in these grotesque
sculptures. It would require
a distinct effort in the modern artist
to depart from the true outline
and proportions of the human form;
and whenever his attention relaxed,
he would infallibly become more
correct than his original. Well, we
see in the delineation here given us
a mere pillar, in the centre of which
is carved a human face, and lower
down two fat arms, which the imagination
is to connect with the unmeaning
face above them; and we
are told in the text “that the character
of this image is grand, and
it would be difficult to exceed the
richness of the ornament.” We
turn the page and see another
gigantic head, with huge saucer
eyes, such as a child would draw,
and we are told that “the style is
good,” and that “the great expansion
of the eyes seems intended to
inspire awe.” So are the masks
sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving
boys. But very silly savages
must those have been in whom such
absurd figures could have inspired
awe. Mr Stephens is constantly
being “arrested by the beauty of
the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at
Palenque are indeed superior to
anything he met with at Copan,
and some drawings from these exhibit
an unexpected grace, and an
outline perhaps unconsciously improved
by the hand of the artist.
But here also we are startled at the
discrepancy between the description
of the enraptured traveller and the
representation in the engravings.
We have, in one of them, a figure
sitting cross-legged upon a narrow
bench; his legs are tucked up
under him painfully tight, and his
balance must be preserved with
great difficulty; his large nose is
in manifest danger of breaking itself
upon the floor. We are told
that this figure sits “on a couch,
ornamented with two leopards’
heads,” and that “the attitude is
easy, and the expression calm and
benevolent.” The first discoverer
must evidently have looked with
something of a lover’s eye.
The learned antiquarian has been
nowhere more exposed to delusion
than in this New World. Mr Wilson
gives us an amusing account
of the inscription on the Dighton
Rock, which has received so many
various interpretations. It stands
in New England; and at a time
when it was a favourite speculation
of its theologians, that the Phœnicians
had been the earliest colonists
of America, and that the accursed
race of Canaan had been banished
there, this inscription was decided
to be Punic. Dr Stiles, President
of Yale College, when preaching in
1783 before the Governor and State
of Connecticut, appealed to the
Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed,
in the old Punic or Phœnician
character and language, in
proof that the Indians were of the
cursed seed of Canaan, and were to
be displaced and rooted out by the
European descendants of Japhet!
“The Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles,
“charged the Dighton and other
rocks in Narraganset Bay with
Punic inscriptions remaining to this
day, which last I myself have repeatedly
seen and taken off at large,
as did Professor Sewell. He has
lately transmitted a copy of this
inscription to M. Gebelin of the
Parisian Academy of Sciences, who,
comparing them with the Punic
palæography, judges them to be
Punic, and has interpreted them as
denoting that the ancient Carthaginians
once visited these distant
regions.”
Various copies, all professing to
be most carefully executed, of this
inscription, were sent to antiquarian
societies, to museums, to colleges,
as well in Europe as in America.
A learned Colonel Vallency, of the
London Antiquarian Society, undertook
to prove that the inscription
was neither Phœnician nor Punic,
but Siberian. Then it became the
fashion to look upon the Danes and
the Northmen as the first discoverers
of America, or its first colonists,
and the Punic was changed into a
Runic inscription. The names of
Thorfinn and other Norse heroes
were plainly read in this wild scrawl
upon the Dighton Rock. Learned
Danes themselves found no difficulty
in deciphering the name at
least of the chief hero who conducted
the expedition of which this is a
memorial, though they confess that
the names of his associates are not
quite so legible.
“Surely no inscription,” continues
Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not
even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual
Rosetta Stone, ever received more
faithful study. But the most curious
matter relating to this written rock is,
that after being thus put to the question
by learned inquisitors for a hundred and
fifty years, it did at length yield a most
surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft
tested the origin and significance of the
Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting
a copy of it to Chingwauk, an intelligent
Indian chief, familiar with the native
system of picture-writing. The result
was an interpretation of the whole as the
record of an Indian triumph over some
rival native tribe, and the conviction on
Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock
is simply an example of Indian rock-writing,
attributable to the Wabenakies
of New England.... And such is the
conviction reluctantly formed in the
mind of the most enthusiastic believer
in the discovery and colonisation of New
England by the Northmen.”
We are in danger of losing our
way entirely amongst the multitude
of interesting subjects which Mr
Wilson’s two thick volumes present
to us—and present, it must be confessed,
in a somewhat confused array.
A rather pleasant effect is produced
by the bringing together the
knowledge of the European archæologist
with the observations of the
modern traveller; but this leads
to a discursive style. In spite of
the distinct titles of the several
chapters, we never know precisely
what we are discussing, and where
to look for anything a second time
which we may remember to have
read. We are now engaged with
the wild Indians, and are reminded
of such human curiosities
as the “Flatheads,” who glory in
producing a deformed skull by a
distressing pressure on the infant’s
head, of which process we have a
gilded picture strangely ornamenting
our learned volumes. These
Flatheads are plainly uninjured in
their intellects by this distortion of
the skull; so as there is room left
for the development of the cerebrum,
all seems right; and even
when nature keeps the formation of
the skull in her own hands, we apprehend
this is all that is wanted.
These Flatheads contrive to make
slaves of the neighbouring round-headed
Indians,—who, by the way,
are not permitted to flatten the
heads of their children, this being
jealously guarded as a sign of freedom
and aristocratic privileges.
They are said to look with contempt
on the whites, as bearing in the
shape of their heads the hereditary
mark of slaves. After contemplating
for a time these unprogressive
natives, some railroad car comes
whizzing past, or the posts of the
electric telegraph remind the author
of the go-ahead American who is
gradually appropriating all the soil
to himself. We have a highly characteristic
trait mentioned of the
new race. Not only does he cut
down forests and break up the
prairie, but he trades in water-lots—in
land still covered with water;
appropriates and sells half the
soil of a lake which has yet to be
reduced to the economical proportion
he intends to allow it.
The two races cannot plainly long
reside on the same continent; but
Mr Wilson brings before us a fact
which will probably be new to most
English readers. It is almost as
much an absorption into the white
race as a process of extinction that
is now going on amongst the Red
Indians. Wherever the whites,
whether they are French, or English,
or Scotch, have been long settled
in the neighbourhood of Indian
tribes, there has grown up a mixed
race or half-breed. This half-breed,
in some instances, remains in the
settlement of the whites, but in
others it still follows the mode of
life of its Indian parent, and a
race grows up that is neither European
nor Indian. Whole tribes
seem now to be constituted of this
half-breed, and they are distinguished
for their power of endurance
and their greater faculty for
social organisation. But in proportion
as they approximate to the
European, the less likelihood is there
that they will long remain distinct
and separated from the European
by their mode of life.
“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the
absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American
race will not, I am aware, meet
with a ready acceptance, even from those
who dwell where its traces are most perceptible;
but fully to appreciate its extent,
we must endeavour to follow down
the course of events by which the continent
has been transferred to the descendants
of its European colonists. At
every fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering
into the wild west, the work has
necessarily been accomplished by the
hardy youths, or the hunters and trappers
of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they
carry with them their wives or daughters;
but where they found a home
amongst savage-haunted wilds, they took
to themselves wives of the daughters of
the soil. To this mingling of blood,
even in its least favourable aspects, the
prejudices of the Indian presented little
obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of
travel among the Cristineaux, says,
‘One of the chiefs assured me that the
children borne by their women to Europeans
were bolder warriors and better
hunters than themselves.’ The fact is
unquestionable that all along the widening
outskirts of the newer clearings, and
wherever an outlying trading or hunting
post is established, we find a fringe of
half-breed population, marking the transitional
border-land which is passing
away from its aboriginal claimants....
At all the white settlements near those of
the Indians the evidence of admixture is
abundant, from the pure half-breed to
the slightly-marked remoter descendant
of Indian maternity, discoverable only
by the straight black hair, and a singular
watery glaze in the eye, not unlike
that of the English gypsy. There they
are to be seen, not only as fishers, trappers,
and lumberers, but engaged on equal
terms with the whites in the trade and
business of the place. In this condition
the population of all the frontier settlements
exists; if, as new settlers come in,
the mixed element disappears, it does so
purely by absorption.
“Nor are such traces confined to the
frontier settlements. I have recognised
the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies
at a Canadian Governor-General’s
receptions, in the halls of the Legislature,
among the undergraduates of
Canadian universities, and mingling in
the selectest social circles. And this is
what has been going on in every new
American settlement for upwards of
three centuries, under every diversity of
circumstance.”
This is a far more agreeable idea
than that the Indians are being
everywhere starved out of existence
by the encroachments of the European.
But that portion of the
mixed offspring which adhered to
the Indian tribe, and became Indian
in its habits, affords a still
more interesting subject of speculation.
On the Red River there is a
settlement of half-breeds, numbering
about six thousand. A marked
difference, we are told, “is observable,
according to their white paternity.
The French half-breeds are
more lively and frank in their bearing,
but also less prone to settle
down to drudgery of farming, or
other routine duties of civilised
life, than those chiefly of Scottish
descent.” If in both cases the half-breed
has been entirely educated
by its Indian parent, this would be
a good instance of the influence of
race as separable from the influence
of education. These half-breeds are
generally superior in physical as
well as mental qualities, and have
greater powers of endurance than
any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr
Wilson assures us “that the last
traces of the Red blood will disappear,
not by the extinction of
the Indian tribes, but by the absorption
of the half-breed minority
into the new generations of the
predominant race.”
Of the warlike tribes of native
Indians some have been induced
to settle down as agriculturists.
Some are Roman Catholics, some
Protestants. But we believe it may
be stated that all signal amendments
or progressive changes have
been accompanied by a mixture of
European blood. To this very day
the full-blooded Indian despises
the civilisation of the white man,
or at least thinks it something
that may be good for the white
man, but by no means good for
him. The fierce tribes that constituted
the famous confederacy
of the Iroquois, and who have
settled in Canada, have been all
more or less tamed, but they have
all lost the purity of their race;
and when we hear of the hunter of
the prairies taking upon himself the
mode of life of European colonists,
we may be sure that this change
has been facilitated by an intermixture
of the two races. Some of
these tribes have forgotten their
own language, and speak only a
French patois.
We do not imply by this observation
that the native Indian would
have been incapable of advancing
by a slow and natural progression
of their own on the road of civilisation:
on the contrary, we believe
that the civilisation of the Aztecs
and the Peruvians may be seen in
its earliest stage amongst the Iroquois.
But when the European
encounters the savage, there is a
gap between them which the latter
cannot suddenly traverse. The intermediate
steps are not presented
to him. The time is not given him
by which slow-changing habits can
be formed and transmitted. He is
required to proceed at a faster pace
than his savage nature can accomplish.
Now, as every generation
that has advanced upon its predecessors,
transmits, together with its
knowledge, some increasing aptitude
for the acquisition of such
knowledge, there is no difficulty
in believing that the savage would
be expedited in his career of civilisation
as well by an intermixture
of race as by a participation of
knowledge.
The whole chapter of Mr Wilson
on the Red Race is well worthy of
perusal. The reader will find in it
many interesting details, which, of
course, our space will not permit
us to allude to. We shall conclude
our notice by some reference to a
topic especially interesting when
we speak of the progress of civilisation—namely,
the mode of transmitting
ideas, the art of writing,
or letters. Our author, according to
his favourite phraseology, entitles
his chapter on this subject ‘The
Intellectual Instinct: Letters.’
The origin of language may be
open to discussion. Its gradual
growth from the wants, the social
passions, the organisation, the mimetic
and reasoning powers of man,
may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory
account. But no one
disputes that writing is an invention
of man. Even if the steps of
this invention had not been traced,
we should have been unable to
frame any other hypothesis with
regard to an art possessed by one
people and not possessed by another.
We may define writing to
be the transmission of ideas by
visible and permanent signs, instead
of by momentary sounds and gestures.
The art of writing, it must
be remembered, is not complete till
the characters upon the paper, or
the parchment, or the plaster of the
wall, or the graven rock, interpret
themselves to one who knows the
conventional value of the several
signs. So long as any picture-writing
or symbolic figures act merely
as aids to the memory, in retaining
a history of events which is, in
fact, transmitted by oral tradition,
writing is not yet invented. The
picture, however faithful, gives its
meaning only to those who know
many other facts which are not in
the picture itself. When a system
of signs has been invented, by which
alone the ideas of one person, or one
generation, can be communicated
to another person or another generation,
then the art has been attained,
whether those signs are
hieroglyphics or alphabetical, whether
they are signs of things or
signs of words.
This is necessary to be borne in
mind, because there is a certain use
of pictorial and symbolic signs which
is in danger of being confounded
with the perfect hieroglyph; and
we are inclined to think this confusion
has been made with regard
to some of the sculptured remains
discovered in Central America. We
doubt if these “hieroglyphics,”
which scholars are invited to study
and to interpret, are hieroglyphics
as the word is understood by the
Egyptologist. Granting that they
always have a meaning, and are not
introduced, in some cases, as mere
ornaments (just as we introduce
the heads of stags or the figures
of little children on any vase we
desire to ornament), still it may be
a meaning of that kind which could
be only intelligible to one who
from other sources knew the history
or the fable it was intended to
bring to remembrance. A representation
of this kind, half pictorial
and half symbolic, would help to
keep alive the memory of an event;
but, the memory of it once extinct,
it could not revive the knowledge
of the event to us. We should waste
our ingenuity in vain attempts to
read what was not, in fact, any
kind of writing.
The Peruvians had manifestly not
advanced beyond a system of mnemonics,
a kind of memoria technica.
With certain knots in strings of
different colours they had associated
certain ideas. A Peruvian woman
could show you a bundle of knotted
strings and tell you her whole life
“was there.” To her it was, but
to no one else. If all the Peruvians
agreed to associate the history of
Peru with other bundles of knotted
cords, their quipus would still be
only an aid to memory; the history
itself must be conveyed from
one mind to another by oral communication.
Some of the North
American Indians had their wampum,
their many-coloured belt, into
which they talked their treaty,
or any other matter it was desirable
to remember. The Mexicans
had mingled symbols with their
picture-writing, but they had not
wrought the hieroglyphic into a system,
by means of which alone ideas
could be conveyed from one generation
to another. With them it
could not be said that the art of
writing was known. But antiquarians
have formed, it seems, a different
opinion of the mixture of symbol
and picture discovered in the
ruins of Copan and Palenque; and,
partly on this ground, they arrived
at the conclusion that these cities
were built and inhabited by a
people in advance of the Mexicans
or Aztecs discovered by the
Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very
distinctly of those mysterious sculptures:
“They are no rude abbreviations,
like the symbols either of
Indian or Aztec picture-writing;
but rather suggest the idea of a
matured system of ideography in
its last transitional stage, before
becoming a word-alphabet like that
of the Chinese at the present day.”
We should be open to the charge
of great presumption, if, with nothing
before us but a few engravings
by which to guide our judgment,
we ventured to offer an opinion
opposed to that of Mr Wilson,
or of others who have made the
subject one of especial study. But
opposite to the very page (p. 140,
vol. ii.) from which we take this
last sentence we have quoted, Mr
Wilson gives us an engraving of
what are denominated “hieroglyphics.”
It appears to us as if the
pillar here represented had been
divided into compartments, and
each compartment had been filled
by the artist with some appropriate
subject, generally some human
figure whose action and attitude
are unintelligible to us; but the
whole conveys the idea, not of a
series of hieroglyphics, but of individual
representations, each of which
has its own independent meaning.
Other engravings, indeed, approximate
more nearly to the hieroglyphic;
the arbitrary sign is more
conspicuous, and there is a more
frequent repetition of the same subject;
but when we consider the
poverty of invention that even in
later times afflicts the arts, and the
tendency to repeat and to copy
which is very noticeable in rude
times, we are not surprised that
the same subject is often found on
the same monument, or that it has
spread from Copan to Palenque.
There is nothing in the engravings
before us, or in the account given
of them, which proves that a really
hieroglyphic system had been invented;
and we cannot but suspect
that those who undertake the
task of deciphering them will inevitably
fail, not because the key
cannot be found, but because no
key ever existed.
Suppose a monument erected or
a medal struck in honour of one of
our own excellent missionaries; suppose
it represented the missionary-standing
with one foot on a broken
image, or idol, and that by his side
knelt some half-naked savage with
a cross in his hands—this mixture
of picture and of symbol would tell
its tale very intelligibly to us, for
we have heard before of the labours
of the missionary. But suppose
this and other pictures of the same
kind were handed down to a remote
posterity, who had no information
except what the pictures themselves
conveyed by which to understand
them, what hopeless perplexities
would they for ever remain! And
the use of the repeated symbol
might lead to the persuasion that
they were composed on some hieroglyphic
system. We might imagine
learned men toiling for ever over
such representation, and never coming
to any satisfactory result.
What different impressions the
same pictorial representation may
convey to two different persons, we
have many an amusing instance of
in the history of our Egyptian discoveries,
or efforts at discovery. We
borrow an example from the pages
before us. On the wall of the temple
at Philæ, at the first cataract of
the Nile, a figure is seen seated at
work on what seems a potter’s
wheel, and there is a group of
hieroglyphics over its head. One
learned translator reads and explains
thus:—“Kaum the Creator,
on his wheel, moulds the divine
members of Osiris (the type of
man) in the shining house of life,
or the solar disk.” Another learned
man, Mr Birch of the British
Museum, soars, if possible, still
higher for a meaning:—“Phtah
Totonem, the father of beginnings,
is setting in motion the egg of the
sun and moon, director of the gods
of the upper world.” Mr Wilson,
we presume, in accordance with a still
later interpretation, calls this figure
simply the “ram-headed god
Kneph,” without explaining what
he is doing with his wheel. If the
picture and the hieroglyphic together
lead to such various results,
we may easily conceive what wild
work would be made by an attempt
to interpret a pictorial representation
alone.
We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions
discovered in these ruined
cities the true character of hieroglyphics;
that is, of a system of
symbols by means of which, independently
of oral tradition, the
ideas of one generation could be
conveyed to another. But our
readers would probably prefer to
have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment
to our own conjectures. He
says:—
“On the sculptured tablets of Copan,
Quirigua, and Palenque, as well as on
the colossal statues at Copan and other
ancient sites in Central America, groups
of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged
in perpendicular or horizontal rows, as
regularly as the letters of any ancient or
modern inscription. The analogies to
Egyptian hieroglyphics are great, for all
the figures embody, more or less clearly
defined, representations of objects in nature
or art. But the differences are no
less essential, and leave no room to
doubt that in these columns of sculptured
symbols we witness the highest
development to which picture-writing
attained, in the progress of that indigenous
American civilisation so singularly
illustrative of the intellectual unity
which binds together the divers races of
man. A portion of the hieroglyphic inscription
which accompanies the remarkable
Palenque sculpture of a figure offering
what has been assumed to represent
an infant before a cross, will best
suffice to illustrate the characteristics of
this form of writing.”
What is the antiquity of these
ruined cities? The first tendency
was to carry them back into some
very remote period, far beyond the
memory or knowledge of the Mexicans
and Peruvians. This was the
first impression of Mr Stephens;
afterwards he was disposed to bring
them nearer the epoch of the Spanish
conquest. He had lent a credulous
ear to the story of some
good padre, who had assured him
that a native Indian city, greater
than Copan could have ever been,
still existed in a flourishing and
populous condition, in some district
untrodden by the European
traveller. And this faith, that a
Copan still existed, naturally induced
him to believe that the ruined
Copan, not belonging to an extinct
civilisation, might not be so old as
he first presumed it to be. He
seems to have thought it possible
that some of these cities might have
been inhabited at the time of the
Spanish conquest, and that others
at that period were already a heap
of ruins. War appears to have been
incessant amongst almost all the
tribes of the native Americans. On
this account it appears to us very
probable that many cities may have
been built and destroyed, and a
partial civilisation won and lost
in them, prior to the epoch of the
Spanish conquest. Such oscillations,
very likely, occurred in the progress
of American civilisation. And in
some of these oscillatory movements
a nearer approach might
have been made to the art of writing
than in that one phase of this
civilisation in which the European
discovered and destroyed it for ever.
But our impression is, that, viewing
the history of this continent as a
whole, there has been a slow irregular
progress, which had reached
its highest point in the epoch of
Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.
The earliest stages of human progress
are very slow, and much interrupted
by wars of conquest and
extermination. We find no difficulty,
therefore, in assigning a great
antiquity to some of these ruined
cities, and a still greater antiquity
to the curious mounds and earthworks
in the valley of the Mississippi,
without necessarily inferring
that these are the remains of any
civilisation superior to what history
has made known to us. And before
these mounds were constructed,
there might have passed a long epoch
in which man wandered wild by the
rivers and in the forests of this continent.
This last-mentioned epoch
of mere savage existence, some of our
speculative philosophers would extend
to an enormous duration. We
are not disposed, by any evidence
yet submitted to us, to expand this
period to what we must not call a
disproportionate length, because we
have not the whole life of the
human race before us; but which,
arguing on those progressive tendencies
which, notwithstanding the
impediments and checks they receive,
constitute the main characteristic
of the species, seems an improbable
length. Let the geologist,
however, to whom this part of the
problem must be handed over, pursue
his researches, and we need not
say we shall be happy to receive
whatever knowledge of the now forgotten
past he can bring to light.
CAXTONIANA: A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS. — PART XVI. — NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.
545
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’
Every description of literature
has its appropriate art. This
truth is immediately acknowledged
in works of imagination. We
speak, in familiar phrase, of the
Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry.
But the presence of art is less
generally recognised in works addressed
to the reason. Nevertheless,
art has its place in a treatise
on political economy, or in a table
of statistics. For in all subjects,
however rigidly confined to abstract
principles or positive facts, the
principles and facts cannot be
thrown together pell-mell; they
require an artistic arrangement.
Expression itself is an art. So
that even works of pure science
cannot dispense with art, because
they cannot dispense with expression.
What is called method in
Science is the art by which Science
makes itself intelligible. There is
exquisite art in the arrangement of
a problem in Euclid. If a man
have a general knowledge of the
fact that all lines drawn from the
centre of a circle to the circumference
are equal, but has never seen
that fact proved by Euclid, let him
attempt to prove it in his own way,
and then compare his attempt with
the problem in Euclid which demonstrates
the fact, and he will at
once acknowledge the master’s art
of demonstration. Pascal is said
to have divined, by the force of his
own genius, so large a number of
Euclid’s propositions, as to appear
almost miraculous to his admirers,
and wholly incredible to his aspersers.
Yet that number did not
exceed eighteen. In fact, art and
science have their meeting-point in
method.
And though Kant applies the
word genius (ingenium) strictly to
the cultivators of Art, refusing
to extend it to the cultivators of
Science, yet the more we examine
the highest orders of intellect, whether
devoted to science, to art, or
even to action, the more clearly we
shall observe the presence of a faculty
common to all such orders of
intellect, because essential to completion
in each—a faculty which seems
so far intuitive or innate (ingenium)
that, though study and practice
perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz.,
the faculty of grouping
into order and symmetrical
form, ideas in themselves scattered
and dissimilar. This is the faculty
of Method; and though every one
who possesses it is not necessarily
a great man, yet every great man
must possess it in a very superior
degree, whether he be a poet, a
philosopher, a statesman, a general;
for every great man exhibits the
talent of organisation or construction,
whether it be in a poem, a
philosophical system, a policy, or
a strategy. And without method
there is no organisation nor construction.
But in art, method is less
perceptible than in science, and in
familiar language usually receives
some other name. Nevertheless, we
include the meaning when we speak
of the composition of a picture, the
arrangement of an oration, the plan
of a poem. Art employing method
for the symmetrical formation of
beauty, as science employs it for
the logical exposition of truth: but
the mechanical process is, in the
last, ever kept visibly distinct; while,
in the first, it escapes from sight
amid the shows of colour and the
curves of grace.
And though, as I have said, Art
enters into all works, whether addressed
to the reason or to the
imagination, those addressed to the
imagination are works of Art par
emphasis, for they require much
more than the elementary principles
which Art has in common
with Science. The two part company
with each other almost as soon
as they meet on that ground of
Method which is common to both,—Science
ever seeking, through all
forms of the ideal, to realise the
Positive—Art, from all forms of
the Positive, ever seeking to extract
the Ideal. The beau ideal is
not in the reason—its only existence
is in the imagination. To
create in the reader’s mind images
which do not exist in the world,
and leave them there, imperishable
as the memories of friends with
whom he has lived, and of scenes
in which he has had his home, obviously
necessitates a much ampler
and much subtler Art than that
which is required to make a positive
fact clear to the comprehension.
The highest quality of Art, as applied
to literature, is therefore
called “the Creative.” Nor do I
attach any importance to the cavil
of some over ingenious critics, who
have denied that genius in reality
creates; inasmuch as the forms it
presents are only new combinations
of ideas already existent. New combinations
are, to all plain intents
and purposes, creations. It is not
in the power of man to create something
out of nothing. And though
the Deity no doubt can do so now—as
those who acknowledge that
the Divine Creator preceded all
created things, must suppose that
He did before there was even a
Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed
to us to trace Him through
Nature, all that we see in created
Nature is combined out of what
before existed. Art, therefore, may
be said to create when it combines
existent details into new wholes.
No man can say that the watch
which lies before me, or the table
on which I write, were not created
(that is, made) by the watchmaker
or cabinetmaker, because the materials
which compose a watch or a
table have been on the earth, so
far as we know of it, since the
earth was a world fit for men to
dwell in. Therefore, neither in
Nature nor in Art can it be truly
said that that power is not creative
which brings into the world a new
form, though all which compose a
form, as all which compose a flower,
a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man,
are, if taken in detail, as old as the
gases in the air we breathe, or the
elements of the earth we tread.
But the Creative Faculty in Art
requires a higher power than it asks
in Nature; for Nature may create
things without life and mind—Nature
may create dust and stones
which have no other life and mind
than are possessed by the animalcules
that inhabit them. But the
moment Art creates, it puts into its
creations life and intellect; and it
is only in proportion as the life thus
bestowed endures beyond the life
of man, and the intellect thus expressed
exceeds that which millions
of men can embody in one form,
that we acknowledge a really great
work of Art—that we say of the
Artist, centuries after he is dead,
“He was indeed a Poet,” that is,
a creator: He has created a form
of life which the world did not
know before, and breathed into
that form a spirit which preserves
it from the decay to which all of
man himself except his soul is subjected.
Achilles is killed by Paris;
Homer re-creates Achilles—and the
Achilles of Homer is alive to-day.
By the common consent of all
educated nations, the highest order
of Art in Literature is the Narrative,
that is the Epic; and the next to it
in eminence is the Dramatic. We
are, therefore, compelled to allow
that the objective faculty—which
is the imperative essential of excellence
in either of these two summits
of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains
to a sublimer reach of art
than the subjective—that is, in
order to make my scholastic adjectives
familiar to common apprehension,
the artist who reflects vividly
and truthfully, in the impartial
mirror of his mind, other circumstances,
other lives, other characters
than his own, belongs to a higher
order than he who, subjecting all
that he contemplates to his own
idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in
his various images of nature and
mankind. We admit this when we
come to examples. We admit that
Homer is of a higher order of art
than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s
‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of
art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets;
‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the
Sonnets being the most subjective
poems which the Elizabethan
age can exhibit.
But it is not his choice of the
highest order of art that makes a
great artist. If one man says “I
will write an epic,” and writes but
a mediocre epic, and another man
says “I will write a song,” and
writes an admirable song—the man
who writes what is admirable is
superior to him who writes what is
mediocre. There is no doubt that
Horace is inferior to Homer—so
inferior that we cannot apportion
the difference. The one is epic,
the other lyrical. But there is no
doubt also that Horace is incalculably
superior to Tryphiodorus or
Sir Richard Blackmore, though they
are epical and he is lyrical. In a
word, it is perfectly obvious, that
in proportion to the height of the
art attempted must be the powers
of the artist, so that there is the
requisite harmony between his subject
and his genius; and that he
who commands a signal success in
one of the less elevated spheres of
art must be considered a greater
artist than he who obtains but
indifferent success in the most
arduous.
Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates
so high a stretch of imagination,
and so wide a range of intellect,
that it will always obtain, if
tolerably well told, a precedence of
immediate popularity over the most
exquisite productions of an inferior
order of the solid and staple qualities
of imagination—so much so
that, even where the first has resort
to what may be called the brick
and mortar of prose, as compared
with the ivory, marble, and cedar
of verse, a really great work of Narrative
in prose will generally obtain
a wider audience, even among the
most fastidious readers, than poems,
however good, in which the imagination
is less creative, and the author
rather describes or moralises over
what is, than invents and vivifies
what never existed. The advantage
of the verse lies in its durability.
Prose, when appealing to the
imagination, has not the same characteristics
of enduring longevity
as verse;—first and chiefly, it is
not so easily remembered. Who
remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’?
Who does not remember
twenty lines in the ‘Deserted Village’?
Verse chains a closer and
more minute survey to all beauties
of thought expressed by it than
prose, however elaborately completed,
can do. And that survey is
carried on and perpetuated by successive
generations. So that in a
great prose fiction, one hundred
years after its date, there are innumerable
beauties of thought and
fancy which lie wholly unobserved;
and in a poem, also surveyed one
hundred years after its publication,
there is probably not a single beauty
undetected. This holds even in
the most popular and imperishable
prose fictions, read at a time of life
when our memory is most tenacious,
such as ‘Don Quixote’ or
‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We
retain, indeed, a lively impression
of the pleasure derived from the
perusal of those masterpieces; of
the salient incidents in story; the
broad strokes of character, wit, or
fancy; but quotations of striking
passages do not rise to our lips as
do the verses of poets immeasurably
inferior, in the grand creative
gifts of Poetry, to those fictionists
of prose. And hence the Verse
Poet is a more intimate companion
throughout time than the Prose
Poet can hope to be. In our moments
of aspiration or of despondency,
his musical thoughts well up
from our remembrance. By a couple
of lines he kindles the ambition of
our boyhood, or soothes into calm
the melancholy contemplations of
our age.
Cæteris paribus, there can be no
doubt of the advantage of verse
over prose in all works of the imagination.
But an artist does not
select his own department of art
with deliberate calculation of the
best chances of posthumous renown.
His choice is determined
partly by his own organisation, and
partly also by the circumstances of
his time. For these last may control
and tyrannise over his own more
special bias. For instance, in our
country, at present, it is scarcely
an exaggeration to say that there is
no tragic drama—scarcely any living
drama at all; whether from the
want of competent actors, or from
some disposition on the part of our
public and our critics not to accord
to a successful drama the
rank which it holds in other nations,
and once held in this, I do
not care to examine; but the fact
itself is so clear, that the Drama,
though in reality it is, in itself, the
highest order of poem, next to the
Epic, seems to have wholly dropped
out of our consideration as belonging
to any form of poetry whatsoever.
If any Englishman were asked by
a foreigner to name even the minor
poets of his country who have
achieved reputation since the death
of Lord Byron, it would not occur
to him to name Sheridan Knowles—though
perhaps no poet since
Shakespeare has written so many
successful dramas; nay, if he were
asked to quote the principal poets
whom England has produced, I
doubt very much whether Ben Jonson,
Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway,
would occur to his mind as readily
as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten,
in short, somehow or other,
except in the single instance of
Shakespeare, that dramas in verse
are poems, and that where we have
a great dramatist, who can hold the
hearts of an audience spell-bound,
we have a poet immeasurably superior,
in all the great qualities of
poetry, to three-fourths of the lyrical,
and still more of the didactic
versifiers who, lettered and bound
as British poets, occupy so showy
a range on our shelves. It is not
thus anywhere except in our country.
Ask a Frenchman who are the
greatest poets of France, he names
her dramatists immediately—Corneille,
Racine, Molière. Ask a German,
he names Goethe and Schiller;
and if you inquire which of
the works of those great masters
in all variety of song he considers
their greatest poems, he at once
names their dramas. But to return;
with us, therefore, the circumstances
of the time would divert an
author, whose natural bias might
otherwise lead him towards dramatic
composition, from a career so
discouraged; and as the largest
emoluments and the loudest reputation
are at this time bestowed
upon prose fiction, so he who
would otherwise have been a dramatist
becomes a novelist. I speak
here, indeed, from some personal
experience, for I can remember
well, that when Mr Macready undertook
the management of one of
those two great national theatres,
which are now lost to the national
drama, many literary men turned
their thoughts towards writing for
the stage, sure that in Mr Macready
they could find an actor to
embody their conceptions; a critic
who could not only appreciate, but
advise and guide; and a gentleman
with whom a man of letters could
establish frank and pleasant understanding.
But when Mr Macready
withdrew from an experiment
which probably required more capital
than he deemed it prudent
to risk in the mere rental of a
theatre, which in other countries
would be defrayed by the State,
the literary flow towards the drama
again ebbed back, and many a play,
felicitously begun, remains to this
day a fragment in the limbo of neglected
pigeon-holes.
The circumstances of the time,
therefore, though they do not arrest
the steps of genius, alter its
direction. Those departments of
art in which the doors are the most
liberally thrown open, will necessarily
most attract the throng of
artists, and it is the more natural
that there should be a rush toward
novel-writing, because no man and
no woman who can scribble at all,
ever doubt that they can scribble a
novel. Certainly, it seems that the
kinds of writing most difficult to
write well, are the easiest to write
ill. Where are the little children
who cannot write what they call
poetry, or the big children who
cannot write what they call novels?—
“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”
says Horace of the writers of his
day. In our day the saying applies
in most force to that class of
poemata, which pretends to narrate
the epic of life in the form of
prose. For the docti as well as the
indocti—men the most learned in
all but the art of novel-writing—write
novels, no less than the most
ignorant; and often with no better
success. One gentleman wishing
to treat us with a sermon, puts
it into a novel; another gentleman,
whose taste is for political disquisition,
puts it into a novel; High
Church and Low Church and no
Church at all, Tories and Radicals,
and speculators on Utopia, fancy
that they condescend to adapt
truth to the ordinary understanding,
when they thrust into a novel
that with which a novel has
no more to do than it has with
astronomy. Certainly it is in
the power of any one to write a
book in three volumes, divide it
into chapters, and call it a novel;
but those processes no more make
the work a novel, than they make
it a History of China. We thus
see many clever books by very
clever writers, which, regarded as
novels, are detestable. They are
written without the slightest study
of the art of narrative, and without
the slightest natural gift to
divine it. Those critics who, in modern
times, have the most thoughtfully
analysed the laws of æsthetic
beauty, concur in maintaining that
the real truthfulness of all works of
imagination—sculpture, painting,
written fiction—is so purely in the
imagination, that the artist never
seeks to represent the positive truth,
but the idealised image of a truth.
As Hegel well observes, “that
which exists in nature is a something
purely individual and particular.
Art, on the contrary, is essentially
destined to manifest the general.”
A fiction, therefore, which is
designed to inculcate an object
wholly alien to the imagination,
sins against the first law of art; and
if a writer of fiction narrow his
scope to particulars so positive as
polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical,
political, or moral, his
work may or not be an able treatise,
but it must be a very poor novel.
Religion and politics are not,
indeed, banished from works of
imagination; but to be artistically
treated, they must be of the most
general and the least sectarian description.
In the record of the
Fall of Man, for instance, Milton
takes the most general belief in
which all Christian nations concur,—nay,
in which nations not Christian
still acknowledge a myth of
reverential interest. Or again, to
descend from the highest rank of
poetry to a third rank in novel-writing;
when Mr Ward, in his
charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes
his very plot consist in the conversion
of an infidel to a belief in the
immortality of the soul, he does not
depart from the artistic principle of
dealing, not with particulars, but
with generals. Had he exceeded
the point at which he very wisely
and skilfully stops, and pushed his
argument beyond the doctrine on
which all theologians concur, into
questions on which they dispute,
he would have lost sight of art altogether.
So in politics—the general
propositions from which politics
start—the value of liberty, order,
civilisation, &c.—are not only within
the competent range of imaginative
fiction, but form some of its
loftiest subjects; but descend lower
into the practical questions that
divide the passions of a day, and
you only waste all the complicated
machinery of fiction, to do what
you could do much better in a party
pamphlet. For, in fact, as the
same fine critic, whom I have previously
quoted, says, with admirable
eloquence:—
“Man, enclosed on all sides in the
limits of the finite, and aspiring to get
beyond them, turns his looks towards a
superior sphere, more pure and more
true, where all the oppositions and contradictions
of the finite disappear—where
his intellectual liberty, spreading its
wings, without obstacles and without
limits, attains to its supreme end. This
region is that of art, and its reality is the
ideal. The necessity of the beau-ideal
in art is derived from the imperfections
of the real. The mission of art is to represent,
under sensible forms, the free
development of life, and especially of
mind.”
What is herein said of Art more
especially applies to the art of narrative
fiction, whether it take the
form of verse or prose. For, when
we come to that realm of fiction
which, whether in verse or prose, is
rendered most alluring to us, either
by the fashion of our time or the
genius of the artist, it is with a desire
to escape, for the moment, out
of this hard and narrow positive
world in which we live; to forget,
for a brief holiday, disputes between
High and Low Church, Tories and
Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of
particulars in the contemplation of
general truths. We can have our
real life, in all its harsh outlines,
whenever we please it; we do not
want to see that real life, but its
ideal image, in the fable land of
art. There is another error common
enough in second-rate novelists,
and made still more common
because it is praised by ordinary
critics—viz., an attempt at the exact
imitation of what is called Nature;
one writer will thus draw a character
in fiction as minutely as he can,
from some individual he has met
in life—another perplexes us with
the precise patois of provincial
mechanics—not as a mere relief to
the substance of a dialogue, but as
a prevalent part of it. Now I hold
all this to be thoroughly antagonistic
to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment
of generals for the
servile copy of particulars.... It
cannot be too often repeated that
art is not the imitation of nature;
it is only in the very lowest degree
of poetry—viz., the Descriptive,
that the imitation of nature can be
considered an artistic end. Even
there, the true poet brings forth
from nature more than nature says
to the common ear or reveals to the
common eye. The strict imitation
of nature has always in it a something
trite and mean—a man who
mimics the cackle of the goose or
the squeak of a pig, so truthfully,
that for the moment he deceives us—attains
but a praise that debases
him. Nor this because there is
something in the cackle of the
goose, and the squeak of pig, that
in itself has a mean association;
for as Kant says truly, “Even a
man’s exact imitation of the song
of the nightingale displeases us
when we discover that it is a mimicry,
and not the nightingale.” Art
does not imitate nature, but it
founds itself on the study of nature—takes
from nature the selections
which best accord with its own intention,
and then bestows on them
that which nature does not possess—viz.,
the mind and the soul of man.
Just as he is but a Chinese kind
of painter, who seeks to give us, in
exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a
tree, which, if we want to see only
a tree, we could see in a field much
better than in a picture; so he is
but a prosaic and mechanical pretender
to imagination who takes a
man out of real life, gives us his
photograph, and says, “I have
copied nature.” If I want to see
that kind of man I could see him
better in Oxford Street than in a
novel. The great artist deals with
large generalities, broad types of
life and character, and though he
may take flesh and blood for his
model, he throws into the expression
of the figure a something which
elevates the model into an idealised
image. A porter sate to Correggio
for the representation of a saint;
but Correggio so painted the porter,
that the porter, on the canvass, was
lost in the saint.
Some critics have contended that
the delineation of character artistically—viz.,
through the selection of
broad generalities in the complex
nature of mankind, rather than in
the observation of particulars by
the portraiture of an individual—fails
of the verisimilitude and reality—of
the flesh-and-blood likeness
to humanity—which all vivid delineation
of human character necessarily
requires. But this objection is
sufficiently confuted by a reference
to the most sovereign masterpieces
of imaginative literature. The
principal characters in Homer—viz.,
Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor,
Paris, Thersites, &c.—are so remarkably
the types of large and enduring
generalities in human character,
that, in spite of all changes of time
and manners, we still classify and
designate individuals under those
antique representative names. We
call such or such a man the Ulysses,
or Nestor, or Achilles, or Thersites
of his class or epoch. Virgil, on
the contrary, has, in Æneas, but a
feeble shadow reflected from no
bodily form with which we are
familiar, precisely because Æneas
is not a type of any large and lasting
generality in human character, but
a poetised and half-allegorical silhouette
of Augustus. There is, indeed,
an antagonistic difference between
fictitious character and biographical
character. In biography,
truth must be sought in the preference
of particulars to generals;
in imaginative creations truth is
found in the preference of generals
to particulars. We recognise this
distinction more immediately with
respect to the former. In biography,
and indeed in genuine history,
character appears faithful and vivid
in proportion as it stands clear from
all æsthetic purposes in the mind
of the delineator. The moment
the biographer or historian seeks to
drape his personages in the poetic
mantle, to subject their lives and
actions to the poetic or idealising
process, we are immediately and
rightly seized with distrust of his
accuracy. When he would dramatise
his characters into types, they
are unfaithful as likenesses. In
like manner, if we carefully examine,
we shall see that when the
Poet takes on himself the task of
the Biographer, and seeks to give
minute representations of living individuals,
his characters become conventional—only
partially accurate—the
accuracy being sought by exaggerating
trivial peculiarities into
salient attributes, rather than by
the patient exposition of the concrete
qualities which constitute the
interior nature of living men.
Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself
unconsciously to the artist; and
mars the catholic and enduring
truthfulness which, in works of
imagination, belongs exclusively to
the invention of original images for
æsthetic ends.
Goethe, treating of the drama,
has said, that “to be theatrical
a piece must be symbolical; that
is to say, every action must have
an importance of its own, and it
must tend to one more important
still.” It is still more important,
for dramatic effect, that the dramatis
personæ should embody attributes
of passion, humour, sentiment,
character, with which large
miscellaneous audiences can establish
sympathy; and sympathy can
be only established by such a recognition
of a something familiar
to our own natures, or to our conception
of our natures, as will allure
us to transport ourselves for the
moment into the place of those
who are passing through events
which are not familiar to our actual
experience. None of us have gone
through the events which form the
action of Othello or Phèdre; but
most of us recognise in our natures,
or our conceptions of our natures,
sufficient elements for ardent love
or agonising jealousy, to establish
a sympathy with the agencies by
which, in Othello and Phèdre, those
passions are expressed. Thus, the
more forcibly the characters interest
the generalities of mankind which
compose an audience, the more
truthfully they must represent what
such generalities of mankind have
in common—in short, the more
they will be types, and the less
they will be portraits. Some critics
have supposed that, in the delineation
of types, the artist would fall
into the frigid error of representing
mere philosophical abstractions.
This, however, is a mistake which
the poet who comprehends and acts
upon the first principle of his art—viz.,
the preference of generals
to particulars—will be the less
likely to commit, in proportion as
such generals are vivified into types
of humanity. For he is not seeking
to personate allegorically a passion;
but to show the effects of
the passion upon certain given
forms of character under certain
given situations: And he secures
the individuality required, and
avoids the lifeless pedantry of an
allegorised abstraction, by reconciling
passion, character, and situation
with each other; so that it is always
a living being in whom we
sympathise. And the rarer and
more unfamiliar the situation of
life in which the poet places his
imagined character, the more in
that character itself we must recognise
relations akin to our own
flesh and blood, in order to feel
interest in its fate. Thus, in the
hands of great masters of fiction,
whether dramatists or novelists, we
become unconsciously reconciled,
not only to unfamiliar, but to improbable,
nay, to impossible situations,
by recognising some marvellous
truthfulness to human nature
in the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of the character represented,
granting that such a character
could be placed in such a situation.
The finest of Shakespeare’s imaginary
characters are essentially typical.
No one could suppose that
the poet was copying from individuals
of his acquaintance in the
delineations of Hamlet, Macbeth,
Othello, Iago, Angelo, Romeo. They
are as remote from portraiture as
are the conceptions of Caliban and
Ariel. In fine, the distinctive excellence
of Shakespeare’s highest
characters is that, while they embody
truths the most subtle, delicate,
and refining in the life and
organisation of men, those truths
are so assorted as to combine with
the elements which humanity has
most in common. And it is obvious
to any reader of ordinary reflection,
that this could not be effected if
the characters themselves, despite
all that is peculiar to each, were
not, on the whole, typical of broad
and popular divisions in the human
family.
Turning to prose fiction, if we
look to the greatest novel which
Europe has yet produced (meaning
by the word novel a representation
of familiar civilised life)—viz., ‘Gil
Blas’—we find the characters therein
are vivid and substantial, capable
of daily application to the life
around us, in proportion as they
are types and not portraits—such
as Ambrose Lamela, Fabricio, the
Archbishop of Toledo, &c.; and
the characters that really fail of
truth and completion are those
which were intended to be portraits
of individuals—such as Olivares,
the Duke de Lerma, the
Infant of Spain, &c. And if it be
true that, in Sangrado, Le Sage designed
the portrait of the physician
Hecquet (the ingenious author of
the “Système de la Trituration),”
and, in the poetical charlatan Triaquero,
aimed at a likeness of Voltaire,
all we can say is, that no two portraits
can be more unfaithful to the
originals; and whatever belongs to
the characters worthy the genius of
the author is to be found in those
strokes and touches by which the
free play of humour involuntarily
destroys the exactitude of portraiture.
Again, with that masterpiece
of prose romance or fantasy ‘Don
Quixote,’ the character of the hero,
if it could be regarded as that of
an individual whom Cervantes
found in life, would be only an
abnormal and morbid curiosity subjected
to the caricature of a satirist.
But regarded as a type of certain
qualities which are largely
diffused throughout human nature,
the character is psychologically
true, and artistically completed;
hence we borrow the word “Quixotic”
whenever we would convey
the idea of that extravagant generosity
of enthusiasm for the redress
of human wrongs, which, even in
exciting ridicule, compels admiration
and conciliates love. The grandeur
of the conception of ‘Don
Quixote’ is its fidelity to a certain
nobleness of sentiment, which, however
latent or however modified,
exists in every genuinely noble nature.
And hence, perhaps, of all
works of broad humour, ‘Don
Quixote’ is that which most approximates
the humorous to the
side of the sublime.
The reflective spirit of our age has
strongly tended towards the development
of a purpose in fiction, symbolical
in a much more literal sense
of the word than Goethe intended
to convey in the extract I have
quoted on the symbolical nature
of theatrical composition. Besides
the interest of plot and incident,
another interest is implied, more or
less distinctly or more or less vaguely,
which is that of the process and
working out of a symbolical purpose
interwoven with the popular action.
Instead of appending to the fable a
formal moral, a moral signification
runs throughout the whole fable,
but so little obtrusively, that, even
at the close, it is to be divined by
the reader, not explained by the
author. This has been a striking
characteristic of the art of our century.
In the former century it was
but very partially cultivated, and
probably grows out of that reaction
from materialism which distinguishes
our age from the last. Thus—to
quote the most familiar illustrations
I can think of—in Goethe’s
novel of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ besides
the mere interest of the incidents,
there is an interest in the inward
signification of an artist’s apprenticeship
in art, of a man’s apprenticeship
in life. In ‘Transformation,’
by Mr Hawthorne, the mere
story of outward incident can never
be properly understood, unless the
reader’s mind goes along with the
exquisite mysticism which is symbolised
by the characters. In that
work, often very faulty in the execution,
exceedingly grand in the
conception, are typified the classical
sensuous life, through Donato; the
Jewish dispensation, through Miriam;
the Christian dispensation,
through Hilda, who looks over the
ruins of Rome from her virgin
chamber amidst the doves.
To our master novelists of a
former age—to Defoe, Fielding,
Richardson, and Smollett—this
double plot, if so I may call it, was
wholly unknown. Swift, indeed,
apprehended it in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’
which I consider the greatest
poem—that is, the greatest work
of pure imagination and original
invention—of the age in which he
lived; and Johnson divined it in
‘Rasselas,’ which, but for the interior
signification, would be the
faulty and untruthful novel which
Lord Macaulay has, I venture to
opine, erroneously declared it to be.
Lord Macaulay censures ‘Rasselas’
because the Prince of Abyssinia
does not talk like an Abyssinian.
Now, it seems to me that a colouring
faithful to the manners of Abyssinia,
is a detail so trivial in reference
to the object of the author of
a philosophical romance, that it is
more artistic to omit than to observe
it. Rasselas starts at once, not
from a positive but from an imagined
world—he starts from the
Happy Valley to be conducted (in
his progress through actual life, to
the great results of his search after
a happiness more perfect than that
of the Happy Valley) to the Catacombs.
This is the interior poetical
signification of the tale of ‘Rasselas’—the
final result of all departure
from the happy land of contented
ignorance is to be found at the
grave. There, alone, a knowledge
happier than ignorance awaits the
seeker beyond the catacombs. For
a moral so broad, intended for civilised
readers, any attempt to suit
colouring and manners to Abyssinian
savages would have been,
not an adherence to, but a violation
of, Art. The artist here wisely disdains
the particulars—he is dealing
with generals.
Thus Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ is no
more a Babylonian than Johnson’s
‘Rasselas’ is an Abyssinian. Voltaire’s
object of philosophical satire
would have been perfectly lost if
he had given us an accurate and
antiquarian transcript of the life of
the Chaldees; and, indeed, the
worst parts in ‘Zadig’ (speaking
artistically), are those in which the
author does, now and then, assume
a quasi antique oriental air, sadly
at variance with meanings essentially
modern, couched in irony essentially
French.
But the writer who takes this
duality of purpose—who unites an
interior symbolical signification with
an obvious popular interest in character
and incident—errs, firstly, in
execution, if he render his symbolical
meaning so distinct and
detailed as to become obviously
allegorical—unless, indeed, as in
the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ it is avowedly
an allegory; and, secondly, he
errs in artistic execution of his
plan, whenever he admits a dialogue
not closely bearing on one or
the other of his two purposes, and
whenever he fails in merging the two
into an absolute unity at the end.
Now, the fault I find chiefly with
novelists is their own contempt for
their craft. A clever and scholarlike
man enters into it with a dignified
contempt. “I am not going
to write,” he says, “a mere novel.”
What, then, is he going to write?
What fish’s tail will he add to the
horse’s head? A tragic poet might
as well say, “I am not going to
write a mere tragedy.” The first
essential to success in the art you
practise is respect for the art itself.
Who could ever become a good
shoemaker if he did not have a profound
respect for the art of making
shoes? There is an ideal even in
the humblest mechanical craft. A
shoemaker destined to excel his
rivals will always have before his
eye the vision of a perfect shoe,
which he is always striving to realise,
and never can. It was well
said by Mr Hazlitt, “That the city
prentice who did not think the
Lord Mayor in his gilded coach
was the greatest of human beings
would come to be hanged.” Whatever
our calling be, we can never
rise in it unless we exalt, even to
an exaggerated dignity, the elevation
of the calling itself. We are
noble peasants or noble kings just
in proportion as we form a lofty
estimate of the nobility that belongs
to peasants or the nobility
that belongs to kings.
We may despair of the novelist
who does not look upon a novel as a
consummate work of art—who does
not apply to it, as Fielding theoretically,
as Scott practically, did,
the rules which belong to the highest
order of imagination. Of course
he may fail of his standard, but he
will fail less in proportion as the
height of his standard elevates his
eye and nerves his sinews.
The first object of a novelist is to
interest his reader; the next object
is the quality of the interest. Interest
in his story is essential, or
he will not be read; but if the
quality of the interest be not high,
he will not be read a second time.
And if he be not read a second
time by his own contemporaries,
the chance is that he will not be
read once by posterity. The degree
of interest is for the many—the
quality of interest for the few.
But the many are proverbially
fickle, the few are constant. Steadfast
minorities secure, at last, the
success of great measures, and confirm,
at last, the fame of great
writings.
I have said that many who, in
a healthful condition of our stage,
would be dramatists, become novelists.
But there are some material
distinctions between the dramatic
art and the narrative—distinctions
as great as those between
the oratorical style and the literary.
Theatrical effects displease
in a novel. In a novel much more
than in a drama must be explained
and accounted for. On the stage
the actor himself interprets the
author; and a look, a gesture, saves
pages of writing. In a novel the
author elevates his invention to a
new and original story; in a drama,
I hold that the author does well
to take at least the broad outlines
of a story already made. It is an
immense advantage to him to find
the tale he is to dramatise previously
told, whether in a history, a
legend, a romance, or in the play
of another age or another land;
and the more the tale be popularly
familiarised to the audience, the
higher will be the quality of the
interest he excites. Thus, in the
Greek tragedy, the story and the
characters were selected from the
popular myths. Thus Shakespeare
takes his story either from chronicles
or novels. Thus Corneille, Racine,
and Voltaire take, from scenes of
antiquity the most familiarly known,
their fables and their characters.
Nor is it only an advantage to the
dramatist that the audience should
come to the scene somewhat prepared
by previous association for the
nature of the interest invoked; it is
also an advantage to the dramatist
that his invention—being thus relieved
from the demand on its powers
in what, for the necessities of the
dramatic art, is an unimportant if
not erroneous direction of art—is
left more free to combine the desultory
materials of the borrowed story
into the harmony of a progressive
plot—to reconcile the actions of
characters, whose existence the audience
take for granted, with probable
motives—and, in a word, to place the
originality there where alone it is
essential to the drama—viz., in the
analysis of the heart, in the delineation
of passion, in the artistic development
of the idea and purpose
which the drama illustrates through
the effects of situation and the
poetry of form.
But in the narrative of prose fiction
an original story is not an auxiliary
or erroneous, but an essential,
part of artistic invention; and even
where the author takes the germ of
his subject and the sketch of his
more imposing characters from History,
he will find that he will be
wanting in warmth of interest if the
tale he tells be not distinct from
that of the history he presses into
his service—more prominently
brought forward, more minutely
wrought out—and the character of
the age represented, not only
through the historical characters
introduced, but those other and
more general types of life which he
will be compelled to imagine for
himself. This truth is recognised
at once when we call to mind such
masterpieces in historical fiction as
‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth,’ ‘Quentin
Durward,’ and ‘I Promessi Sposi.’
In the tragic drama, however,
historical subjects appear to necessitate
a different treatment from
that which most conduces to the interest
of romantic narrative. There
is a dignity in historical characters
which scarcely permits them to be
transferred to the stage without
playing before the audience the important
parts which they played in
life. When they enter on the scene
they excite a predominating interest,
and we should not willingly
see them deposed into secondary
agencies in the conduct of the story.
They ought not to be introduced at
all, unless in fitting correspondence
with our notions of the station they
occupied and the influence they exercised
in the actual world; and
thus, whether they are made fated
victims through their sufferings, or
fateful influences through their
power, still, in the drama, it is
through them that the story moves:
them the incidents affect—them
the catastrophe involves—whether
for their triumph or their fall.
The drama not necessitating an
original fable nor imaginary characters,
that which it does necessitate
in selecting a historical subject
is, the art of so arranging and
concentrating events in history as
to form a single action, terminating
in a single end, wrought through
progressive incidents clearly linked
together. It will be seen that the
dramatic treatment is, in this respect,
opposed to the purely historical
treatment; for in genuine history
there are innumerable secondary
causes tending to each marked
effect, which the dramatist must
wholly eliminate or set aside. He
must, in short, aim at generals to
the exclusion of particulars.
And thus, as his domain is the
passions, he must seek a plot which
admits of situations for passion, and
characters in harmony with such
situations. Great historical events
in themselves are rarely dramatic—they
are made so on the stage by
the appeal to emotions with which,
in private life, the audience are accustomed
to sympathise. The preservation
of the Republic of Venice
from a conspiracy would have an
interest in history from causes appealing
to political reasoning, that
would be wholly without interest
on the stage. The dramatist,
therefore, places the preservation
of Venice in the struggle of a
woman’s heart between the conflicting
passions, with which, in
private life, the audience could
most readily sympathise. According
as Belvidera acts, as between
her husband and her father, Venice
will be saved or lost. This is dramatic
treatment—it is not historical.
All delineations of passion
involve the typical; because whoever
paints a passion common to
mankind presents us with a human
type of that passion, varied, indeed,
through the character of an individual
and the situations in which
he is placed; but still, in the expression
of the passion itself, sufficiently
germane to all in whom that passion
exists, whether actively or
latently, to permit the spectator to
transfer himself into the place and
person of him who represents it.
Hence the passions of individuals,
though affecting only themselves, or
a very confined range of persons
connected with them, command,
in reality, a far wider scope in
artistic treatment than the political
events affecting millions in
historical fact. For political events,
accurately and dispassionately described,
are special to the time and
agents—they are traced through
the logic of the reason, which only
a comparative few exercise, and
even the few exercise it in the calm
of their closets, they do not come
into the crowd of a theatre for its
exercise. But the passions of love,
ambition, jealousy—the conflict between
opposing emotions of affection
and duty—expressed in the breast
of an individual, are not special,—they
are universal. And before a
dramatic audience the safety of a
state is merged or ignored in the
superior interest felt in the personation
of some emotion more ardent
than any state interest, and
only more ardent because universal
amongst mankind in all states and
all times. If the domestic interest
be the strongest of which the drama
is capable, it is because it is the
interest in which the largest number
of human breasts can concur,
and in which the poet who creates
it can most escape from particulars
into generals. In the emancipation
of Switzerland from the
Austrian yoke, history can excite
our interest in the question whether
William Tell ever existed—and
in showing the large array of
presumptive evidence against the
popular story of his shooting the
apple placed on his son’s head.
But in the drama William Tell
is the personator of the Swiss liberties;
and the story of the apple,
in exciting the domestic interest
of the relationship between father
and son, is that very portion of
history which the dramatic artist
will the most religiously conserve,—obtaining
therein one incalculable
advantage for his effect—viz., that
it is not his own invention, and
therefore of disputable probability;
but, whether fable or truth in the
eyes of the historical critic, so popularly
received and acknowledged as
a truth, that the audience are prepared
to enter into the emotions of
the father, and the peril of the son.
It is, then, not in the invention
of a story, nor in the creation of
imaginary characters, that a dramatist
proves his originality as an
artist, but in the adaptation of a
story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic
purpose; and in the fidelity,
not to historical detail, but to psychological
and metaphysical truth
with which he reconciles the motives
and conduct of the characters he
selects from history, to the situations
in which they are placed, so
as to elicit for them, under all that
is peculiar to their nature or their
fates, the necessary degree of sympathy
from emotions of which the
generality of mankind are susceptible.
But to the narrator of fiction—to
the story-teller—the invention
of fable and of imaginary character
is obviously among the legitimate
conditions of his art; and a fable
purely original has in him a merit
which it does not possess in the
tragic or comic poet.
On the other hand, the skilful
mechanism of plot, though not without
considerable value in the art
of narrative, is much less requisite
in the Novelist than in the
Dramatist. Many of the greatest
prose fictions are independent of
plot altogether. It is only by straining
the word to a meaning foreign
to the sense it generally conveys,
that we can recognise a plot in ‘Don
Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture
of the word can make a plot out of
‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason
that the novel admits of what the
drama never should admit—viz.,
the operation of accident in the conduct
of the story: the villain, instead
of coming to a tragic close
through the inevitable sequences of
the fate he has provoked, may be
carried off, at the convenient time,
by a stroke of apoplexy, or be run
over by a railway train. Nevertheless,
in artistic narrative, accident,
where it affects a dénouement,
should be very sparingly employed.
Readers, as well as critics, feel it to
be a blot in the story of ‘Rob Roy’
when the elder brothers of Rashleigh
Osbaldistone are killed off by
natural causes unforeseen and unprepared
for in the previous train of
events narrated, in order to throw
Rashleigh into a position which the
author found convenient for his ultimate
purpose.
A novel of high aim requires, of
course, delineation of character, and
with more patient minuteness, than
the drama; and some novels live,
indeed, solely through the delineation
of character; whereas there are
some tragedies in which the characters,
when stripped of theatrical
costume, are very trivial, but which,
despite the poverty of character, are
immortal, partly from the skill of
the plot, partly from the passion
which is wrought out of the situations,
and principally, perhaps, from
the beauty of form—the strength
and harmony of the verse. This
may be said of the French drama
generally, and of Racine in especial.
The tragic drama imperatively requires
passion—the comic drama
humour or wit; but a novel may
be a very fine one without humour,
passion, or wit—it may be made
great in its way (though that way is
not the very highest one) by delicacy
of sentiment, interest of story,
playfulness of fancy, or even by
the level tenor of everyday life, not
coarsely imitated, but pleasingly
idealised. Still mystery is one of the
most popular and effective sources
of interest in a prose narrative, and
sometimes the unravelling of it constitutes
the entire plot. Every one
can remember the thrill with which
he first sought to fathom the dark
secret in ‘Caleb Williams’ or ‘The
Ghost-Seer.’ Even in the comic
novel, the great founder of that
structure of art has obtained praise
for perfection of plot almost solely
from the skill with which Tom
Jones’s parentage is kept concealed;
the terror, towards the end, when
the hero seems to have become involved
in one of the crimes from
which the human mind most revolts,
and the pleased surprise with which
that terror is relieved by the final
and unexpected discovery of his
birth, with all the sense of the
many fine strokes of satire in the
commencement of the tale, which
are not made clear to us till the
close.
To prose fiction there must always
be conceded an immense variety in
the modes of treatment—a bold licence
of loose capricious adaptation
of infinite materials to some harmonious
unity of interest, which
even the most liberal construction
of dramatic licence cannot afford to
the drama. We need no lengthened
examination of this fact; we
perceive at once that any story can
be told, but comparatively very few
stories can be dramatised. And
hence some of the best novels in the
world cannot be put upon the stage;
while some, that have very little
merit as novels, have furnished
subject-matter for the greatest plays
in the modern world. The interest
in a drama must be consecutive,
sustained, progressive—it allows of
no longueurs. But the interest of a
novel may be very gentle, very irregular—may
interpose long conversations
in the very midst of action—always
provided, however, as I have
before said, that they bear upon the
ulterior idea for which the action is
invented. Thus we have in ‘Wilhelm
Meister’ long conversations on art
or philosophy just where we want
most to get on with the story—yet,
without those conversations, the
story would not have been worth
the telling; and its object could
not, indeed, be comprehended—its
object being the accomplishment of
a human mind in the very subjects
on which the conversations turn.
So, in many of the most animated
tales of Sir Walter Scott, the story
pauses for the sake of some historical
disquisition necessary to make us
understand the altered situations
of the imagined characters. I
need not say that all such delays
to the action would be inadmissible
in the drama. Hence an intelligent
criticism must always allow a latitude
to artistic prose fiction which
it does not accord to the dramatic,
nor indeed to any other department
of imaginative representation of
life and character. I often see in
our Reviews a charge against some
novel, that this or that is “a defect
of art,” which is, when examined,
really a beauty in art—or a positive
necessity which that department of
art could not avoid—simply because
the Reviewer has been applying to
the novel rules drawn from the
drama, and not only inapplicable,
but adverse, to the principles which
regulate the freedom of the novel.
Now, in reality, where genius is
present, art cannot be absent.
Unquestionably, genius may make
many incidental mistakes in art,
but if it compose a work of genius,
that work must be a work of art on
the whole. For just as virtue consists
in a voluntary obedience to
moral law, so genius consists in a
voluntary obedience to artistic law.
And the freedom of either is this,
that the law is pleasing to it—has
become its second nature. Both
human virtue and human genius
must err from time to time; but
any prolonged disdain, or any violent
rupture, of the law by which
it exists, would be death to either.
There is this difference to the advantage
of virtue (for, happily, virtue is
necessary to all men, and genius is
but the gift of few), that we can lay
down rules by the observance of
which any one can become a virtuous
man; but we can lay down no
rules by which any one can become
a man of genius. No technical
rules can enable a student to become
a great dramatist or a great
novelist; but there is in art an inherent
distinction between broad
general principles and technical
rules. In all genuine art there is a
sympathetic, affectionate, and often
quite unconscious adherence to certain
general principles. The recognition
of these principles is obtained
through the philosophy of criticism;
first, by a wide and patient observation
of masterpieces of art, which
are to criticism what evidences of
fact are to science; and next, by
the metaphysical deduction, from
those facts, of the principles which
their concurrence serves to establish.
By the putting forth of these principles
we cannot make bad writers
good, nor mediocre writers great;
but we may enable the common
reader to judge with more correctness
of the real quality of merit,
or the real cause of defect, in the
writers he peruses; and by directing
and elevating his taste, rectify
and raise the general standard of
literature. We may do more than
that—we may much facilitate the
self-tuition that all genius has to
undergo before it attains to its full
development, in the harmony between
its freedom and those elements
of truth and beauty which
constitute its law. As to mere
technical rules, each great artist
makes them for himself; he does
not despise technical rules, but he
will not servilely borrow them from
other artists; he forms his own.
They are the by-laws which his
acquaintance with his special powers
lays down as best adapted to their
exercise and their sphere. Apelles
is said to have made it a by-law to
himself to use only four colours in
painting: probably Apelles found
his advantage in that restraint, or
he would not have imposed it on
his pallet. But if Zeuxis found
that he, Zeuxis, painted better by
using a dozen colours than by confining
himself to four, he would
have used a dozen, or he would not
have been Zeuxis.
On careful and thoughtful examination
we shall find, that neither
in narrative nor dramatic
fiction do great writers differ on
the principles of art in the works
which posterity accepts from them
as great—whereas they all differ
more or less in technical rules.
There is no great poetic artist,
whether in narrative or the drama,
who, in his best works, ever represents
a literal truth rather than the
idealised image of a truth—who
ever condescends to servile imitations
of nature—who ever prefers
the selection of particulars, in the
delineation of character or the conception
of fable, to the expression
of generals—who does not aim at
large types of mankind rather than
the portraiture of contemporaries—or,
at least, wherever he may
have been led to reject these
principles, it will be in performances
that are allowed to be beneath
him. But merely technical
rules are no sooner laid down by
the critics of one age, than they are
scornfully violated by some triumphant
genius in the next. Technical
rules have their value for the artist
who employs them, and who usually
invents and does not borrow
them. Those that he imposes on
himself he seldom communicates to
others. They are his secret—they
spring from his peculiarities of
taste; and it is the adherence to
those rules which constitutes what
we sometimes call his style, but
more properly his manner. It is
by such rules, imposed on himself,
that Pope forms his peculiar
cæsura, and mostly closes his sense
at the end of a couplet. When this
form of verse becomes trite and
hackneyed, up rises some other
poet, who forms by-laws for himself,
perhaps quite the reverse. All
that we should then ask of him
is success: if his by-laws enable
him to make as good a verse as
Pope’s in another way, we should
be satisfied; if not—not. One
main use in technical rules to an
author, if imposed on himself, or
freely assented to by himself, is
this—the interposition of some
wholesome impediment to the over-facility
which otherwise every
writer acquires by practice. And
as this over-facility is naturally
more apt to be contracted in prose
than in verse, and in the looseness
or length of the novel or romance,
than in any other more terse and
systematic form of imaginative
fiction—so I think it a wise precaution
in every prolific novelist to
seek rather to multiply, than emancipate
himself from, the wholesome
restraints of rules; provided always
that such rules are the natural
growth of his own mind, and confirmed
by his own experience of
their good effect on his productions.
For if Art be not the imitator of
Nature, it is still less the copyist of
Art. Its base is in the study of
Nature—not to imitate, but first to
select, and then to combine, from
Nature those materials into which
the artist can breathe his own vivifying
idea; and as the base of Art
is in the study of Nature, so its
polish and ornament must be sought
by every artist in the study of those
images which the artists before him
have already selected, combined,
and vivified; not, in such study, to
reproduce a whole that represents
another man’s mind, and can no
more be born again than can the
man who created it; but again to
select, to separate, to recombine—to
go through the same process in
the contemplation of Art which he
employed in the contemplation of
Nature; profiting by all details, but
grouping them anew by his own
mode of generalisation, and only
availing himself of the minds of
others for the purpose of rendering
more full and complete the realisation
of that idea of truth or beauty
which has its conception in his own
mind. For that can be neither a
work of art (in the æsthetic sense of
the word) nor a work of genius in
any sense of the word, which does
not do a something that, as a whole,
has never been done before; which
no other living man could have
done; and which never, to the end
of time, can be done again—no
matter how immeasurably better
may be the other things which other
men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Childe
Harold’ were produced but the other
day; yet already it has become as
impossible to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’
or a ‘Childe Harold’ as to reproduce
an ‘Iliad.’ A better historical
romance than ‘Ivanhoe,’ or
a better contemplative poem than
‘Childe Harold,’ may be written
some day or other; but, in order
to be better, it must be totally different.
The more a writer is imitated
the less he can be reproduced.
No one of our poets has been so
imitated as Pope, not because he is
our greatest or our most fascinating
poet, but because he is the one
most easily imitated by a good versifier.
But is there a second Pope,
or will there be a second Pope, if
our language last ten thousand
years longer?
THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART. [3]
561
When the announcement first
appeared that a biography of the
late Sir Howard Douglas was in
progress, the impression made upon
our minds was anything but favourable
to the enterprise. Of the good
and gifted man himself, as he mixed
in general society, our recollections
were indeed of the most pleasurable
kind. He stood before us with his
kindly manner, his noble appearance,
his high bearing, his generous
nature, the perfect model of what
an English officer and gentleman
ought to be. And casting our eyes
across the room to the shelf on
which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and
‘Military Bridges’ were ranged,
we thought of him as a man of
science more than ordinarily well
read in his profession. But not all
our desire to find in connection
with him materials for a consecutive
history, helped us to any other
conclusion than this, that the story
of his life, if told at length, must
be a dull one. We acknowledge,
less with shame than with satisfaction
and some surprise, that we
were quite mistaken. Sir Howard
Douglas’s career had more of romance
about it than that of many
a man who has filled a much larger
space in the world’s observation. It
was successful as far as it carried
him, because a sound judgment controlled
good abilities, and directed
them to a wise end. And, above
all, it reads this lesson to coming
generations, that he who honestly
seeks the wellbeing of others rarely
fails, sooner or later, to secure his
own. Nor must we omit to render
to Sir Howard’s biographer the
commendation which he deserves.
Mr Fullom has executed his task
well; neither overlaying his narrative
with details, which sometimes
weary, nor keeping back anything
which might conduce to its completeness,
he has given us one of
the pleasantest books which, for
some time past, has come under
our notice.
The house of Douglas has from
the earliest times been renowned
in Scottish story. Its alliance with
the royal family began in the fourteenth
century, when the Lord of
Dalkeith took to wife Mary the
fifth daughter of James I. On
this same Lord of Dalkeith the
earldom of Morton was not long
afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law,
James II. From father
to son, or from uncle to nephew,
the earldom passed through twelve
generations, and narrowly escaped
coming in the thirteenth to the
father of Sir Howard. But Charles
Douglas, if he missed a coronet,
won for himself a baronetcy and
great distinction as a British sailor.
He it was who, when Arnold
and Montgomery besieged Quebec,
forced his squadron through the
ice on the St Lawrence and relieved
the place. He it was who first of
all constructed a flotilla for himself,
and then swept the Canadian lakes
of the rebel gunboats; and by-and-by,
on the 12th of April 1782, he
caught, as if by inspiration, that
idea, the application of which enabled
Admiral Rodney to break
the enemy’s line, and to save at a
critical moment the honour of the
British fleet.
Of this Sir Charles Douglas,
Howard was the eldest son by a
second marriage. Sir Charles’s first
wife, a foreign lady, had brought
him two sons and a daughter, so
that Howard’s prospects, so far as
title and fortune were concerned,
could not have been in his infancy
very bright: and they would have
been entirely overcast by the early
death of his mother, had not her
place been well supplied by a
maternal aunt. Under the roof of
this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive
Bank, near Musselburgh, the little
fellow grew and prospered, repaying
all the tenderness with which
he was reared by his affectionate
and gentle disposition, as well as
by his industry and success over his
books.
Howard’s brothers both entered
the navy. This was natural, and
it was perhaps equally so that
Howard should desire to follow
their example; but Sir Charles considered
that, if his three sons were
all to embrace the same profession,
the chances were that they would
only stand in each other’s way.
He gave directions, therefore, that
Howard should be educated for a
different walk in life, and the boy
ascended in due time from the
charge of the governess to the
grammar-school. Yet the child’s
tastes were entirely naval all the
while. He built toy ships, and
sailed them on a pond in the garden;
he made friends of the fisher-lads
and cabin-boys along the coast,
and became so initiated into the
mysteries of their craft that none
among them could better manage
than he a fishing-boat or a ship’s
yawl. It thus became clear to Sir
Charles Douglas, who visited his
sister in 1789, previously to assuming
the command on a foreign
station, that nature had designed
his youngest son for a career similar
to his own, and he made up his
mind to take Howard with him, and
to rate him as a midshipman on
board the flag-ship. But the coveted
flag he was never destined to hoist.
A sudden illness carried him off
while the guest of his sister, and
Howard’s lot was cast for him in
the army.
The Royal Academy at Woolwich
was more easily entered in those
days than it is now. A pass examination
was, however, required;
and young Douglas, strange to say,
in spite of his marked bias for
practical mechanics, failed in the
elements of geometry. But he had
made so good a figure in other respects,
and appeared so cast down
by the circumstance, that the examiner,
Dr Hutton, encouraged him
to try again; and three weeks spent
with a clever crammer sufficed to
bring him up to the mark. He
therefore presented himself a second
time, passed, and was admitted.
There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s
history which puts his readers
to considerable inconvenience—he
is not very accurate in his dates.
We do not quite make out, for example,
when young Douglas made
his way into the Academy, or how
long he continued a cadet; but we
are told, what is extremely probable
in itself, that he was much beloved
by his contemporaries, and that he
soon took the lead among them
both in the playground and in the
class-room. His passion for naval
affairs continued as strong as ever,
and he indulged it by frequent boat
excursions on the Thames. He
swam, also, like a duck, and paid
many a furtive visit to Deptford
dockyard, where he studied by fits
and starts the art of shipbuilding.
His vacations he spent in Scotland,
passing to and from Leith in one
of the smacks;—an intense delight
to him, because he was instructed
by the crews in the arts of knotting
and splicing, of plaiting points and
gaskets, of making gammets, and
heaving the lead. It is not often
that a youth displays such unmistakable
aptitude for a career which
he is not destined to follow; and it
still more rarely happens that the
amusements of the boy, whom circumstances
in after life place in a
groove apparently wide apart from
them, turn out to have been by no
means the least useful branches of
his education, either to himself or
to others.
After completing his college
course, Douglas received a lieutenant’s
commission, and in 1795
assumed the command of a small
artillery corps in the north of England.
His headquarters were in
Tynemouth Castle, and he had
detachments at Sunderland, Hartlepool,
and Berwick-upon-Tweed. His
entire force in gunners fell short of
fifty men; yet this was at a time
when the risk of invasion appeared
to be imminent, and Douglas and
his gunners were necessarily exposed
to bear the brunt of it. The
young lieutenant felt how perfectly
inefficient his force was, and
cast about to devise some means of
increasing it. He asked first for
a reinforcement of artillerymen,
which could not be afforded. He
then suggested to the general officer
of the district the propriety of
drilling a portion of his infantry to
the great-gun exercise; and himself,
with unwearied diligence, instructed
thirty men from each of the regiments
quartered within many miles
of Tynemouth. He was not, however,
satisfied even with this—the thought
struck him that he might enlist the
sympathies of the fishermen and
coasting sailors in the cause which
he had at heart; and having obtained
through General Balfour the
sanction of the Government, he
invited them to form themselves into
companies of volunteer artillery.
Upwards of five hundred fine fellows
answered to the call; and the
thoughtful lad had soon the satisfaction
of knowing that danger, if
it did come, would not find him
unprepared, and that the merit of
having provided a remedy for a
great and acknowledged evil was
entirely his own.
It is not to be supposed that the
young man was so given up to
serious matters as to turn away
from the recreations common to his
age and profession: on the contrary,
Douglas seems to have been
at Tynemouth the gayest of the
gay. He danced well, rode well,
established a yacht in which he
made many adventurous cruises,
and won the hearts of young and
old by his frank and graceful manners.
But sterner work awaited
him, and the romance of his existence
began.
Early in August 1795 he received
orders to take charge of a detachment
of troops, which, with women
and children, were to proceed from
Woolwich to Quebec. He joined
the Phillis transport at Gravesend,
and found himself the senior officer,
with six subalterns besides himself
on board. To him the prospect of
a voyage across the Atlantic was a
positive delight. What cared he
about the inadequacy of accommodation,
or the wretched nature of
the food which was then issued to
soldiers embarked? His thoughts
were entirely given up to the great
object of his boyish fancy—the
actual navigation of a ship out of
sight of land, and all the enterprise
and excitement incident thereto.
Never neglecting his own proper
duties, he accordingly found time
to make himself one of the crew,
and, sharing their labours, and
evincing perfect intelligence of all
that was required, he won more
than the goodwill, the confidence
and respect of every one on board.
The Phillis was a slow sailer.
She encountered various changes
of weather, behaving, upon the
whole, tolerably well, though sometimes
uneasy and always uncomfortable.
At last, however, a tempest
overtook her about forty
leagues to the east of the southern
entrance of the Gulf of St Lawrence,
and the sea swept over her
decks, knocking the boats from
their fastenings. The gale lasted
all that day and throughout the
night; but a lull came in the
morning, and the women and children,
who had been kept below,
were allowed to come on deck.
The same evening the officers entertained
the skipper, and all were
rejoicing in the prospect of escape
from danger, when the mate suddenly
broke into the cabin and requested
the captain to follow him.
Douglas guessed from the manner
of the two men that something
must be wrong. He ran up the
companion-stair, and heard—for he
could see nothing—the roar of
breakers close ahead. The ship
had drifted before the wind, and
was already in imminent danger.
Immediately the soldiers were ordered
up, and, with their assistance,
the best bower anchor was
let go. But though it seemed to
check the vessel for a moment, it
soon began to drag; and, with
breakers on the bow, practised eyes
discovered that there was land on
both quarters—that the ship was
embayed.
It was evident, under such circumstances,
that the single chance
of saving the lives of those on
board was to force the Phillis, if
possible, round a projecting reef on
her lee bow. But this could be
done only by making more sail,
and to go aloft at that moment and
shake out reefs was a service of the
utmost hazard. The seamen ordered
to do so hung back, whereupon
Douglas sprang into the shrouds,
and, followed by two cabin-boys,
accomplished the operation. The
consequence was that the Phillis
bore up and cleared the point,
though very narrowly; but it was
a mere respite from danger. The
storm grew more and more tremendous.
The boats could with difficulty
be moved, and one of them
(the long-boat) was scarce got over
the side ere she went to pieces.
The ship was now upon the rocks,
and another boat was lowered chiefly
by the exertions of the soldiers.
But she in her turn seemed in
danger of being broken to pieces;
whereupon Douglas, followed by
two officers, sprang in, hoping to
fend her off from the ship’s side.
Already she was more than half
full of water, which compelled the
three youths to spring back, in
doing which Douglas missed his
footing and fell into the sea. Happily
he had divested himself of
most of his clothing, and his skill
as a swimmer stood him in good
stead, for he rose upon the top of a
wave, and one of his friends, seizing
his collar at the moment, dragged
him on to the deck.
Shipwreck under any circumstances
is an awful thing. The
wreck of the Phillis went on, so to
speak, through two days and as
many nights. Men and women
went overboard; children died from
exposure in their mothers’ arms.
One poor fellow struck out in despair
for the land, and was lost
among the breakers. The first raft
which the survivors constructed
carried two of their number to the
shore, who, regardless of the fate
of their companions, immediately
deserted. A second raft was put
together, and on that Mr Douglas
reached the land. He had carried
a rope with him, and began immediately
to construct a bridge. Fortunately
the wind lulled at this
moment, and the wreck was cleared
of its living occupants. But scarcely
was this done ere the Phillis went
to pieces without an opportunity
having been afforded of securing
the means of subsistence even for a
single day.
The sufferings of these poor people
on the barren cliff to which they
escaped were dreadful. Happily
the waves brought ashore some
pieces of cloth as well as a cask of
wine and a quantity of smoked
pork. But the sailors seized the
wine and drank it; and the first
night was spent in cold and misery,
for the snow lay deep on the ground,
and there was no fuel with which
to make a fire. All lay down and
slept—a sleep from which they would
probably never have wakened had
not Douglas been roused by a fearful
scream, to which the wife of
his servant gave utterance. She
had gone mad from privations and
excitement, and died shrieking to
the last, so that her voice was heard
over the wind and rain. She had
outlived all the women who went
on board at Gravesend, and not a
child survived.
Mr Douglas was at this time
barely nineteen years of age, yet
such was the force of his character
that all about him, seamen as well
as soldiers, looked to him for instructions.
He rescued a second
cask of wine from being broached
this time by soldiers, though not
without a struggle. “We are all
equals now,” said the leader of the
mutineers; “we’ll take no orders
from you or anybody else.” “Won’t
you!” cried Douglas, springing at
his throat with a knife; “you are
under my command; and if you
don’t obey, by heavens, I’ll kill
you!” The man yielded; the small
stock of provisions and wine was
secured, and after a vain attempt
to penetrate through the forest,
the whole party returned again to
the cliff—there to wait till either
help should come from the sea, or
famine do its work and destroy them.
A feeling of despair was beginning
to gain the mastery, when one
day the cry was heard, “A sail! a
sail!” They had already set up a
spar, and hoisted a piece of cloth
upon it; but the object was small,
and might not be discerned from
a distance, and then what a fate
awaited them! It was not, however,
so ordered. The sail approached;
she was a small schooner trading
between St John and Great
Jarvis; and the crew gave back
the cheer which the poor castaways
raised in their agony, crowding at
the same time to the beach. They
were all taken off and carried to
the place whither the schooner was
bound, and spent the winter, roughly
but not unhappily, among the honest
fishermen who had there established
themselves.
The winter seemed long, the days
being very short in that latitude.
Not ungrateful, but tired of the
monotony, Douglas purchased a
whale-boat, and, having fitted it
with a deck, determined, as soon as
the season should advance a little,
to risk a voyage to the West Indies.
Several of his brother officers agreed
to share the danger with him, and
they got a St Lawrence pilot and a
seaman from Newfoundland to join
them. But a succession of heavy
gales hindered them from starting
till April was far spent. At last,
just as their preparations were completed,
there arrived in the harbour
a schooner bound from Halifax to
St John, the commander of which
had heard of their misfortunes, and
gone out of his way to offer them
assistance. Adventurous as they
were, Douglas and his friends did
not hesitate to abandon their own
project, and to avail themselves of
the superior accommodation thus
placed at their disposal. They were
accordingly conveyed in the first
instance to St John, Mr Douglas
doing seaman’s duty throughout
the voyage, and by-and-by to Halifax,
whither, after discharging cargo,
the schooner returned.
The Duke of Kent, the father of
her present Majesty, was at that
time Governor and Commander-in-Chief
in Nova Scotia. He had
heard of the fate of the Phillis, and
of the sufferings of the crew and
passengers, and sent an aide-de-camp
to request that such of the officers
as might be in a state to be moved,
should present themselves at Government
House. Douglas and his
friend Mr Forbes obeyed the summons,
and were most kindly treated
by the Royal Duke. But their
destination was Quebec, whither, as
soon as means of transport could be
found, they proceeded. The reception
awarded them there, and especially
Mr Douglas, was gratifying
in the extreme. The important services
rendered by the father to the
colony had not yet passed out of
men’s minds, and they believed that
they saw in the son qualities which
proved him worthy of his parentage.
He was taken at once, so to
speak, to the hearts of the people,
and had the still higher gratification
to find that the authorities,
civil and military, entertained a
just appreciation of his talents, and
were determined to make use of
them.
There was an alarm of a French
fleet hovering near the coast, and
not a single cruiser lay in the St
Lawrence. The Governor became
anxious, and having often observed
Mr Douglas guiding with remarkable
adroitness a sailing-boat in
boisterous weather about the bay,
he bethought him that the nautical
skill of the young officer might be
applied to better purposes than
those of mere amusement. Douglas
was sent for, and asked if he would
be disposed to take command of an
armed coaster, and go off as far
as the Banks of Newfoundland in
search of the enemy. He accepted
the trust without a moment’s hesitation;
and, carrying with him, in
addition to a good crew, artillerymen
enough to man his ten guns,
he hoisted his pennant on board a
schooner of 250 tons burden, and
stood out to sea. Though never
coming up with the French fleet—which,
indeed, had steered in a different
direction—he found more than
one opportunity of showing how
well qualified he was, under trying
circumstances, to manage a ship of
war, and probably to fight her. And
many a time in after life he used to
tell the story, adding that, “after all,
a naval life was that for which nature
had peculiarly fitted him.”
So passed a year in Lower Canada,
at the close of which the roster
of service carried Mr Douglas to
Toronto, where he still found vent
for his marine propensities on Lake
Ontario. He became likewise a
great sportsman, as well with the gun
as with the fishing-rod, and made
frequent incursions into the forests
in search of game. This brought
him more than once in contact with
the Red men, over whom, by his cool
courage and endurance of fatigue,
he acquired a remarkable ascendancy.
Among other circumstances
worth noticing was his encounter
in the bush with a young white girl,
of surpassing beauty, who had lived
among the Indians from her infancy.
He states in his note-book
that she had been carried off by a
party of warriors who had ravaged
a settlement, and that they treated
her, as she grew up, with the utmost
kindness and respect. “A strange
chance discovered her to her brother,
and he entreated her to return
home; but she refused, declaring
that she was perfectly happy, and
could not support a different existence.”
In the autumn of 1798, tidings
reached Mr Douglas of the death of
the elder of his half-brothers. The
event rendered necessary his immediate
return to England, and he
took a passage in the last ship of
the season, a little brig, timber-laden
and bound for Greenock. It seems
to have been his destiny never to go
to sea without encountering danger
and difficulty. One night, shortly
after clearing the Bay of St Lawrence,
Mr Douglas was awakened
by the vessel giving a sudden lurch,
for which he could not account
otherwise than by supposing she
had struck on some sunken rock.
He jumped out of bed, and, staying
only to throw a greatcoat about
him, ran upon deck. A brisk gale
was blowing, and the brig, having
got into the trough of the sea,
staggered under single-reefed topsails,
main-top-gallant-sails, and
jib, and fore-and-aft main-sail,
with the wind on the beam. The
mate, whose watch it was, had got
drunk, and gone below, and the
helmsman seemed quite at a loss
how to guide the rudder. Douglas
saw that there was not a moment to
be lost. He took the command of
the ship, called up all hands, issued
with clearness and promptitude
orders which were instantly obeyed,
and kept the vessel from foundering.
The tumult brought the captain
on deck, who stood by astonished
and speechless. No sooner, however,
had he satisfied himself of
the untrustworthiness of the mate,
than he directed the vessel to be put
about, and would have returned to
Quebec had not Mr Douglas volunteered
to do mate’s duty during the
remainder of the passage. There
could be no hesitation on the captain’s
part, after what he had just
seen, to accede to this proposal: so
the brig held her course, and arrived
safe in the Clyde, where, with
protestations of mutual respect and
esteem, he and his friendly skipper
parted.
Mr Douglas had not been long in
Scotland before he fell in love, and
soon afterwards married Miss Anne
Dundas, a young lady of great personal
beauty and cultivated mind.
He obtained his promotion likewise
in 1799; and having done duty for
a while as adjutant of a battalion,
he was subsequently posted to the
horse-artillery. But better things
than the command of a troop were
in store for him. The military authorities
had established at High
Wyckham a cadet school, with a
senior department attached to it, in
which officers might be instructed
for the Staff; and General Zamy, an
old aide-de-camp of Frederick the
Great, being appointed commandant,
it was proposed to Captain
Douglas that he should undertake
the superintendence of the Staff
College. Captain Douglas was not
unnaturally reluctant to give up the
proper line of his profession, but
finding the Duke of York bent upon
the arrangement, and being tempted
to accede to it by the offer of a
step of rank, he passed from the
artillery into the line as a major,
and took the place for which both
his natural talents and acquired
information eminently fitted him.
From 1804 up to 1814 Douglas
continued to be connected with the
educational department of the army.
It would be impossible to overestimate
the importance of the services
which he rendered. He not only
instructed candidates for Staff employment
by lessons gathered from
the past, but deduced, from his own
clear perception of things, hints and
suggestions which were then entirely
new. He had many differences
because of this habit with General
Zamy, who, like veterans in general,
was slow to believe that the
tactics and strategy of his own youth
could be improved upon. But in
1806 the old man retired, and Douglas,
with the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
took his place at the head
of the establishment. A fresh impulse
was immediately given to the
course of study. Not surveying
only, but pontooning, artillery, and
the theory of the whole art of war,
were taught, and those brilliant
Staff officers sent out who in the
Peninsular struggle gave to the
Great Duke such efficient support.
Sir Howard, however—for he had
by this time succeeded by the death
of another brother to the baronetcy—yearned
for active employment
in the field. He applied for and
obtained permission to join Sir John
Moore’s army, which he overtook
just as the retreat from Benevente
began; and he shared its fortunes
both in the painful marches which
it accomplished, and in the battle
near Corunna, which enabled it
to re-embark without dishonour.
By-and-by, when the expedition to
the Scheldt was fitted out, Sir
Howard prevailed upon the Duke
of York to appoint him to the Staff
of Lord Chatham’s army as Deputy
Quartermaster-General. The enterprise
grievously failed; and the
loss by disease among the troops
and ships’ companies engaged was
very severe. But even under such
circumstances Sir Howard proved
of great service to his chief: for
having kept a journal of each day’s
proceedings as it occurred, he was
able to show, when examined concerning
the causes of the failure,
that by far the largest share of
blame rested with the navy, or
rather with the officer whom
the Admiralty had placed at its
head.
For two years subsequently to
his return from Walcheren, Sir
Howard led a quiet and useful life
as head of the Military College. In
1811, however, a fresh opportunity
was found for employing him
abroad. The Government of that
day put a far higher value on the
services of the Spanish guerillas
than they deserved, and were incredulous
of Lord Wellington’s
assurances, that on the regular armies
of Spain no dependence could
be placed. It seemed to Lord Liverpool
and his colleagues that the
Spaniards, if properly armed and
supplied, were capable by their own
valour of driving the French beyond
the Pyrenees; and they made
choice of Sir Howard Douglas to go
among them, because they believed
that he possessed talents and energy
enough to awaken them to a sense
of their duty. He received instructions,
therefore, towards the end of
July, to proceed without delay to
Lord Wellington’s headquarters,
and to arrange with him all details
respecting his future proceedings.
Perhaps there is no interval in the
long and useful career of Sir Howard
Douglas which afforded him
more frequent opportunities of doing
good service to his country than
that which, extending over little
more than a year, was spent by him
in Spain; but the tale is one which
will not bear condensation.
After conferring with Lord Wellington
on the Portuguese frontier,
Sir Howard rode across the country
to Oporto, and thence took a passage
by sea to Corunna. He entered
there into relations with Spanish
juntas, Spanish generals, and the
chiefs of guerilla bands, and found
them all, with the exception of
one or two individuals belonging
to the latter class, even more impracticable
than he had been led to
expect. He gave them first arms,
money, clothing, and had the mortification
to learn that the best battalions
and batteries, as soon as they
became fit for war, were shipped off
for South America. He turned next
to the irregulars, and succeeded in
getting a levy en masse set on foot,
which very much perplexed, and
gave constant occupation to, the
French troops scattered over that
and the adjoining provinces. But
the circumstance which more than
any other affected his own fortunes,
was a combined attack on the fortified
convent of St Cintio Rey by
Sir Home Popham’s squadron from
the sea, and the guerilla band of
Don Gaspar on shore. It was while
watching the effect of the Venerable’s
fire that Sir Howard became
struck with the ignorance of
the first principles of gunnery which
manifested itself both among officers
and men, and that he conceived the
idea of applying, should leisure ever
be afforded him, a proper remedy to
the evil. From that idea emanated
his first great treatise, to which the
British navy owes so much, and of
which the rulers of the British navy,
the Lords of the Admiralty, did not
condescend, for many months after
it had been submitted to them, even
to acknowledge the receipt.
There can be no doubt that to Sir
Howard’s activity in Galicia the
successful issues of Lord Wellington’s
campaign, in the early summer
of 1812, were greatly owing. Had
he not managed to find employment
for two whole divisions of French
infantry, these, with a division of
cavalry, must have joined Marmont’s
army; in which case the battle of
Salamanca would have either not
been fought at all, or it might have
ended less triumphantly than it did.
But no man can work impossibilities;
and the time arrived when,
having accomplished the main purpose
of his mission, Sir Howard
received orders to return to England.
He could not quit the Peninsula,
however, without once again communicating
with Lord Wellington,
whom he found just about to undertake
the siege of the Castle of Burgos.
To Douglas’s practised eye the
place appeared of immense strength
in proportion to the means disposable
for its reduction; and a private
reconnaissance led him to conclude
that the whole plan of attack was
faulty. In both opinions he stood
alone; yet such was the respect in
which his judgment was held, that
the chiefs of artillery and engineers
communicated what he had said to
Lord Wellington, and Lord Wellington
sent for him. The following
is Mr Fullom’s account of this
interview:—“‘Well, Sir Howard,
you have something to say about
the siege?’ ‘I think the place is
stronger than we supposed, my
Lord.’ ‘Yes, by G—; but our way
is to take the hornwork, and from
there breach the wall, and then
assault over the two advanced profiles.’
‘I would submit to your
Lordship whether our means are
equal to such an attack?’ ‘I am
not satisfied about our ammunition,’
replied Lord Wellington.
‘The enemy’s guns are 24-pounders,
my Lord, and we have only three
18-pounders and five 24-pound
howitzers. The 18-pounders will
not breach the wall, and our fire
must be overpowered, unless your
Lordship brings up some guns from
the ships at Santander.’ ‘How
would you do that?’ ‘With
draught oxen as far as the mountains,
and then drag them on by
hand; we can employ the peasantry,
and put a hundred men to a gun.’
‘It would take too long.’ ‘I
think the place may be captured,
with our present means, from the
eastern front, my Lord,’ returned
Sir Howard; and he disclosed his
plan, with his reasons for thinking
it the most practicable. Lord Wellington
made no remark. Possibly
he saw the defects of his own plan,
but it had been deliberately adopted,
and he was not convinced that
it ought to be abandoned.”
Mr Fullom has not told this anecdote
quite correctly. Sir Howard
was more closely questioned as to
the mode of conveyance for the
guns, and answered more pertinently,
than is here set down. He
suggested that the 24-pounders
should be dismounted, the guns
placed in the boles of trees hollowed
out, and the carriages run
forward by themselves. Thus the
narrowest track through woods and
round rocks would suffice for the
conveyance of the former, while the
latter, being comparatively light,
would offer no formidable resistance
wherever men or bullocks could
travel. Lord Wellington, however,
adhered to his own plan, and sustained
the only reverse which marks
the progress of an experience in war
extending wellnigh over a quarter
of a century. It is just towards both
parties to observe, that the baffled
hero was too magnanimous not to
acknowledge his error. “Douglas
was right,” he exclaimed, as he
mounted his horse to begin the retreat;
“he was the only man who
told me the truth.”
Sir Howard returned to England,
and there resumed his occupations
as a military instructor; but his
mind was full of a project for forcing
attention to gunnery on the
chiefs of the navy; and the disastrous
results of the first frigate-actions
in the American war not a
little quickened his zeal. He had
a more herculean task before him,
however, than he himself imagined.
Strange to say, his disinclination to
the study of pure mathematics had
never been overcome; and now he
found himself obliged to master all
the arcana of the science, so far as
these had any relation to the movement
of a vessel through water
under all possible contingencies.
While pursuing these studies he
effected such improvements in the
reflecting circle and semicircle for
land and marine surveying as attracted
the attention of the Royal
Society, which immediately elected
him a member; and then he gave
himself up steadily to the object
for which all this abstruse study
had been only the preparation. He
produced a treatise in which every
point connected with the theory and
practice of artillery was handled.
He discussed not only the power
and range of various kinds of ordnance,
with the uses of their several
parts, and the effects of transit,
windage, recoil, and suchlike, but
he explained how a school of naval
gunnery could be established, and
submitted the whole in MS. for the
consideration of the Lords of the
Admiralty. Weeks and months
passed by, however, without bringing
him so much as a written acknowledgment
of its receipt; and
then, and not till then, he wrote
privately to his friend Sir Graham
Moore. Sir Graham made such
apology as the case would admit
of, and did his best to fix upon the
subject the attention of his colleagues;
but a year elapsed before
any decided steps were taken. At
last the scheme was adopted; and
in 1819, Sir Howard, having first
of all obtained the sanction of the
Government, gave his valuable treatise
to the world. It attracted at
once the attention of scientific men
both at home and abroad, and led
to frequent correspondence between
the author and all persons capable
of appreciating and taking an interest
in so important a matter.
Promoted to the rank of Major-General,
Sir Howard was nominated
in 1824 to the Governorship
of New Brunswick, and to the
command of the troops stationed
there, and in Nova Scotia, Cape
Breton, Prince Edward Island,
Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Mr
Fullom tells an amusing story of
Sir Howard being met on the pier
at Halifax by Mr Justice Haliburton,
which fails in this respect,
that it happens unfortunately not
to be accurate. It was not Sam
Slick, but his cousin of the same
name, who in 1796 had served in
the Fusiliers, and in 1824 greeted
his old comrade as Governor of
New Brunswick. But there is so
much of vraisemblance in the matter,
that the anecdote may very
well remain where it is. On the
other hand, Mr Fullom’s narrative
of Sir Howard’s administration of
the province is not only correct to
the letter, but extremely interesting.
It came to pass while he was
there that one of those fires occurred,
of the appalling effects of
which we in this old world of
Europe can form no conception.
It was an unusually dry summer,
the third of a succession of such,
when first in the town, and by-and-by
far off in the forest, flames
suddenly broke out. Government
House was the first to be burned
down; then whole streets ignited
at once; and just as a line began to
be drawn between what remained
of the town and the ashes of dwellings
consumed, a lurid glare, seen
afar off, gave warning that even a
worse calamity was in progress.
“Several days elapsed before the fire
subsided, and then it became masked by
a smoke which darkened the whole country.
But night proved that it had not
burned out; for showers of flame shot
up at intervals, and trees stood glaring
in the dark, while the mingled black
and red of the sky seemed its embers
overhead. Thus a week passed, when
Sir Howard determined to penetrate the
forest, and visit the different settlements.
A friend has described his parting
with Lady Douglas and his daughters,
whose pale faces betrayed their
emotion, though they forbore to oppose
his design, knowing that nothing would
keep him from his duty. But this was
not understood by others, and the gentlemen
of the town gathered round his
rough country waggon at the door, and
entreated him to wait a few days, pointing
to the mountains of smoke, and declaring
that he must be suffocated if he
escaped being burned. He thanked them
for their good feeling, grasped their
hands, and mounted the waggon. It
dashed off at a gallop, and wondering
eyes followed it to the woods, where it
disappeared in the smoke.
“The devastation he met exceeded
his worst fears; for the settlements he
went to visit no longer existed. The
fire seems to have burst in every quarter
at once; for it broke out at Miramichi
the same moment as at Fredericktown,
though one hundred and fifty
miles lay between. But here its aspect
was even more dreadful, and its ravages
more appalling, as Miramichi stood in
the forest completely girt round except
where escape was shut off by the
river. Many were in bed when they
heard the alarm; many were first
startled by the flames, or were suffocated
in their sleep, leaving no vestige
but charred bones; others leaped from
roof or window, and rushed into the
forest, not knowing where they went,
or took fire in the street, and blazed up
like torches. A number succeeded in
gaining the river, and threw themselves
in boats or on planks, and pushed off
from the banks, which the fire had almost
reached, and where it presently
raged as fiercely as in the town. One
woman was aroused from sleep by the
screams of her children, whom she found
in flames, and caught fire herself as she
snatched up an infant and ran into the
river, where mother and child perished
together. Then came the hurricane,
tearing up burning trees and whirling
them aloft, lashing the river and channel
to fury, and snapping the anchors of the
ships, which flew before it like chaff,
dashing on the rocks, and covering the
waves with wreck. Blazing trees lighted
on two large vessels, and they fired like
mines, consuming on the water, which
became so hot in the shallows that large
salmon and other fish leaped on shore,
and were afterwards found dead in heaps
along the banks of the river. What
can be said of such horrors, combining
a conflagration of one thousand miles
with storm and shipwreck, and surprising
a solitary community at midnight?
Happily the greater number contrived
to reach Chatham by the river; but
floating corpses showed how many perished
in the attempt, and nearly three
hundred lost their lives by fire or drowning.”
No small portion of Sir Howard’s
time henceforth was spent in devising
means for the relief of the
unfortunate people whom this calamity
had ruined. He made strong
appeals to the benevolence of the
British public, which were not disregarded,
and he advanced from
his own funds more than he could
well spare. Nor was he inattentive
to other matters. He made a
voyage from harbour to harbour
throughout the extent of his military
command, and, with his usual
luck, twice narrowly escaped shipwreck.
Indeed, so completely was
his name up as a Jonah, that the
captain of the Niemen frigate, with
whom he had been a passenger,
took the alarm.
“The following day” (the day after
one of these mishaps) “brought Captain
Wallace to dine with the Governor, and
it came out that he had been hearing
tales about his Excellency which he did
not consider to his advantage, for he
suddenly asked him if he had not once
been shipwrecked. Sir Howard replied
by telling the story, and the captain’s
face became longer as he proceeded,
though he made no remark till the close.
He then observed that his regard for him
was very great, and he valued their interchange
of hospitality in port and
ashore, but should never like to take
him to sea again; for he had been twenty
years afloat without mishap, except on
the two occasions when they had been
together; and he should now look upon
his appearance in his ship as a passenger
as a very bad omen indeed.”
On both occasions the ship had
struck for lack of proper beacons,
and Sir Howard at once applied
the remedy. He caused lighthouses
to be built where they were most
required; and in order to improve
the internal communications of the
province, he made roads, and proposed
a plan for connecting by a
canal the Bay of Fundy with the
Gulf of St Lawrence. Meanwhile
he was not neglectful of the intellectual
wants of the colonists, as
yet very imperfectly attended to.
He founded, endowed, and, after a
good deal of opposition, obtained a
charter for the University of Fredericktown,
of which, in 1829, he became
the first Chancellor, giving at
the same time his own name to
the College. These were works of
peace; and he was equally careful
in guarding against the chances of
war. The treaty of 1783 had left
the boundary-line between Great
Britain and the United States very
imperfectly defined; and as the inhabitants
of the latter country increased
in number, they began to
encroach on the territories of the
former. A good many squatters had
forced themselves into New Brunswick,
and been driven away, till at
last a person named Baker, bolder
than the rest, took possession of an
outlying portion of land, and hoisted
the American standard. The
proceeding was much approved by
the Government of Maine, and
strong parties of the militia were
turned out in anticipation of a collision
with the garrison of Fredericktown.
Sir Howard Douglas, however,
knew better than to precipitate
hostilities. He contented himself
with sending a civil message to
Baker, requesting him to withdraw;
and when no attention was paid to
it, he gave such orders to the troops
as would bring them to the frontier
in a few hours should their presence
be required. This done, a
parish constable was desired to perform
his duty; and the man, coming
upon Baker without any fuss or
parade, cut down the flag-staff,
seized the squatter, and carried
him off in a waggon to the capital
of the province. All Maine was
thrown into a ferment. The Governor
threatened, and demanded
that Baker should be set at liberty.
Sir Howard refused so much as to
see the messenger intrusted with
this demand, justly alleging that
he could hold communication on
such subjects only with the Central
Government at Washington. The
result was, that Baker, being put
upon his trial, was found guilty,
and sentenced to pay a fine; which
fine, after an enormous amount of
bluster, was duly paid. For his
firm yet judicious conduct throughout
this awkward affair Sir Howard
received the approbation of the
Home Government, becoming at
the same time more than ever an
object of enthusiastic admiration
to the people whom he governed.
While approving all that their
representative had done, the British
Government saw that it would be
impossible with safety to leave the
boundary question longer unsettled.
Arrangements were accordingly
made with the United States for
referring the points at issue to arbitration;
and the King of the Netherlands
being accepted as arbitrator,
Sir Howard was requested to
return to Europe, and to watch
proceedings. The King’s decision
gave, however, little satisfaction to
either party. England, indeed,
would have acquiesced in it, though
feeling herself wronged; but America
failed to get all that she coveted,
and refused to be bound. It remained
for her, by sharp practice
at a future period, to gain her end;
and for England, under the management
of Lord Ashburton and Sir
Robert Peel, to be made a fool of.
The part played by Sir Howard
Douglas during the progress of this
negotiation was every way worthy
of his high reputation; but that
which strikes us most is the sagacity
with which, so early as 1828,
he foretold events in the States
themselves, which have since come
to pass. In a paper addressed to
the Secretary for the Colonies,
which points out endless grounds
of quarrel between the Federal
Government and the Governments
of the several States, he thus expresses
himself:—
“Here we may see the manner in
which the Union will be dissolved—viz.,
the secession of any State which, considering
its interest, property, or jurisdiction
menaced, may no longer choose
to send deputies to Congress. This is
a great defect in the Bond of Union,
which has not, perhaps, been very generally
noticed, cloaked as it is under
article 1st, section 5th of the Constitution,
which states ‘that where there are
not present, of either House, members
sufficient to form a quorum to do business,
a smaller number may be authorised,
for the purpose of forming one, to
compel the attendance of absent members.’
But this appears only to be authorised
for the purpose of forming a
quorum, and only extends over members
actually sworn in, who, being delegated
to Congress by the States they represent,
are subjected to whatever rules
of proceeding and penalties each House
may provide, with the concurrence of
two-thirds of its members. But there
is nothing obligatory upon the several
‘Sovereign States’ to send members to
Congress, or to prevent those sent from
being withdrawn. The ‘Sovereign
States’ have never bound themselves
to do either; so that the process of dissolution
in this way is very simple, and
the danger imminent of a separation
being thus effected, whenever the interests
of any particular State or States are
touched by the Government, or brought
into discussion in Congress, although
those interests may be outvoted by
the preponderating influence of other
States having different interests. But
the State or States which are to suffer
will not, it is clear, send members to
vote their own injury or ruin; and it
may safely be pronounced, from what I
have shown in this paper, that this is the
manner in which the American Union
will come to a natural death.”
Sir Howard returned to England
from the Hague, to find the Government
bent on equalising the duties
on foreign and colonial timber, and
thereby depriving the people of
New Brunswick of one of the most
lucrative branches of their trade.
He could not sit still and see done
what he himself regarded as an act
of great injustice. He made immense
exertions, therefore, personally
and through the press, to
defeat the Ministerial measure, and
he succeeded. It was impossible,
under such circumstances, to return
to New Brunswick, and he therefore
resigned the government. Not
even their satisfaction at the victory
which he had achieved for them
could reconcile the New Brunswickers
to the loss of their Governor;
and they marked their gratitude
for all that he had done by presenting
him with a magnificent service
of plate. Indeed, it is very touching
to remember how, up to the
latest day of his life, every person
connected with New Brunswick, on
visiting England, sought him out
as if he had been a private friend,
and laid open to him matters, not
of public only, but of private business.
The Whig Ministers, on the
other hand, naturally piqued at
their defeat, left him for four years
without any employment. Hence
it was not till 1835, when Sir
Robert Peel acceded to office, that
Sir Howard received the appointment
of Lord High Commissioner
of the Ionian Islands. It was
again his fate to be mixed up with
calamities brought on by natural
causes, and with political difficulties
of no common order. There
arrived one day from Ireland, at
Government House, a Right Rev.
Dr Hynes, a protégé of Daniel
O’Connell, who introduced himself
to Sir Howard as Bishop of Corfu,
and handed him a letter from Lord
Glenelg, at that time Colonial Secretary.
“‘You seem not to be aware that
there is already a Bishop in Corfu,’ remarked
Sir Howard. Dr Hynes intimated
that he was a Catholic Bishop
appointed by the Pope. ‘I know of
but one Bishop here, sir,’ replied Sir
Howard, ‘and no other could be recognised.’
Dr Hynes remonstrated, and
pointed out the importance to England
of the Roman Catholic interest in the
islands; but Sir Howard could not be
persuaded that the British Government
was not strong enough to hold its ground
without this bulwark. The prelate appealed
to the letter of the Minister of
the Colonies, but was shown that this
was no recognition, nor could such be
given without the sanction of the Ionian
Senate. He declared he would assume
his functions, and abide the consequences;
but met a firmness surpassing his
own, and learned that he would not be
permitted to remain on the island. He
denied that he could be expelled, and
warned the Lord High Commissioner
that his conduct must be answered in
England. ‘I have only to say,’ was
the reply, ‘that you will be removed by
the police if you are not gone within
twenty-four hours.’”
The Bishop was unable to resist
such an argument as this, and Papal
aggression received a temporary
check in Corfu. But Sir Howard
had another battle to fight, and
he fought it to a successful issue.
Wherever he exercised authority,
his great object seems to have been
to promote the physical and moral
wellbeing of society, and he applied
himself with this view to compile a
sound code of laws for the Ionians.
Nothing could be more offensive
to those who profited by bad laws;
and the priests in particular, set on
by the Patriarch of Constantinople,
as he was set on by Russia, offered
all the opposition in their power.
Sir Howard’s mode of defeating
this move of the Hellenistic faction
proved at once novel and effective.
He waited till the preparations for
revolt (for open revolt was meditated)
were complete; and then surrounded
the house where the chief
conspirators sat, arrested them all,
and took possession of papers which
placed the complicity of the Patriarch
beyond doubt. These he sent
to the British Minister at Constantinople,
who obtained without difficulty
the deposition of the Patriarch,
and the setting up of a successor
less disposed to become a tool
in the hands of Russia.
Of the great earthquake which
shook Zante to its centre the memory
will not soon pass away. It
began just as Sir Howard entered
the harbour on one of his tours
of inspection, and continued, with
shocks recurring at narrow intervals,
for a whole fortnight. The
people, paralysed with terror, knew
not what to do, or whither to betake
themselves, till the Lord High
Commissioner appeared among
them, calm and collected. He gave
the necessary orders for extricating
the wounded from the ruins: he
directed men, women, and children
where to go; caused temporary
barracks to be erected for their
shelter; and appeared to them as
a guardian angel in their hour of
need. His good offices on that
occasion, as well as a brief experience
of the working of his laws,
brought about a thorough change
of opinion both with regard to
them and to him. When he resigned
his office, which he was obliged
to do in consequence of the
not very generous conduct towards
him of Lord John Russell, then
Colonial Secretary, he left scarce
one enemy in the island, and had
the honour of having an obelisk
erected to him, by vote of the
Senate, bearing this inscription:
“Howard Douglas, Cavalier, and
General, High Commissioner, Benefactor
of the Ionian Islands.”
Sir Howard sat in Parliament
for Liverpool during Sir Robert
Peel’s last administration, and
spoke and voted on all occasions
like a sound yet thoughtful Conservative.
In 1847 he retired
from the House of Commons, and
thenceforth applied his energies to
the service of the country as a
writer on professional and scientific
subjects. His treatise on
‘Naval Gunnery’ had already gone
through several editions, as did his
volume on ‘Fortification;’ and he
now compiled and published his
‘Military Bridges,’ perhaps the
most generally interesting, if not
the most important, of all his works.
But it was not thus alone that he
continued to be useful. His opinions
were sought and freely given
to each successive Government on
every question connected with the
improvement of arms, the selection
of points to be fortified, the management
of the navy, and the steps
to be taken for putting the country
in a state of defence. It is extremely
interesting to know that,
like the great Duke of Wellington,
Sir Howard laid aside all party
feeling whenever the honour or interests
of the country came to be
considered; and that he possessed,
as he deserved, the entire confidence
of Whigs not less than of Tories.
His opinions as to the relative value
of iron and wooden ships are
well known; he was entirely opposed
to the former, though he did
not object to the process of casing
the latter with mail; while in his
‘Naval Warfare with Steam’ he
advocated a system of tactics which
should bring the management of
fleets very much into the same
category with the management of
armies in the day of battle.
Thus, honoured and beloved, Sir
Howard grew old, without losing
one jot of the elasticity of spirit
which had characterised him in
earlier days. He was very happy
also in his family till death began
to cut it short, and blow after blow
fell so heavily, that, brave as he was,
he sometimes reeled. In 1854 a
grandson, the bearer of his own
name, died; then came tidings of
the decease of his eldest son, Charles,
far away; then his second son left
him; then two of his daughters,
Mrs Harcourt and Mrs Murray
Gartshore. The loss of Mrs Gartshore
affected him very deeply; and
well it might, for she was one of
those gifted and beautiful creatures
who shed light around them wherever
they go, seeming too pure and
noble for earth. And scarcely were
his tears dry when Lady Douglas,
his companion for fifty-seven years,
followed her daughters. Two daughters
and one son alone remained to
him, and one of these daughters
was a widow; the other kept his
house, and was, indeed, everything
to him. But she likewise was
taken from him, in a manner as
trying as could be to his Christian
patience and courage. She had
been in apparent health and cheerful
with him at dinner one day, and
next morning was found dead in
her bed. If the old man’s head
had fallen into the dust, who could
have wondered? But it did not.
“No one can tell,” he observed to
Mr Bateman, the medical gentleman
who was called in, “what a
loss she is to me: she has devoted
herself to me; but I must do what
is to be done. She will sleep beside
her mother, where I will soon
join them.”
In this manner the sun went
gradually down till it sank beneath
the horizon. Not that he suffered
himself to be unmanned by sorrow;
quite otherwise. But the physical
frame felt the shock, and yielded to
it perceptibly.
“Sir Howard enjoyed excellent health
up to Miss Douglas’s death. All his
teeth were sound; he walked three or
four miles a-day, and obtained eight
hours’ sleep at night. But that event
gave his system a shock, and the controversy
about armour-ships wore it
more, showing his friends a marked
change. His sleep was less regular and
composed, and he frequently recited the
lines of our great poet—
‘Oh, sleep! oh, gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamours in the slippery clouds,
That with the hurly death itself awakes.’
“But he hid his sorrows, appearing
calm and cheerful, though his manner
was subdued and his conversation less
animated. His vivacity revived at times,
particularly when he spoke of Scotland,
the theme he liked best; or when he
recalled his early life in America, and
described the pathless forests, the villages
of wigwams, or the falls of Niagara,
reciting Thomson’s lines—
‘Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood
Rolls fair and placid,’ &c.
“He derived little benefit from the
Folkstone breezes on his last visit,
though enjoying his walks on the promenade,
which he pronounced the noblest
platform in Europe. Its attractions
were just to his taste, for he could
here see the coast of France, against
which he had raised such bulwarks,
watch the yachts and shipping in harbour
and Channel, and glance around at
the military strollers. Shorncliff Camp
was within reach, as well as the Military
School at Hythe, in which he took great
interest, highly appreciating General
Hay. He supported the Volunteer
movement, and aided in its organisation,
addressing a letter of advice to the National
Rifle Association through his
friend General Hay, and receiving an
acknowledgment in his election as an
honorary member. So well did he keep
abreast with the age. He showed the
same interest in the movements at the
Camp, and attended any display, though
not always to commend. He particularly
censured a sham fight, representing an
attack on an enemy who had landed in
a bay near Hythe. The troops were
marched down, and skirmishers thrown
out on the beach, when the whole body
fell back on the heights, holding them
to cover their retreat. ‘What an absurd
proceeding!’ remarked Sir Howard
to Mr Bateman, who was by his side;
‘the movement ought to be exactly reversed.
They should have brought down
every man and gun as quickly as possible
if the enemy had landed, and attacked
him, and driven him into the sea. There
would be some sense in that.’
“Sir Howard looked a soldier to the
last, retaining his erect bearing, and
walking with a firm step, though cautiously,
and with looks bent on the
ground. His sight had begun to fail,
and cataracts were forming on both his
eyes, but he did not submit them to
medical treatment. ‘They will last my
time,’ he remarked to the author. He
contrived to write by never raising his
pen, forming the letters by habit, and
all were plain to one acquainted with
his hand. A career of threescore years
and ten left his character much what it
first appeared, with all its elements of
dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and
perception, its habits of industry, its
generous instincts, and its warm sympathies.
Neither heart nor mind showed the
wear of life, and he is the same at eighty-five
as at seventeen; inspiring the
Volunteers at Hythe as he inspired them
at Tynemouth, and exercising the inventive
genius which scared the rats in
improving the screw propeller. The
hand that caught up the child in the
shipwreck, obeyed the same impulse
still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking
up the street at Folkstone with a loaded
basket which he had taken from a poor
little girl. ‘My dear, give that to me,’
he said, as he saw her bending under
the weight; ‘I am better able to carry
it than you.’ The words were reported
by a lady who heard them in passing, as
the General of eighty-five and the poor
child of five walked away together.”
We are not going to draw an
elaborate character of one whose
life may be said to have formed
his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas
needs no panegyrist to tell the
world what he was. Chivalrous,
truthful, high-minded, brave, he
secured the esteem, not less than
he commanded the respect, of all
who approached him. Had circumstances
so ordered it that he had
ever directed the movement of
troops in the field, we take it upon
us to say, that among English generals
few would have attained to
higher eminence than he. As it
was, he did more for the British
army, and navy too, in his books
and by his teaching, than either
army or navy, or the heads of both
branches of the service, have ever
had the grace to acknowledge. To
these more shining qualities of head
and temperament he added the
faith and humility of a Christian
man: a humility which was far too
real to be obtruded on careless observers;
a faith which had not one
shade of hypocrisy or fanaticism
about it. Rest to his noble spirit!
it will be long before we look upon
his like again.
ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE.
576
Terrorism, in one shape or other,
is the bane of Italy. By a system
of organised terrorism the princes
of Italy have governed their states,
and by means of terror the peoples
have replied to their rulers. From
the wide diffusion of this sentiment
throughout the nation, secret societies
took their root in the land, and
men became banded together for
attack, protection, resistance, or revenge.
There was none so high in
character or so elevated by station
that he might not be denounced;
there was not one so degraded that
he might not be associated with the
secret acts of the Government. The
only idea of rule was through the
instrumentality of a secret police.
All were suspected—all were watched.
The report of the secretary
was entertained as to the character
and the acts of the minister, and
the secretary was himself under
the close inspection of some underling
in his office. The work of the
State went on under the assumption
that no man was honest; and
it was really curious to see how all
the complicated questions of a Government
could be dealt with by a
system whose first principle was that
there was no truth anywhere. It impaired
nothing of a man’s position
or influence that he was known to
take bribes. Corruption was the
rule, from the star-covered courtier
beside the throne, down to the half-naked
lazzarone on the Mole. “Take
care of your pockets, gentlemen,
there’s a minister coming,” was the
decorous pleasantry of King Ferdinand
at one of his last receptions,
and the speech had a significance
which all could appreciate. It was
especially in Southern Italy that
this corruption prevailed the most.
Amongst a race long enervated and
demoralised, the work of Government
went easily on by means of
such agency. The great efforts of
the rulers were directed, not to repress
crimes against property and
offences against society, but to meet
political disaffection and discontent.
The noted thief would be leniently
dealt with, while the Liberal journalist
would be sentenced to the
ergastolo. Assassination and robbery
went on increasing, and none
seemed to feel terrified; while the
imprisonment of one man for some
expression of Liberal opinions, or
some half-implied censure of the
Government, was sure to strike
terror into many a heart.
The “Government” was, in fact,
very little else than an organised
conspiracy against the spread of all
civilisation. Its efforts were directed
to keeping the people in a
degraded ignorance—the slaves of
priestly superstition, thinking little
of the present and utterly regardless
about the future. The Neapolitan
temperament was well suited
for such a system. Caring wonderfully
little how life was sustained,
so that no labour was exacted for
its maintenance,—light-hearted,
even to recklessness—indifferent to
almost all privations,—such a people
were neither subject to the same
fears nor stirred by the same hopes
as the Northern Italian. They
asked, in fact, for little beyond the
permission to exist. Discontent,
in its political significance, had no
place among them; they had never
heard of any better liberty than
idleness, and if they had, they
could not have prized it. With
natural acuteness, however, they
saw the corruption that surrounded
them—how the minister took
bribes from the contractor, and how
the contractor cheated the State—how
the customs officer was bribed
by the smuggler, and how the first
merchants of the capital filled their
warehouses with contraband goods.
They saw that no man’s integrity
ever interfered to his disadvantage,
but that self-interest was the mainspring
of every action; and could a
people so acute to learn be slow to
profit by the lesson they acquired?
Out of this system of terror, for it
was and is a system, grew two institutions
in Southern Italy—Brigandage
and the Camorra. The former
of these asserted its influence over
the country at large; the latter,
which was an “organised blackmail,”
limited its operations to
towns and cities. Brigandage is no
new pestilence in Italy; it has existed
for centuries. From the character
of the country, so difficult to
travel and so interlaced with cross
paths only known to the inhabitants,
all pursuit of these robbers
has been rendered difficult; but
besides this, another and far greater
obstacle has presented itself in the
sympathy of the peasantry, who,
partly from affection and partly
from fear, have always taken part
with the brigands to protect or to
conceal them. The same disposition
of the country people to side with
those who break the law that we
see every day in Ireland, is recognisable
here. Like the Irish, the
lower Italians have never regarded
the law but as a harsh and
cruel tyranny. They only know it
in its severity and in its penalties—they
have never had recourse to it
for protection or defence; it has
never been to them a barrier against
the exactions of the great man, or
the unjust pressure of the powerful
man; they have felt it in its moods
of vengeance, and never in its moments
of commiseration. Elevated
above their fellows by a certain
wild and savage chivalry, the
brigands have long exercised a terror
over the people of the South.
Their lives were full of marvellous
adventures, of terrible incidents
and hairbreadth escapes, sure to excite
interest in the minds of an
uneducated and imaginative race,
who grew to regard the relators in
the light of heroes. Nor did the
Church itself scruple to accept the
ill-gotten gains of the highwayman:
and the costly robe of the Virgin,
and the rich gems that decked
her shrine, have often and often
displayed the spoils that have
been torn from the luckless traveller.
In this mixture of religious superstition
with a defiance of all
human law, we see again a resemblance
between the Italian and the
Irishman, whose traits have indeed
an almost unerring similarity in
everything. That “wild justice” of
which the great Irish rhetorician
once spoke, is the rule of each.
Assuming that society has formed a
pact against them, they have taken
up arms in their own defence;
and whether it be the landlord or
the traveller, it matters little who
shall pay the penalty. It is next
to impossible to deal with crime
where the general sentiment favours
the criminal. The boasted
immunity of the policeman in
England is but another name for
the ascendancy of the law. How
comes it otherwise that one man
armed with a mere truncheon dares
to arrest a thief in the midst of his
accomplices and associates, while
we see in Italy ninety thousand soldiers
unable to repress Brigandage
in two provinces of the South, where
the number of the brigands is set
down as four hundred? Such in substance
is the report lately furnished
to the Chamber of Deputies at Turin
by the order of General Lamarmora.
The forces for the repression
of Brigandage amount to ninety
thousand well-armed and well-disciplined
soldiers, and the enemy are
stated as four hundred half-naked
and scarcely armed wretches, as destitute
of courage as of food. Such
is the picture given of them; and
we are left in utter astonishment
to guess why, with such a disparity
of numbers, the curse of Brigandage
should yet be known in the land.
Why cannot ninety thousand deal
with four hundred, even were the
cause at issue less one of equity
and justice? If, as has often been
asserted, the Brigandage has been
fed from Rome—if the gold of
Francis II. and the blessing of
the Pope go with those who cross
the frontier to maintain the disturbance
in Southern Italy—what
should be easier, with such a superiority
of numbers, than to cut off the
communication? With sixty thousand
men a cordon could be drawn
from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic
in which each sentinel could hail
his neighbour. Were the difficulty
to lie here, could it not be met at
once? It was declared a few weeks
back by Mr Odo Russell, that a
whole regiment, armed and clothed
in some resemblance to French
soldiers, passed over to the south;
and we are lost in amazement why
such resources should be available
in the face of an army greater than
Wellington ever led in Spain or
conquered with at Waterloo. To understand
a problem so difficult, it is
first of all necessary to bear in mind
that this same Brigandage is neither
what the friends of the Bourbons nor
what the advocates of united Italy
have pronounced it. If the Basilicata
and the Capitanata are very far
from being La Vendée, they are
also unlike what the friends of Piedmontism
would declare—countries
well affected to the House of Savoy
under the temporary dominion of
a lawless and bloody tyranny from
which they are utterly powerless to
free themselves. If Brigandage is
not in its essence a movement of
the reactionists, it has nevertheless
been seized upon by them to prosecute
their plans and favour their
designs. To render the Neapolitan
States ungovernable—to exhibit to
the eyes of Europe a vast country
in a state of disorganisation, where
the most frightful cruelties are
daily practised—where horrors that
even war is free from are hourly
perpetrated—was a stroke of policy
of which the friends of the late
dynasty were not slow to avail
themselves. By this they could
contrast the rule of the present
Government with that of the former
ones; and while the press of
Europe still rang with the cruelties
of the Bourbons, they could ask,
Where is the happy change that
you speak of? Is it in the proclamations
of General Pinelli—the
burning of villages, and the indiscriminate
slaughter of their inhabitants?
Do the edicts which forbid
a peasant to carry more than one
meal to his daily labour, tell of a
more enlightened rule? Do the
proclamations against being found
a mile distant from home, savour
of liberty? Are the paragraphs
we daily read in the Government
papers, where the band of this or
that brigand chief has been captured
or shot, the only evidences to
be shown of a spirit which moves
Italians to desire a united nation?
You tell us of your superior enlightenment
and cultivation, say
the Bourbonists, and the world at
large listens favourably to your
claims. But why, if it be true,
have the last two years counted
more massacres than the forty
which have preceded them? Why
are thousands wandering homeless
and shelterless through the mountains,
while the ruins of their
dwellings are yet smoking from the
ruthless depredations of your soldiery?
If Brigandage numbers but
four hundred followers, why are
such wholesale cruelties resorted
to? The simple fact is this: the
Brigandage of Southern Italy is
not a question of four hundred,
or four thousand, or four hundred
thousand followers, but of a whole
people utterly brutalised and demoralised,
who, whatever peril
they attach to crime, attach no
shame or disgrace to it. The labourers
on one of the Southern
Italian lines almost to a man
disappeared from work, and on
their return to it, some days after,
frankly confessed they had spent
the interval with the brigands.
They were not robbers by profession
nor from habit; but they saw
no ignominy in lending themselves
to an incidental massacre and bloodshed.
The National Guards of the
different villages, and the Syndics
themselves, are frequently charged
with a want of energy and determination;
but the truth is, these
very people are the very support
and mainspring of Brigandage. The
brigands are the brothers, the sons,
or the cousins of those who affect
to move against them. So far from
feeling the Piedmontese horror of
the brigand, these men are rather
irritated by the discipline that
bands them against him. They
have none of that military ardour
which makes the Northern Italian
proud of being a soldier. Their
blood has not been stirred by seeing
the foreigner the master of
their capital cities; their pride has
not been outraged by the presence
of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian
at their gates. To them the
call to arms has been anything but
a matter of vain glory. Besides this,
there seems in the unrelenting pursuit
of the Brigandage a something
that savours of the hate of
the North for the South. Under
the Bourbons the brigand met a
very different measure, as he did
under the French rule, and in the
time of Murat. Men of the most
atrocious lives, stained with many
and cruel murders, were admitted
to treat with the Government, and
the negotiations were carried on as
formally as between equals. When
a Capo Briganti desired to abandon
his lawless and perilous life, he had
but to intimate his wish to some
one in authority. His full conditions
might not at first or all be
acceded to, but he was sure to
be met with every facility for his
wish; and in more than one case
was such a man employed in a situation
of trust by the State; and
there yet lives one, Geosaphat Talarico,
who has for years enjoyed a
Government pension as the reward
of his submission and reformation.
Under the old Bourbon rule, all
might be pardoned, except an offence
against the throne. To the
political criminal alone no grace
could be extended. The people
saw this, and were not slow to
apply the lesson. Let it also be
borne in mind, that the brigand
himself often met a very different
appreciation from those who knew
him personally to that he received
at the hands of the State. The
assassin denounced in wordy proclamations,
and for whose head a
price was offered, was in his native
village a “gran’ Galantuomo,” who
had done scores of fine and generous
actions.
To revolutionise feeling in such
a matter is not an easy task.
Let any one, for instance, fashion
to his mind how he would proceed
to turn the sympathies of the Irish
peasant against the Rockite and
in favour of the landlord, to hunt
down the criminal and to favour
his victim. It would be a similar
task to endeavour to dispose the
peasant of the Abruzzi to look unfavourably
on Brigandage. Brigandage
was, in fact, but another
exercise of that terrorism which
they saw universally around them.
Was the Capo Briganti more cruel
than the tax-gatherer? was he not
often more merciful? and did he
ever press upon the poor? Were not
his exactions solely from the rich?
Was he not generous, too, when he
was full-handed? How many a benevolent
action could be recorded to
his credit! If this great Government,
which talked so largely of
its enlightenment, really wished to
benefit the people, why did it not
lighten the imposts, cheapen bread,
and diminish the conscription? instead
of which we had the taxes
quadrupled, food at famine prices,
and the levies for the services
more oppressive than ever. They
denounced Brigandage; but there
were evils far worse than Brigandage,
which, after all, only pressed
a little heavily on the rich, and
took from them what they could
spare well and easily.
It is thus the Neapolitan reasons
and speaks of that pestilence which
is now eating like a cancer into the
very heart of his country, and taxing
the last energy of her wisest and
best to meet with success. At this
moment Southern Italy is no more
under the control of the Italian Government
than are the States of the
Confederacy under the sway of President
Lincoln, and all the powerful
energies of the North are ineffectual
to eradicate a disease which is not
on the surface, but in the very heart
of the people.
The Italian Brigand, like the
Irish Rockite, is by no means of
necessity the most depraved or most
wicked of his native village. Perhaps
his fearlessness is his strongest
characteristic. He is in other respects
pretty much like those around
him. He has no great respect for
laws, which he has often seen very
corruptly administered. He has
been familiar with perjury all his
life. He has never seen the rites of
the Church denied to the blackest
criminals, and he has come to believe
that, except in the accidents of
station, men are almost alike, and
the great difference is, that the filchings
of the minister are less personally
hazardous than the spoils of
the highwayman.
That these men take pay and
accept service from the Bourbonist
is easy enough to conceive. To cry
Viva Francesco Secondo, when they
stop the diligence or pillage a farmhouse,
is no difficult task; but that
they are in any sense followers,
or care for the King or his cause,
is utterly and ridiculously untrue.
The reactionists affect to believe
so, for it gives them the pretext of
a party. The French like to believe
so, for it proclaims, what the press
continues unceasingly to assert, that
the North has no footing in the
South, and that no sympathy ever
has existed, or ever will exist, between
peoples so totally and essentially
dissimilar.
The Piedmontese, too, unwilling
to own that the event they have so
ineffectually struggled against has
not all the force of a great political
scheme, declare that the Brigandage
is fed from Rome, and would not
have a day’s existence, if the ex-King
were compelled to leave that capital,
and the favour of the Papal
Court withdrawn from its support.
That the present rulers of Italy
pursue the brigands with an energy,
and punish them with a severity
never practised before, is cause
even to prefer the reign of the
Bourbons to that of the Piedmontese.
There is no need for them to
enter upon the difficult questions
of freedom and individual liberty,
to contrast the rights enjoyed under
one government with those available
under another. It is quite sufficient
that they see what was once tolerated
will no longer be endured,
and that the robber chief who once
gave the law to the district he lived
in is now hunted down with the
remorseless severity that will only
be satisfied with his extermination.
It may be asked, How could the
people feel any sympathy for a system
from which they were such
heavy sufferers, or look unfavourably
on those who came to rid them
of the infliction? The answer is,
that long use and habit, a sense of
terror ingrained in their natures,
and, not less than these, a reliance
in the protective power of the brigand,
disposed the peasant to prefer
his rule to that of the more unswerving
discipline of the State.
The brigand was at least one of his
class, if not of his own kindred. He
knew and could feel for the peculiar
hardships which pressed upon the
poor man. If he took from the
proud man, he spared the humble
one; and, lastly, he possessed the
charm which personal daring and
indifference to danger never fail
to exercise over the minds of the
masses.
Let us again look to Ireland, to
see how warmly the sympathies of
the peasant follow those who assume
to arraign the laws of the
State, and establish a wild justice
of their own—how naturally they
favour them, with what devotion
they will screen them, and at what
personal peril they will protect
them; and if we have to confess
that centuries have seen us vainly
struggling with the secret machinery
which sustains crime amongst ourselves,
let us be honest enough
to spare our reproaches to those
who have not yet suppressed brigandage
in Southern Italy. It is
not, in fact, with the armed and
mounted robber that the State is at
issue, but with a civilisation which
has created him. He is not the disease,
he is only one of its symptoms;
and to effect a cure of the malady
the remedies must go deeper.
Nor is the question an easy one
to resolve; for though Garibaldi
with a few followers sufficed to
overthrow a dynasty, the whole
force of a mighty army, backed by
a powerful public opinion, has not
succeeded in firmly establishing a
successor.
Piedmont is not loved in the
South. There is not a trait in the
Piedmontese character which has
not its antitype in the Neapolitan;
and they whose object it was to exhibit
the sub-Alpine Italian in the
most unfavourable colours, could
not lack opportunity to do so. The
severities practised towards the brigands—which
were not always, nor
could they be, exercised with discrimination—furnished
ample occasion
for these attacks. Many of
these assumed a Garibaldian, or
even Mazzinian tone, and affected
indignation at cruelties of which
the people—the caro popolo—were
always the victims. One of the
chief brigands, Chiavone, pretended
to imitate Joseph Garibaldi; and
in dress, costume, and a certain
bold, frank manner, assumed to represent
the great popular leader.
Amongst his followers he counted
Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans,
Belgians, and, it is said, Irish. One
of these foreigners was a man
of high rank and ancient lineage,
Count Alfred de Trazégnies—a near
relative of M. de Merode’s: he
was taken prisoner and shot. Another
was the famous Borjès, from
whom was taken the instructions
given him by General Clary, and,
more interesting still, a journal
written in his own hand.
Though his “instructions” are
full of grandiloquent descriptions
of battalions and squadrons and
batteries—horse, foot, and dragoons—with
exact directions given as
to the promotions, the staff appointments,
the commissariat,—let
us hear how he himself describes
the first steps of his enterprise.
Having with great difficulty succeeded
in obtaining about twenty
muskets at Malta, he saw himself in
some embarrassment as to getting
away from the island, where intimations
as to his project were already
about. He succeeded, however, in
getting on board of a small coasting
vessel with his officers, and landed
after a two days’ voyage at Brancaleone.
“The shore,” he says,
“was totally deserted, no trace of
habitation to be seen; and, directed
at last by the glimmer of a solitary
light, we came upon the hut of a
shepherd, who received us kindly
and hospitably. The next day he
guided us to the little town of Precacore,
where we were met by the
curate, and amidst cries of Viva Francesco
Secondo conducted into the
Piazza. I was cheered by this,” says
he, “and deemed it a lucky augury.
About twenty peasants enrolled
themselves here under my command,
and we moved on to Caraffa,
where I was told a friendly
welcome awaited me. On passing,
however, near St Agata, a company
of the mobilised National
Guard, about sixty in number,
opened a sharp fire on us, and my
new recruits took to their heels,
leaving me alone with my officers.
Sustained, however, by a strong
position, we held our own for an
hour and a half, after which a deputation
from Caraffa came to
offer me the hospitality of that
city—an offer I was fortunate
enough to refuse, for another and
far more serious ambuscade was
prepared for me there.”
At Cirella he came up with a
Bourbon partisan named Mittica,
with one hundred and twenty men
under him, but who refused to accept
him as a leader, and in fact
treated him and his officers as spies
and prisoners.
After many dangers and much
suffering, deserted by Mittica and
his band, Borjès found himself in
Tovre, “where an old soldier of the
3d Cacciatori offered to accompany
me—the only follower I have met
with up to this day.”
His narrative, simply and unaffectedly
written, is one of the
most extraordinary records of suffering,
privation, and peril, and at the
same time of devotion to his enterprise
and zeal in the cause of the ex-King.
He firmly believes that the
mass of the people are “royalist,”
that he only needs five hundred
men, well armed and disposed to
obey him, to “overthrow the revolution”
and restore the sovereign.
He met his death like a brave
man. He was surprised with some
of his followers at a farmhouse
in the very last village before crossing
the Roman frontier, to which he
was hastening. A young Piedmontese
Major, Franchini, with a detachment
of Bersaglieri and some
mounted gendarmes, surrounded the
house and at last set fire to it, on
which Borjès surrendered and was
immediately shot. “I was on my
way to tell the King,” said he with
his last words, “that he has nothing
but cowards and scoundrels to defend
him—that Crocco is a villain
and Langlais a fool.” Then turning
to the Major he added, “Thank
fortune for it that I did not start
one hour earlier this morning, for
I should have gained the Roman
frontier, and you would have heard
more of me.”
The Piedmontese have been
severely blamed for the execution
of Borjès. Indeed he has found no
less an advocate than Victor Hugo,
who would not consent to have him
ranked with Crocco, Ninco Nancho,
and the rest, mere brigands and
robbers on the highway. That the
popular sentiment of Italy was not
disposed in his favour may be assumed
from the indignation felt by
all the villages of the frontier when
General Lamarmora consented that
the body of Borjès should be exhumed
and conveyed to Rome.
There is little doubt, however, that
his being a Spaniard influenced this
feeling. In no country of Europe
is the foreigner regarded with the
same jealousy and distrust.
While the report of General
Lamarmora shows that no disparity
of force, not even ninety thousand
to four hundred, is sufficient to
deal with the Neapolitan Brigandage,
it affects to explain why. In
fact, the report is one insinuated
accusation of the French, who by
their occupation of Rome supply
arms and money to the reactionists,
and feed a movement which,
if left to its own resources, must
perish of inanition. The report
shrinks from the avowal that the
whole inhabitants of two great provinces
are friends and sympathisers
with the brigands; that however
little political reasons enter into the
issue, the priests have contrived to
give a political colouring to the
struggle, and by contrasting the immunities
of the past with the severities
of the present, have made the
peasant believe that the rule of the
Bourbon was more favourable to him
than that of the House of Savoy. It
is not merely in the conscription for
the regular army that the pressure
is felt, but in the very enrolment for
the National Guard, which, liable
as it is to being “mobilised,” exacts
all the services and all the privations
of soldiering. So much as 3000 francs
have been paid for a substitute,
rather than serve in a force which
compels the shopkeeper to desert
his business or the farmer his fields
for eight or ten months of the year!
If we have heard much of the
personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese
in Southern Italy, it is a
theme which cannot be exaggerated.
There is not, perhaps, throughout
Europe a people who have less in
common than the sub-Alpine and
the South Italian. If Garibaldi and
his followers came as liberators, the
Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors.
The Garibaldians won all
the suffrages of a people who loved
their free-and-easy manners, their
indiscipline, that “disinvoltura”
so dear to the Italian heart;—their
very rags had a charm for them.
The rigid, stiff, unbending Piedmontese,
almost unintelligible in speech
and repulsive in look, were the very
reverse of all this. Naples was gay,
animated, and happy under the
sway of the same lawless band of
red-shirted adventurers, but she
felt crushed and trampled down by
the regular legions of the King.
In the great offices of the State,
and in the Prefectures, it was easy
enough for the Piedmontese to
appoint their own partisans; but
how do this throughout the rural
districts, the small towns, and the
villages? In these the choice lay
between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and
a Mazzinian. If you
would not accept a follower of the
late King, you must take one who
disowned sympathies with all royalty.
The Syndics and “Maires” of
the smaller cities have been almost
to a man the enemies of the Northern
Italian. It is through these
all the difficulties of propagating
“union” sentiments have been experienced.
It is by their lukewarmness,
if not something worse, that
Brigandage is able still to hold its
ground, not so much because they
are well affected to the Bourbons,
or that they cherish sentiments of
Mazzinianism, but simply that they
disliked Northern Italy, nor could
any rule be so distasteful to them
as that which came from that
quarter. That the French occupation
of Rome has tended to maintain
and support Brigandage cannot
for a moment be disputed. The
policy of France, from the very hour
of the treaty of Villafranca, has
been to perpetuate the difficulties
of Italian rule—to exhibit the
country in a state of permanent
disorder, and the people unquiet,
dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce
the peninsula to that condition, in
fact, in which not only would the
occupation of Rome be treated as a
measure of security to Europe at
large, but the graver question urged
whether a more extended occupation
of territory might not be
practicable and possible.
If Garibaldi’s expedition had not
terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte,
it is well known the French
would have occupied Naples. When
they would have left it again, it is
not so easy to say. It is clear
enough then to see, how little soever
the French may like that
Brigandage that now devastates the
South, they are not averse to the
distress and trouble it occasions to
the Italian Government, all whose
ambitions have been assumed as so
many menaces against France. Had
you been content with the territory
we won for you—had you remained
satisfied with a kingdom of six
millions, who spoke your own language,
inherited your own traditions,
and enjoyed your own
sympathies, you might have had
peace and prosperity, say the oracles
of the Tuileries; but you would be
a great nation, and you are paying
the penalty. “This comes of listening
to England, who never aided
you, instead of trusting to us who
shed our blood in your cause.”
France never has consented to a
united Italy; whether she may yet
do so is, however improbable, still
possible; one thing is, however,
clear—until she does give this consent,
not in mere diplomatic correspondence,
but in heart and wish,
the southern provinces of the peninsula
will remain unconquered territories,
requiring the presence of a
large force, and even with that defying
the power of the Government
to reduce them to obedience.
Brigandage is but the open expression
of a discontent which exists
in every class and every condition
in the districts it pervades.
It is the assertion of the Catholic
for the Pope, of the Royalist for
the Bourbon, of the Revolutionist
against a discipline, and last of all,
of the Southern Italian against being
ruled by that Northern race
whose intelligence he despises, and
for whose real qualities of manliness
he has neither a measure nor a respect.
One word as to the Camorra
before we conclude: and first of all
what is this Camorra of which men
talk darkly and in whispers, and
whose very syllables are suppressed
while the servants are in the room?
The Camorra is an organised blackmail,
which, extending its exactions
to every trade and industry, carries
the penalties of resistance to its
edicts even to death.
The Camorra has its agents everywhere.
On the Mole, where the
boatman hands over the tenth of
the fare the passenger has just
paid him—at the door of the hotel,
where the porter counts out his
gains and gives over his tithe—at
the great restaurant, at the theatre,
at the gaming-table—some one is
sure to present himself as the emissary
of this dreaded society, and in
the simple words, “for the Camorra,”
indicate a demand that
none have courage to resist.
The jails are, however, the great
scenes for the exercise of this system.
There the Camorra reigns supreme.
In the old Bourbon days the whole
discipline of the prisons was maintained
by the Camorristi, who demanded
from each prisoner as he
entered the usual fees of the place.
The oil for the lamp in honour of
the Madonna had to be paid for,
then came a sort of fee for initiation,
after which came others in the shape
of taxes on the income of the prisoner
and his supposed means, with
imposts upon leave to smoke, to
drink, or to gamble. His incomings
too were taxed, and a strict account
demanded of all his gains, from
which the tenth was rigidly subtracted.
To resist the imposts was to
provoke a quarrel, not unfrequently
ending fatally; for the Camorristi
ruled by terror, and well knew
all the importance of maintaining
their “prestige.”
The revenues of the Camorra,
amounting to sums almost incredibly
large, are each week handed
over to the treasurer of the district,
and distributed afterwards to the
followers of the order by the Capo
di Camorra, according to the rank
and services of each, any concealment
or malversation of funds
being punished with death. The
society itself not only professes
to protect those who belong to it,
but to extend its influence over all
who obey its edicts; and thus the
poor creature who sells his fruit at
the corner of the street sees his
wares under the safeguard of one
of these mysterious figures, who
glide about here and there, half in
listlessness, and whose dress may
vary from the patched rags of almost
mendicancy to the fashionable attire
of a man of rank and condition.
In the cafés where men sit at
chess and dominoes, the Camorrist
appears, and with his well-known
whisper demands his toll. In
vain to declare that the play is not
for money; it is for the privilege
to play at all that his demand is
now made. The newly appointed
clerk in a public office, the secretary
to the minister, it is said, have been
applied to, and have not dared to
dispute a claim which would be
settled otherwise by the knife.
Recognised by the old police of
Naples, tolerated and even employed
to track out the crimes of
those who did not belong to the
order, the Camorrists acquired
all the force and consideration of
an institution. Men felt no shame
at yielding to a terror so widespread;
nor would it have been
always safe to speak disparagingly
of a sect whose followers sometimes
lounged in royal antechambers as
well as sought shelter under the
portico of a church.
It has been more than once
asserted that Ferdinand II. was a
sworn member of the order, and
that he contributed largely to its
funds. Certain it is the Camorra
in his reign performed all the
functions of a secret police, and
was the terror of all whose Liberalism
made them suspected by the
Government. To the Camorra, too,
were always intrusted those displays
of popular enthusiasm by
which the King was wont to reply
to the angry remonstrances of
French or English envoys. The
Camorra could at a moment’s notice
organise a demonstration in
honour of royalty which would
make the monarch appear as the
loved and cherished father of his
people.
It was, however, by the Liberals
themselves the Camorra was first
introduced into political life, and
Liberio Romano intrusted the defence
of the capital to these men
as the surest safeguard against the
depredations of the disbanded soldiers
of the King; and, strange
to say, the hazardous experiment
was a perfect success, and
for several weeks Naples had
no other protectors than the members
of a league who combined
the atrocities of Thuggee with
the shameless rapine of the highwayman.
The stern discipline of
Piedmont would not, however, condescend
to deal with such agents;
and Lamarmora has waged a war,
open and avowed, against the whole
system of the Camorra. Hundreds
of arrests have been made, and the
jails are crowded with Camorrists;
but men declare that all
these measures are in vain—that
the magistracy itself is not free
from the taint: and certain it is
that the system prevails largely in
the army and navy, and has its
followers in what is called the
world of fashion and society.
The Mezzo Galantuomo is the
most terrible ingredient in the constitution
of a people. The man
who is too bad for society but a
little too good for the gallows, is
a large element in this land, and
it will require something more than
mere statecraft to deal with him.
A Parliamentary Commission is
at present engaged in the investigation
of the whole question of Brigandage,
and their “Report” will
probably be before the world in a
few days. It is very doubtful, however,
if that world will be made
much the wiser by their labours.
There is, in fact, no mystery as to
the nature of this pestilence, its
source, or its progress.
It may suit the views of a party
to endeavour to connect it with
Bourbonism, but it would be equally
true to assert that the peasant-murderers
in Ireland were adherents of
the Stuarts! The men who take
to the mountains in the Capitanata
are not politicians. They have no
other “cause” at heart than their
own subsistence, for which they
would rather provide at the risk of
their heads than by the labour of
their hands. All that they know of
civilisation is taxation and the conscription.
In these respects the
old régime was less severe than the
present; neither the imposts were
so heavy, nor the levies so large;
not to add that, under the Bourbons,
soldiers led lives of lounging
indolence, and “no one was ever
cruel enough to lead them against
the Austrians.”
The Bourbon Government of
Naples had many faults, but the
Piedmontese rule has had no successes.
There is that of ungeniality
in the Northern temperament
that renders even favours at their
hands little better than burdens,
and their justice has a smack of
severity in it that wonderfully resembles
revenge.
What may be the future fate of
Southern Italy it is not easy to
say; but one thing at least is certain,
the influence of Piedmont has not
obtained that footing there which
promises to make her cause their
cause, or her civilisation their civilisation.
If the Bourbons governed
badly, their successors do not govern
at all!
LUDWIG UHLAND. — THE LANDLADY’S DAUGHTER. — THE GOLDSMITH’S DAUGHTER. — THE BOAT. — THE FERRY. — THE SUNKEN CROWN. — RESOLUTION. — THE SINGER’S CURSE. — AUF DEN TOD EINES KINDES.
586
Incontestably, since the death
of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has
been, at least in the hearts of the
people, the Laureate of Germany.
He is not a poet who took the world
by storm with his earliest productions;
but he has been gradually
growing in favour and general acceptance,
until his death is now
deplored as a national affliction.
He died quietly at Tübingen, the
place of his birth, on the 13th of
November 1862, in his seventy-sixth
year, having been born on the 26th
of April 1787. He was said never
to have known a day’s illness until
his last, which was occasioned by
his attending the funeral of a friend
and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in
inclement weather.
The parents of the poet were Johann
Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to
the University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth
(born) Hoser, daughter of one
Hoser who held a similar office. He
had a brother, Fritz, who died in his
ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who
married Meyer, the pastor of Pfullingen,
near Reutlingen. His education
conduced to bringing out the
talent that was latent in him, as it
was the custom of Kauffmann, the
rector of the Tübingen school, to
give free themes to be worked out
in prose or verse, according to the
inclinations of his scholars; and the
young Uhland generally chose the
latter, and was early distinguished
in his choice. Even at school he
was known as an enthusiastic student
of German and Scandinavian
antiquities. At the age of sixteen
and seventeen he produced many
compositions of merit, but only
two, ‘Der Sterbender Held,’ and
‘Der Blinder König,’ found their
way into that collection of his
poems which was published in 1815.
At this time he was hesitating between
the professions of law and
medicine. As a youth, though
given to long walks alone in the
beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen,
he was distinguished by his
love of social manly exercises, particularly
of skating. Two of his
earliest poetical friends were Schröder,
who was afterwards drowned
in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who
fell in the Russian campaign of
Napoleon. This is the friend who
is alluded to in the exquisite poem
of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend
vor uns allen,” while the fatherly
friend spoken of there is Uhland’s
maternal uncle, Hoser, the pastor
of Schmiden. He was also much
influenced in his tastes by Haug of
Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of
Ancient Literature in Tübingen.
Later he became acquainted with
Justin Kerner, whose talent he
placed above his own, Oehlenschläger
the Danish poet, and Varnhagen
von Ense the historian.
Goethe he had seen once when a
boy in 1797, and he records his
impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’
In 1810 Uhland went to Paris, in
order to work at the treasures of
Romance literature contained in the
Imperial Library. On his return
he applied himself to practice as an
advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting
his poetic labours. His
tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’
which belongs to this period,
elicited the warm admiration of
Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a
deputy of the Würtemberg States.
In 1820 he married Emma Vischer,
a daughter, by a former marriage,
of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie
Pistorius, to whose memory Rückert
dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen
auf das Grab einer edlen Frau.’
In 1834 he was made Professor of
German Literature at Tübingen.
He distinguished himself as a political
character in 1848, though without
joining the extreme Liberal
party, and on one occasion presented
an address to the King of Würtemberg,
praying for the restoration
of the Constitution, the prayer of
which was immediately granted, as
most prayers of the kind were at
that particular time, from prudential
motives. He had already resigned,
in 1833, his office of deputy,
finding it incompatible with his
professorship, and had returned to
his residence at Tübingen. His
marriage with Emma Vischer was
in many respects a fortunate one.
He appears to have lived with her
in great harmony till his death, and
the dowry she brought him, though
not large, was sufficient to keep
from his door the anxieties which
usually beset a priest of the Muses.
On the other hand, the marriage
was not blest by children. There
are old pictures extant of Uhland
as a child, with a fair honest face
and powdered hair. His later face
is now familiar to the Germans.
Its first impression is decidedly
heavy. The upper-lip is long, the
cheekbones high, the eyes not large,
the forehead broad over the brows,
and narrower above—altogether an
ordinary honest man’s face, nothing
more. A phrenologist in a steamboat,
to whom the poet was unknown,
once guessed him to be a
watchmaker, adding, to console
him, that every one could not be a
poet. Uhland’s manners appear to
have been plain and unpretending—rather
those of a man who makes
friends than acquaintances. Yet
those who knew him, knew him as
a hearty and even jovial companion.
He was shy, and shunned publicity,
and could not bear to be treated as
a literary lion. On one occasion,
when he was presented with a
crown of laurel, he hung it and
left it on an oak beside the road.
His habits were early and healthy.
In summer he lived in his open
garden-house, and at ten o’clock
every morning used to go out for a
long walk, prefaced by a plunge in
the Neckar when the weather was
genial. At Tübingen, which is a
very pretty quaint little university
town, lying in that finely-broken
country which intervenes between
the Black Forest and the Alps, he
owned a plain house on the country
side of the Neckar bridge, only
ornamented by Corinthian pilasters
in front; behind it was his garden,
arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,”
from which he made his
own ordinary supply of wine. He
was of social habits, but, at the
same time, fond of musing and
solitude. The homely but intellectual
society of Tübingen fully sufficed
him. He was not a man to
care for that of those above him in
station, as his sterling independence
shrank from patronage in the same
way in which his diffidence shrank
from general notoriety.
Politically, Uhland was a people’s
man without being a Radical. His
love of medieval literature imbued
his mind with respect for hereditary
rank, station, and honours, while
his love of freedom and optimist
views of the future of his country
and mankind in general, made him
a sturdy opponent of any attempt to
infringe on what he called “the good
old right.” In England he might
have been a Tory or Conservative
Whig. In Germany, it has pleased
the powers that be to count him with
the Democratic party; hence the admiration
or policy which prompted
Louis Napoleon to make a national
affair of the funeral of Béranger,
was wanting in the case of Uhland,
who was buried, as he had lived, in
privacy. Although this does not
tell well for the temper of the Government
of Würtemberg, and fully
accounts for the hatred of Englishmen
which is said to be dominant
at Stuttgard, the deceased poet
would probably not have wished it
otherwise. No doubt he was, as
far as the honours that proceed
from the great are concerned, to
the end of his life an unacknowledged
and unappreciated man.
But he had all he wanted—robust
health, self-respect, and the respect
of those he loved, sufficient worldly
means, and that divine gift which
Homer himself thought a full compensation
even for blindness.
The uneventfulness of Uhland’s
life, his unpretending presence, his
very look and bearing, his intense
love for nature, the simplicity of
his habits, his steady domestic character,
and unaffected religious feeling,
all bring to mind our own
Wordsworth; and in his poems, as
in those of Wordsworth, the gems
are to be sought among the shorter
compositions. But Wordsworth
made it his business to sit down
at the Lakes and paint nature in
words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic
school of landscape painters
sit down and paint her in colours.
Wordsworth wooed the beauty of
nature immediately and for itself.
His human figures are merely put
in roughly to help out the foreground.
But Uhland rarely paints
nature directly; he rather uses natural
scenery as a background to
his “genre” pictures, which interest
chiefly by presenting the phases of
human feeling, and the joys and
sorrows of mankind. All his poems
are alive with the breath of Spring—fresh,
luminous, and joyous;
but we are aware of his surroundings
rather from the effects they
produce upon him than from any
actual descriptions. His poems
have the ring of the true singer;
an internal melody permeates his
verse, capricious rather than monotonous,
changing its airs and cadences
like the voice of a bird,
rather than flowing on with the
mechanical jingling of a musical
box. This is the quality which
gives the bardic stamp to the compositions
of a Burns, a Béranger, a
Tennyson, and a want of which is
felt in the glowing rhetoric of Byron,
and in
“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”
which belongs to the poetry of
Moore. In matter and choice of
subject, and in some measure in respect
of treatment, he has much in
common with Walter Scott. His
preparatory studies were much of
the same nature, consisting in the
history, scenery, and legends of his
own country. He has done for Germany
what even Schiller and Goethe
with all their greatness omitted
to do in the same degree. He has
immortalised her local recollections.
Second only to the man who leads
an army to rescue his country
from the stranger, such a man
is a patriot of the true kind, whatever
the colour of his politics may
be. Some poems he has written
are like those exquisite ancient
miniature pictures on a gold ground,
best to be understood and appreciated
by the educated connoisseur,
while others are so plain in language
and sentiment that they have
sunk into the hearts of the people,
and will flow for ever from the lips
of the people in the shape of national
songs. Uhland differs most
from the twin stars of Germany—Schiller
and Goethe—in that his
poetry is more exclusively objective
than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt
in his glorious self, and his all-absorbing
devotion to art. Like Horace’s
hero, a world might have fallen
in ruins about him and he would
not have quailed; and, indeed, all
the crash of empires and clash of
armies in which he lived left his
brow as serene as that of one of the
gods of Epicurus. But Uhland could
not sing through the humiliation of
his country, and his voice sank
within him through the French occupation;
but when Germany arose
at length, and with incredible hardihood
pushed back the flood of
invasion, Uhland, like Körner and
others, did manful service, not by
fighting and falling among the foremost,
as Körner did, but with even
better judgment, as husbanding his
gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the
Liberation War. His songs of that
time have a deep and manly note
peculiarly their own, and they are
such as no lesser circumstances
could have called forth. Uhland,
again, as distinguished from Schiller
and Goethe, was the prominent
poet of the Romantic school. But
he was to them what Socrates was
to the Sophists—counted with them,
but not of them. From whatever
source he derived his inspirations,
he always remained fast rooted in
truth and nature. The unreal and
morbid sentimentality of Tieck and
Novalis was unknown to him; nor
did he share the Romeward tendencies
of Friedrich Schlegel, while
fully appreciating the beauty of the
Roman Catholic ritual and associations,
and freely interweaving them
with the golden tissue of his compositions.
On the whole, he is the
most German of German poets, as
he owes none of his inspiration to
“the gods of Greece,” and little to
any foreign source, except those old
Romance writers whom he studied
at Paris; but then it must be borne
in mind that the early threads of
history in France and Germany are
closely interwoven, and the empire
of the Franks in particular belonged
as much to one as to the other.
In attempting to present to the
English reader some of the best
of the poems of Uhland, we must
premise that to translate a perfect
poem from one language into another
is simply an impossibility, and
difficult exactly in proportion to
the degree in which any poem approaches
perfection. The special
difficulty of translating German
poetry into English, and vice versâ,
consists in this, that though the
two languages are not in their basis
much more than dialects of the
same original stock, yet German is
as generally dissyllabic as English
is monosyllabic, owing in part to
English having discarded inflection
where German retains it. We are
aware that many of Uhland’s poems
are already known through very
good translations, one of those most
highly spoken of being that of Mr
Platt. Longfellow has also done
freely into English verse the ‘Castle
by the Sea,’ ‘The Black Knight,’ the
‘Luck of Edenhall,’ and others, and
has succeeded admirably in catching
the spirit of the original. Not
having Mr Platt’s translations before
us, as we write in Germany, we
must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland’s
memory, for attempts of our
own in the same direction, in which
we have tried to reproduce as nearly
as we can the ideas of the original
in the metres in which they
appeared. It is impossible to find
a song in the whole collection more
perfect than ‘Der Wirthin Töchterlein.’
There is not a word or
thought one would wish changed.
The pathos is expressed, without
a single pathetic epithet, solely by
the situation. This poem has been
interpreted politically, as alluding
to the different feelings with which
three classes of patriots regard the
corpse of German liberty. But to
our mind this spoils the simplicity
of the picture. It is more likely to
be true that the poem was occasioned
by an incident of Uhland’s
youth, since it is said that he once
stopped some students who were
singing it under his window, telling
them not to end it, as the end
had too close a personal interest for
him. If this be true, the poem is
more complimentary to the memory
of the fair maid of the inn than to
the lady who became Frau Uhland.
But poets will be poets, as boys
will be boys.
Three students they hied them over the Rhine,
And there they turned in at a landlady’s sign.
“Landlady, hast thou good beer and wine?
And where is that beauteous daughter of thine?”
“My beer and wine are fresh and clear;
My daughter she lies on the funeral-bier.”
And when they did enter the inner room,
There lay she all white in a shrine of gloom.
The first from her face the veil he took,
And, gazing upon her with sorrowful look,
“Oh, wert thou living, thou fairest maid,
’Tis thee I would love from this hour,” he said.
The second let down on the face that slept
The veil, and turned him away and wept:
“Alas for thee there on the funeral-bier!
For thee I have loved full many a year.”
The third, he lifted again the veil,
And kissed her upon the mouth so pale:
“I loved thee before, I love thee to-day,
And I will love thee for ever and aye!”
The last line, “Und werde dich
lieben in ewigkeit,” would be more
correctly rendered, “And I will
love thee in eternity.” And we are
equally aware that our “landlady’s
sign” is objectionable, as the original
is simply, “They turned in
there to a landlady’s.” But it
would be hard to render it otherwise
without losing the quadruple
rhyme, which has a certain mournful
elegance. ‘The Landlady’s
Daughter’ naturally leads us to
‘The Goldsmith’s Daughter.’ In
this poem we must not suppose that
the hero and heroine meet for the
first time. The maiden has fallen
in love with the knight, her superior
in station, but scarcely dares
even confess it to herself, till the
knight agreeably surprises her by
adorning her as his bride, taking
her acceptance for granted. We
would not spoil the romance by
hinting that it may not have been
an uncommon case in the middle
ages for young noblemen of small
fortune to seek their brides from
the rich bourgeoisie of the Free
Towns.
A goldsmith stood within his stall,
Mid pearl and precious stone:
Of all the gems I own, of all,
Thou art the best, Heléna,
My daughter, darling one.
One day came in a knight so fine:
“Good morrow, maiden fair;
Good morrow, worthy goldsmith mine;
Make me a costly crownlet,
For my sweet bride to wear.”
The crown was made, the work was good,
It shone the eye to charm,
But Helen hung in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
The trinket on her arm.
“Ah! happy happy she to bear
This glittering bridal toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
A crownlet but of roses,
How full were I of joy!”
Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the crown approve:
“Now make me, goldsmith, best of men,
A ring with diamonds set,
To deck my lady-love.”
The ring was made, the work was good,
The diamonds brightly shone,
But Helen drew ‘t in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
Her finger half-way on.
“Ah, happy happy she to bear
This other glittering toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
But of his hair a ringlet,
How full were I of joy!”
Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the ring approve:
“Thou’st made me, goldsmith, best of men,
The gifts with rarest cunning,
For my sweet lady-love.
“Yet would I prove them how they sit;
So prithee, maiden, here
Let me on thee for trial fit
My darling’s bridal jewels:
In beauty she’s thy peer.”
’Twas on a Sunday morn betime;
It happed the maiden fair,
Expectant of the matin chime,
Had donned her best of raiment
With more than wonted care.”
With coyness all aglow, behold
The maid before him stand;
He crowns her with the crown of gold,
The ring upon her finger
He sets, then takes her hand.
“Heléna sweet, Heléna true,
I’ve ended now the jest;
That fairest bride is none but you,
By whom I would the crownlet
And ring should be possest.
“Mid gold and pearl and jewel fine
Hath been thy childhood’s home;
Be this to thee a welcome sign
That thou to heights of honour
With me shalt duly come.”
There is a great dramatic beauty
in the accident of the girl having
put on her best apparel to make
ready to go to church, so that the
knight has only to furnish her with
the bridal accessaries to prepare her
at a moment’s notice to go to church
with him.
A ferry-boat is a favourite subject
for painters; and the navigation
of his native Neckar has been
to Uhland the occasion of some of
his sweetest verse-pictures. In the
poem called ‘The Boat’ he shows
how a freight of people, before unacquainted
with each other, and
therefore silent, struck up an intimacy,
and parted with regret, when
some improvised music had once
furnished an introduction.
The boat is swiftly going,
Adown the river’s flowing;
No word beguiles the labour,
For no one knows his neighbour.
What pulls from coat the stranger,
The tawny forest-ranger?
A horn that sounds so mildly,
The stream-banks echo wildly.
Then haft and stopper screwing,
His staff to flute undoing,
Another, deftly playing,
Chimes with the cornet’s braying.
Shy sat the maid, self-chidden,
As speech were thing forbidden,
Now blend her accents willing
With flute and cornet’s trilling.
The rowers with new pleasure
Pull strokes that match the measure;
The boat the stream divideth,
And, lulled by music, glideth.
It strikes with shock the landing,
The folk are all disbanding;
“May we again meet, brother,
On board this boat or other!”
The companion to this little
cabinet picture of the boat going
with the stream is the crossing of
the ferry. The poet offers the
ferryman three times his fare, because
the spirits of two friends,
now dead, who crossed the same
ferry with him in past years, are
supposed to have gone with him.
Many years have passed for ever
Since I came across the river;
Here’s the tower, in evening’s blushing,
There, as erst, the weir is rushing.
Then with me the boat did carry
Two companions o’er the ferry,
One a friend, a father seeming,
One a youth with high hopes beaming.
That one lived a peaceful story,
And is gone in peace to glory;
This, of all most fiery-hearted,
Hath in fight and storm departed.
So when I, mid blessing cherished,
Dare to think on seasons perished,
Must I still to sorrow waken,
Missing friends that Death hath taken.
Friendship may not be united,
Save when soul to soul is plighted:
Full of soul those hours went by me,
Still to souls a bond doth tie me.
Ferryman, I gladly proffer
Thrice the fare that others offer,
Since two spirits thou didst carry
At my side across the ferry.
Longfellow, in his ‘Hyperion,’
has beautifully rendered the spirit
of this poem, if he has somewhat
missed its cadence.
The fine elegy on the death of
Tell belongs to Uhland’s ‘Songs
of Freedom,’ Tell’s death is undemonstrative,
and he characteristically
comes by it, by rescuing a
child from a torrent. ‘The Sunken
Crown’ stands before it in the collection,
probably by way of introduction:—
There, over on the hill-top,
A little house doth stand;
One gazes from the threshold
On all the lovely land.
There sits a free-born peasant
Upon the bench at even;
He whets his scythe so blithely,
And sings his thanks to Heaven.
There, under in the hollow,
Where glooms the mere of old,
There lieth deeply sunken
A proud rich crown of gold:
Though in it gleam at nightfall
Carbuncle and sapphire,
Since ages grey it lies there,
To seek it none desire.
In his neighbouring Switzerland
the poet seems to see the image of
his ideal freedom, modest and self-respecting;
founded on the laws
of decency and order; possessing
its ancient charters and title-deeds;
no ephemeral offspring of democratic
chaos; a gentle and serene
goddess of justice holding the exact
balance between despotism and
universal suffrage. Such freedom
as this, in many grand patriotic
strains, he desires for Würtemberg—a
country whose praises he enumerates
in soil, products, climate,
scenery, and manners, only lamenting
one want, without which it
would be a paradise, the want of
“Good Right.” He is certainly
justified in his praise of his country,
which, with the Grand-Duchy
of Baden, forms a corner in the
map of Europe which is a garden
of fertility, a museum of antiquities,
and a labyrinth of natural
grandeur; but we question whether
Uhland is not over-sensitive
as to its political misery.
When we pass from his ‘Songs of
Freedom’ to his ‘Songs of the Affections,’
we find the same moderation
and purity of sentiment. Uhland
always seems afraid of saying too
much. His exquisite taste is a
constant check upon him. He
leaves the lines of his sketches to
speak for themselves, and shrinks
from too much elaboration. The
imaginative reader may, if he
pleases, supply for himself much
of the inessential detail. What
a picture of a bashful old-world
lover he gives us in his poem called
‘Resolution!’
She comes to walk in this sweet wild;
To-day I’ll banish all alarm;
Why should I tremble at a child
That does no living creature harm?
All give her greeting near and far;
I would, but dare not do the same;
And to my soul’s transcendent star
I cannot lift my eyes for shame.
The flowers that bend as she doth fare,
The birds with their voluptuous song,—
All these their love so well declare,
Why must I only feel it wrong?
To highest Heaven I oft prefer
Through livelong nights a bitter plaint;
Yet would I say three words to her,
“I love thee,” then my heart is faint.
In wait behind the tree I’ll stay
She passes in her daily walk,
And whisper “My sweet life” to-day,
As if in dreaming I did talk.
I will—but oh the fright I feel!
She comes, and she will see me sure;
So here into the bush I’ll steal,
And I shall see her pass secure.
For pathetic simplicity, perhaps
none of his love-poems stands
higher than Die Mähderin—the
‘Female Mower.’ There is a pathos
in the very fact of the delicate girl—delicate
at least in feeling—being
engaged in rude masculine toil,
a case but too common in many
countries; then, again, in her hopeless
attachment to the son of the
rich farmer; then in her overtasking
her strength in mowing the
whole field without refreshment or
repose, because the avaricious and
selfish old man has promised her
his son’s hand as the price; and
again, in the killing deception at
the close. She dies a martyr to
the combined effects of the labour
and the disappointment, and the
old man has virtually murdered
her to prevent her marrying his
son and for selfish gain. Another
example of a deep and simple
pathos, produced by two pictures
of the same place, is ‘The Castle
on the Sea;’ it is a dioramic change
of effect produced by a dialogue.
First the castle stands superb in
rising or setting sunlight, towering
to heaven and bowing to the
deep; the king and queen walk
on the terrace in their royal insignia,
and a beautiful princess
walks with them: the scene changes
to a weird moonlight effect,
where the castle stands in ghostly
grandeur; the king and queen are
there on the terrace, but without
their robes or crowns; they are in
mourning, and the princess is no
longer with them. This ballad
has been effectively translated by
Longfellow. Though verging on
the impossible in subject, ‘The
Mournful Tournament’ is a grand
tragic sketch. Seven knights came
to joust for the favour of the
king’s daughter, but as they came
in through the castle gate they
heard the knell of her funeral.
They persist in the tournament; for
the one who loves her most truly,
holds that still, though dead, she
is worthy to be fought for, the
victor gaining her wreath and ring.
All fall in the fight but he, and he
is mortally wounded, but, as the
prize of victory, is buried with his
lady-love.
Similar in actual improbability
of subject, but demonstrating its
bare possibility by its tragic truth,
is the ballad of ‘Three Young
Ladies.’ The father brings to mind
the Greek bandit, the hero of
About’s ‘Roi des Montagnes,’ who
keeps his daughter at school at
Athens, and when she wants a new
piano, harries a village. As he returns
from his rides, or raids, the
three maidens ask this feudal tyrant
what he has brought for them. The
first, he knows, loves gold and
finery; he has killed a knight for
her, and brought her the spoil. But
the dead knight was her lover; she
strangles herself with the stolen
chain, and dies beside his body.
Two maidens only welcomed the
father on his next return. The
second, he knows, loves the chase;
so he brings her a hunting-lance
with a gold band, having killed a
wild huntsman to obtain it. The
wild huntsman was her lover, and
she falls on the lance and dies
beside him. One maiden only
greets him the next time. Flowers
are her passion; so he brings her
flowers, having slain the bold gardener
to obtain them. She takes
the flowers and seeks the body of
the dead gardener, who was also
her lover; but flowers can inflict
no wounds, so she stays beside him
till the flowers wither, and she
withers with them. ‘The Black
Knight’ has been done full justice
to by Longfellow. The practice of
wearing visors in the ages of chivalry
made such tales a poetic possibility.
Death comes to joust in a
king’s court, like a knight in black
armour on black steed; he kills all
the champions, dances with the
king’s daughter, pours out a draught
for the prince and princess, from
which they quickly grow pale and
sink. The old king begs him to
take him also, but he says that “he
only breaks flowers in spring,” and
stalks away. In the ‘Luck of
Edenhall’ Uhland gets upon English
ground. His own preserves
are so well stocked that he had no
need to poach on those of the minstrels
of the Scottish Border. But
the offence is a single one, and may
be forgiven for its admirable success
and the world-wide interest of
the beautiful Cumbrian legend.
The trumpet-like bray and strange
metre of this poem render it one of
the most difficult for a translator
to grapple with; Longfellow, however,
has done it almost without
fault, the only exception we might
take being to the repetition of the
“crystal tall,” and the expression
“the cup to praise” instead of “the
cup to honour.” But in sonorous
cadence his rendering equals the
original. There is a thrilling solemnity
in the remark at the end,
that the world will one day be
dashed to pieces like the shattered
Luck of Edenhall. In a note
below Longfellow’s translation it
is said, “The tradition on which
this ballad is founded, and the
‘shards of the Luck of Edenhall,’
still exist in England. The goblet
is in the possession of Sir Christopher
Musgrave, Bart. of Edenhall,
Cumberland, and is not so
entirely shattered as the ballad
leaves it.”
If not the very best of all the
ballads, at least the most characteristic
of the poet’s ethical bent, is
‘The Singer’s Curse.’ With this
we may fitly conclude our specimens,
as it is a declaration of the
greatness and holiness of the poet’s
mission, and a prophecy of the
annihilation of all earthly pomp
that is founded on injustice and
wrong, which it is the poet’s highest
duty to raise his voice against. It
might also be entitled ‘The Martyr-Minstrel.’
In days of old a castle stood, it stood so haught and high,
Wide o’er the lands it shone to where the blue sea met the sky;
All round it lush flower-gardens a perfumed girdle made,
Wherein with radiance rainbow-arched reviving fountains played.
Sat there a proud king rich in spoil of war and rich in land,
Upon his ancient throne he sat so gaunt and grimly grand;
For all he thinks is Terror, and all he looks is Hate,
And all he speaks is Scourging, and all he writes is Fate.
Once did a noble minstrel pair up to this castle go,
The one with golden ringlets, the other with locks of snow;
The old man with the harp he sat on a goodly steed astride,
The while his blooming comrade tript gaily at his side.
Spake to the youth the old man, “My son, be strong to-day;
Knit all the nerves of music, the joy, the pain, in one;
Our task it is to-day to touch the tyrant’s heart of stone.”
Now stand the singers twain within the lofty pillared house,
And high upon his throne the king sits with his royal spouse;
The king so fiercely splendid, like blood-red northern light,
But sweet and mild the queen as looks the full moon on the night.
Then smote the strings the old man right wondrously and well,
That full and fuller on the ear the tides of music swell;
And then angelically clear the young man’s voice did flow
In the elder’s pauses, like a choir of spirits, weird and low.
They sing of spring and true love, of an age of golden youth,
Of freedom and of manhood, of holiness and truth;
They sing of every sweetness that makes man’s bosom soft,
They sing of every greatness that bears man’s heart aloft.
Forthwith the courtier circle unlearns the courtly sneer,
The king’s disdainful warriors bow down to God and fear.
Then, as her soul with tender pain and rapture overflows,
The queen before the singers from her bosom flings the rose.
“Ye have beguiled my people—will ye bring my wife to shame?”
So cries the king in fury, quivering through all his frame;
He hurls his sword, that flashing strikes through the stripling’s heart;
Now from the source of golden songs a blood-jet high doth start.
Strewn as by sudden tempest is all the listening swarm,
The youth hath sobbed his life out upon his master’s arm;
Upon his horse he sets him, wound in his mantle’s fold,
And fastly binds him upright, and quits with him the hold.
But at the high gate halting, the old man stands sublime,
His harp he seizes wildly, of harps the peerless prime;
Against a marble column he hath dashed its strength in twain,
Then cries aloud that garden and castle peal amain.
“Woe, woe to you, proud halls, no more echo melodious word
Through all your vaulted hollows, nor ever song or chord;
No, moans alone and wailing, and coward step of slaves,
Till sprites of vengeance trample you to dust and mould of graves.
“Woe to you, odorous gardens, in May-tide’s lovely light,
As ye behold this dead face, so sadly changed to sight;
Even so untimely wither, with every fountain dry,
And naked all and turned to stone through coming ages lie.
“Woe to thee, murderer accurst, of minstrel-craft the bane,
For crowns of savage glory strive on, and strive in vain;
And be thy name forgotten, in endless midnight sunk,
And pass as into vain air that last death-rattle shrunk.”
The old man’s voice hath pealed it, and Heaven hath heard on high;
The mighty walls are levelled, the halls in ruin lie;
One pillar lone and lofty still tells of vanished power;
Ev’n that is cloven, and may fall before the morning hour.
Around for perfumed gardens is a heath of desert land,
No tree sheds welcome shadow, no spring leaps in the sand.
That king he perished all unnamed in hero-scroll or verse,
Forgotten, blindly overwhelmed!—so wrought the singer’s curse.
Shortly before his death Uhland
wrote a little epigram on the death
of a young child, which it would
be inexcusable to attempt to give
in any other language than the
original, especially as it has not
yet appeared in any collected edition
of his works.
Du kamst, du gingst mit leiser Spur,
Ein flücht’ger Gast in Erdenland
Woher? Wohin?—wir wissen nur
Aus Gottes Hand in Gottes Hand.
In these lines the childlike spirit
of the old poet may have conceived
a fitting epitaph for himself, so
calm and simple was his life and
death. But the “mit leiser Spur,”
“with faint footfall,” could not
have been applied to his own case
except by his own modesty; for,
unmistakably, if ever man did so,
to use the language of his admirer,
Longfellow, Ludwig Uhland has
left some very enduring “footsteps
on the sands of Time.”
MY INVESTMENT IN THE FAR WEST.
595
“A golden opportunity, sir;
Fortune knocking at your door, as
she knocks but once in a man’s lifetime;
and if you refuse to let her
in, excuse me, sir, but you will repent
it—you will.”
Such were the persuasive words
of Colonel Coriolanus Sling, as he
cracked his filberts and sipped his
sherry in the snug dining-room of
my villa at Stamford Hill. The
Colonel, as his name indicates pretty
clearly, was an eminent citizen of
the model republic, not long arrived
on British ground, and the bearer
of an introductory letter from my
esteemed friend Cassius Corkey, a
late Secretary of Legation. I had
given a little dinner in honour of
my new acquaintance; the repast
had gone off pleasantly enough, and
the ladies had left us four gentlemen
to our wine and politics, when
the Colonel uttered the above remarks.
It was early autumn, and, if the
flower-beds of the garden were
somewhat faded, the shrubberies of
Magnolia Villa had still a cheerful
aspect; and the lawn, as seen
through the French windows, was
smooth and trim as a gigantic piece
of Genoa velvet. Not a weed, not
a withered leaf, marred the neatness
of the bright gravel of the
walks: the fountain was in full
play, liberally sprinkling the goldfish
in the little marble basin; and
the transparent walls of the conservatory
showed a wealth of many-tinted
flowers within. There may
be larger and more stately residences
than Magnolia Villa, but I
flatter myself that few proprietors
could make more of four and a half
acres of ground, imperial measurement,
than your humble servant,
George Bulkeley. We were, as I
have said, four in company—the
Colonel; young Tom Harris of the
Stock Exchange; a friend and countryman
of the Colonel’s, by name
Dr Titus A. C. Bett; and myself.
“Why, Colonel Sling,” answered
I, doubtfully, “I don’t quite know
about that. The distance, you see,
is great, and the risk may be——”
“Nothing at all!” interrupted
my guest, warmly; “I pledge you
the honour, sir, of a free-born citizen
of the U-nited States, nothing at
all! The plum, sir, is ripe, and
ready to drop into your mouth
spontaneous; and I may safely
assure you, sir, that nothing but
my gratitude for your hospitality
would have induced me to promulgate
a scheme so out-and-out auriferous
as the Great Nauvoo and
Nebraska Railway will eventuate.”
I did not always find it in my
power to follow the Colonel through
all the windings of an argument.
His exuberant diction was occasionally
too much for me; but the drift
of what he said was pretty clear,
and I was greatly struck with it.
Tom Harris, who had been staring
at the Colonel with his round eyes
very wide open, here ventured to
say that he supposed there would
be considerable expenditure before
any returns could be expected.
“Guess you’d better shut up,”
said, or rather snuffled, Dr Titus
A. C. Bett. “I have documents in
my pocket to substantiate the number
of miles metalled, and the
bridges, and the viaducts, and
general plant. A mere flea-bite of
outlay, sir, would suffice to establish
another of those mighty arteries of
communication in respect to which
America, it’s pretty much admitted,
whips the world; and none but a
soft-horn, sir, would have the least
dubiosity about it.”
The Doctor and the Colonel were
compatriots, one being a Boston
man and the other a New-Yorker,
but they were very unlike each
other in aspect and manner. For
whereas the Colonel was six feet
two inches high, at the very least
computation, and had an eagle beak,
keen dark eyes, and a forest of lank
black hair streaming around his
sallow face; the Doctor was a little
man of five feet three, or thereabouts,
with weak eyes, spectacles,
a head almost bald, and a little
wizened countenance. Furthermore,
the Colonel was a soft-spoken
man, with conciliatory manners and
a peculiarly honeyed tone; and
though he smoked prodigiously, he
consumed tobacco in no other way.
The Doctor, on the other hand, was
quarrelsome and warlike to a degree,
capped every anecdote, contradicted
everybody, hummed and buzzed in
society like an angry wasp, and
kept a silver box full of quids in
his coat-pocket. These two were
partners. Ill-natured people were
malicious enough to say that the
Colonel’s department was cajolery,
and the Doctor’s bullying, in the
joint interest of the firm. I gave
no ear to these unkind rumours,
and indeed I justly considered the
Colonel to be a man of superior
abilities and remarkable eloquence.
He did not omit, on this occasion,
to spread a little soothing salve on
the wounds which his countryman’s
rudeness had inflicted.
“Excuse the worthy Doctor,” he
murmured, in bland accents, to Tom
Harris, whose face was very red
with awkward indignation, “he is
accustomed to the free discussions
of our colossal country, where the
restrictive etiquette of older and
more despotic lands is spurned beneath
the boot-heels of enlightenment.
Do not be riled, I beseech
you, at the freedom of his remarks;
truth inspires them. You do not
know, gentlemen” (here the orator’s
voice swelled into a sonorous fulness)—“you
cannot know—the resources
of our glorious country:
none but American citizens can
fully appreciate the mines of profitable
pro-duce always awaiting the
civilising pick-axe of the hardy
western pioneer. But never, never
since first our Pilgrim Fathers
began to improve the Indians off
the face of nature—never since
Manhattan changed its name to
New Amsterdam, afterwards to be
New York—has such a speculation
as this, of which I am the felicitous
herald, been going a-begging. Hail,
Columbia, happy land! as our inspired
bard, who whips your Swan
of—ahem!” And here the Colonel
ended in some confusion, and hid
his fluent lips for a moment in his
wine-glass.
Tom Harris was quite appeased.
He was not a bright personage,
Tom, but he did very well on the
Stock Exchange, to which he may
be said to have been born and bred.
He was the only son of the well-known
old Peter Harris, the man
who made so much, as a bear, at
the time of the Nore mutiny. He,
Tom—not old Peter—had inherited
a great deal of money; and though
he set up for a sporting man, and
generally hedged so artfully, and
made up such ingenious books on
the races that his alternative was
between great losses and small ones,
he was richer than when he came
into his father’s fortune. For
money accrues to money, as a snowball
gathers in rolling; and it no
more requires a genius to thrive in
the Stock Market than it does to
rule in a Cabinet, if Chancellor
Oxenstiern tells the truth. And
Tom had married a young lady of
property, Miss Mungle, daughter of
Chuttnee and Mungle, or rather of
the junior partner in that great
firm. Tom Harris, therefore, was
wild for lucrative investments, and
so, in a qualified way, was I; and
money was plentiful in the City, as
the ‘Times’ correspondent daily
informed the reading public. We
therefore already began to nibble
at the tempting bait which the
Colonel placed before us so dexterously.
“But,” said I, “is the traffic
certain to be remunerative? The
line runs through rather a thinly-peopled
tract of country, doesn’t
it?”
Colonel Coriolanus Sling slapped
his leathery palm upon the polished
mahogany with an emphasis that
made the glasses ring. “Sir,” said
he, “you are the most sensible
man I have met in this benighted—I
mean this beautiful kingdom.
You have hit the exact point,
my dear Mr Bulkeley, on which
the eligibility of the whole affair
pivots, only you must look at
it from that sublimely piercing
elevation from which the American
intellect surveys it. Sir, we
must create a population: sir, we
must found cities: sir, it must be
ours to people the western solitudes
and to implant the germs of a nascent
commerce, a new learning, a
fresh community, where now the
coon and the prairie dog dwell
unmolested and alone: and, sir,
future ages will decree to us colossal
statues of imperishable brass;
while in this we shall realise the
applause of our consciences and of
our bankers.” Here the Colonel
stopped, overpowered by his feelings,
and blew his nose with a martial
dissonance.
“By Jove!” said Tom Harris,
“I’ll speak to old Muggins about
it: if he says ‘all right,’ I’ll take a
thousand shares in the concern.”
“Muggins, sir! who is Muggins?”
demanded the Doctor, waspishly:
“is Muggins, sir, a fit judge when
such an enterprise is in question—an
enterprise to reflect eternal
honour, sir, on its spirited and
high-feluting projectors, with the
finger of ignominy to point at the
craven that draws back. Muggins!
some stony-hearted London capitalist—some
toad-eater at the beck of
a bloated aristocracy—some miserable
haunter of the gilded saloons
of a Chancellor of the Exchequer”
(the doctor was not very particular
as to the authenticity of the accusations
he flung broadcast). “Muggins,
indeed!”
Tom Harris was an ingenuous
youth. He looked excessively
ashamed of his allusion to Muggins,
and was quite borne down by the
volubility of his transatlantic opponent.
Thus it came about that
a meeting was arranged for the
next day at Colonel Sling’s chambers,
at which we were to discuss
the propriety of forming a company
to work out the concession of the
Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway, of
which our American friends were
the fortunate owners. I was an
older man than Tom Harris, and
had necessarily seen more of the
world. And I had been “bit,” as
the phrase goes, once or twice, by
Mexican Debentures, Spanish Deferred,
and unsaleable Scrip. I
therefore asked, as delicately as I
could, why my new acquaintances
had not raised among the enlightened
capitalists of their own country
a sufficient amount to pay all preliminary
expenses, thus keeping the
golden fruit entirely among Americans.
But the Colonel had an answer
ready for me. He frowned,
pursed up his month, bit his lips,
and assumed very much the air of
a conspirator.
“Hush!” he uttered, in tragic
tones; then rushing to the door,
whisked it open, putting to rout
Adolphus the page, who always is
listening at keyholes, in spite of repeated
corporal punishment. Adolphus
scuttled away across the hall
in great dismay, and the Colonel returned
to his seat with an expression
that Iago might have envied.
“Hush!” said he, “walls have
auriculars, and spies are always on
the watch to re-port the words of
Columbia’s children. It is well
known that your arbitrary Government
has long adopted the wicked
maxim due to the crafty forethought
of your Pitt, Earl of Holland, that
‘America’s danger is England’s opportunity.’”
I could not help laughing as I
answered, “I am afraid, Colonel,
your memory has not rendered the
passage in exactly its original form.”
“Excuse me,” croaked the Doctor,
“but nothing is more wonderful
than the ignorance which prevails
in Britain, with regard to the
sayings and doings of your grandees
and public persons.”
“Allow me, Doctor,” said the
Colonel, oracularly, “to finish my
explanation. You see, gentlemen,
we might have offered this concession
in Wall Street in the Empire
City, and Wall Street would have
snapped it up; yes, sir, as an alligator
would chaw pork.”
This was a forcible simile, but it
did not quite content us. “Why
didn’t you?” was trembling on the
lips of both Tom Harris and myself,
but politeness restrained us
from uttering what our looks must
have plainly said.
The Colonel answered our looks
thus: “Because, squires, there was
this difficulty in the way,—Buck,
you know, is our old man.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Tom,
reddening again; “but I don’t
quite catch your meaning. Buck,
did you call the gentleman?”
“Buck! the old man! White
House—deputations—soirees—soft
sawder,” explained the Doctor; and
then we discovered that President
Buchanan was the object of discourse.
“Well,” pursued the Colonel,
“Buck’s very far gone—notice to
quit—time nearly up. His successor
is sure to be Abe Lincoln, if
the little giant don’t beat him at
the election. Nobody else has got
a chance. Caucuses all at work!
dark as moles. Now, sir, we have
plugged the platform.”
“You’ve done what?” exclaimed
Tom Harris.
“We’ve made it all safe, and Lincoln
stands to win,” exclaimed the
Colonel, condescendingly. “Now
we suspect those Southerners mean
to ride rusty if they get an anti-slavery
man, like old Abe, to be
President over them; and though
our folks air screamers, and that’s
a fact, the South’s an ugly customer,
and our line of railway is
too close to Missouri State to be
safe, if owned by Northerners.
But in the smartest row the South
can make, you Britishers are sure
to be handled as tenderly as a
hoosier handles a squirrel’s skin;
and so it’s best the property should
be in the name of British subjects,
not free citizens. Don’t you see?”
We did see, and we resolved that
on the morrow we would sift the
matter thoroughly.
“Try the claret, Colonel,” said I;
“you have been drinking nothing
but sherry, and this is Chateau
Margaux that I got at Bilkingham’s
sale. Those are pretty good peaches,
Doctor, of my own growing.”
“Don’t talk of peaches,” said
the Doctor, who, I will own, was
anything but an agreeable guest;
“you must cross the broad Atlantic
before you talk of peaches,
I reckon. I’ve fed pigs with better
than your dukes and earls could
show. I’ve bought in the market
twenty-nine big peaches for thirty
cents, I have. We do crow over
you in peaches, as in most, only
your national vanity won’t permit
you to see it.”
The Colonel jumped from his
chair. “You be quiet!” said he;
“the Doctor is a glowing patriot,
Mr Bulkeley; but I know he admires
your delightful snuggery,
embellished by art and high-flying
taste, as much as I do myself.
Some day, as a director of the
Nauvoo and Nebraska, you may, if
you please, build a palace on the site
of Magnolia Villa that will take the
shine out of the sumptuous halls
of your nobility. But enough of
business. Gentlemen, if you have
liquored sufficiently, we will join
the ladies.”
We did join the ladies. We
found them strolling over the lawn
in the cool of a September evening,
and presently we all went in to
coffee. I noticed that the Colonel
was very polite and attentive, not
only to my wife, but to young Mrs
Harris, who was exceedingly stupid
and plain of feature. As for Mrs and
Miss Jarman, they were entertained
by the Doctor with an amusing
dissertation on the difference between
America and England, and
especially between London and
New York. If Mrs Jarman had
hitherto cherished a belief in the
pre-eminence of London, as she
apparently had, she must have received
a considerable shock as the
Doctor informed her that Belgravia
was but a poor place to Fourth and
Fifth Avenue, and that we were
benighted creatures in all matters
of elegance and taste.
“Not a mahogany door, I guess,
have I seen in this smoky beggarly
town of yours,” said Dr Bett, with
both thumbs in the pockets of his
black satin vest; “and as for silver
knockers and bell-pulls, I might as
well look for liberty in your institutions,
or for sincerity in your
press. The helps are enough to
disgust all free-born men; to see
them in plush and powder, with
gold-sticks and nosegays, standing
behind the gilt vehicles of an effete
aristocracy, is alone a spectacle that
beats earthquakes; and your Life
Guards would sing small, I guess,
by the side of the Brooklyn Volunteers.”
The Colonel, however, could be
complimentary and gentle, if his
brother republican could not; and
so well did he play his cards, that
when the company drove off, and
the last grinding of their carriage-wheels
upon the gravel had died
away, my wife and daughters turned
to me with beaming faces, and began
to sing the praises of their
departed guest.
“A most superior, well-informed,
gentlemanly man, is Colonel Sling,”
said the partner of my joys, emphatically.
“A delightful man!” lisped
Georgina, my eldest.
“Quite an Admirable Crichton,”
said Selina, my second, who is a
bit of a blue.
“Delightful! he has so much conversation,
and makes one laugh
so!” cried artless Lucy, the third
and youngest of my daughters.
So he had pleased them all, and,
I admit, he had pleased me too;
but he mostly showed his tact in
winning the suffrages of the feminine
members of my household.
For Mrs Bulkeley is not a cipher
by any means, even in my business
transactions, and she has an amiable
habit of warning me against entering
into commercial relations with
any one she mistrusts or dislikes.
The next day beheld assembled in
the showy Pall Mall chambers of
Colonel Sling the same quartette
that had closed around the mahogany
in Magnolia Villa on the preceding
day. Tom Harris and I
drove down there together from
the City, and we found the two
Americans awaiting us with a hearty
welcome. There were maps on a
great table, and plans, and minerals,
and parchments, and heaps of
papers, carefully stacked and docqueted,
and files of letters with great
red seals to them that would have
carried conviction home to the most
incredulous. And the Colonel, after
the first salutations were over,
and after tenderly inquiring about
the health of my womankind, commenced
a lucid explanation of the
exact position of the Nauvoo and
Nebraska Railway—its position, I
mean, in a pecuniary point of view,
not its geographical position. The
latter, we ascertained by a glance
at the map, to be in the free State
of Iowa, skirting Missouri, and
with one terminus in Illinois State
and the other in Nebraska Territory.
But information now came
showering upon us, and the Colonel
was extremely careful to prove
every fresh axiom which he laid
down by an appeal to documents
of the most incontrovertible character.
There was the original concession
of the line, approved by
the State Legislature, signed by the
governor, registered by the State’s
law officers and by the Federal attorney
of the district. There were
similar documents, to which the
autographs of the governors of Nebraska
and Illinois were attached.
There were the reports of surveyors,
the accounts of contractors, subcontractors,
architects, machinists,
and ironmasters. Moreover, there
were specimens of minerals found
in the immediate neighbourhood of
the line, and within the liberal
grant of land which the State had
made—which specimens the Colonel
showed us, in rather a careless
way, as mere incidental advantages.
But the eyes of Tom
Harris and myself sparkled at the
sight; for although we were not
adepts in geology, we knew iron
ore, and copper ore, and limestone,
and hornblende, and fine marble,
when we saw them; and visions of
mines and quarries to be worked
at vast profit, or leased for high
rentals, flitted brilliantly before us.
What wonder that, on hearing the
generous terms on which the two
American gentlemen were willing
to admit us to a full participation
of their advantages, Tom and I
shook hands most heartily with
Doctor and Colonel, and devoted
ourselves from that moment to
the establishment of the projected
Company? And then Colonel
Coriolanus rang the bell for lunch,
and we all drank, over and over
again, in creaming bumpers of
Clicquot, prosperity and success
to the Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway. Two day after, out came
our prospectus to dazzle the City.
A more flowery manifesto, or
one more fertile in temptations,
I have seldom seen. It proved,
moreover, as plainly as that two
and two make four, that the investment
was as secure as the bank,
if not more so, and a hundred-fold
more remunerative. Never was
there such a railway; never were
there directors so opulent, so respectable,
so conscientious, so experienced;
never was there a line
on which the expenses were so trifling,
the traffic so enormous, or the
dividend so princely, as that of the
Nauvoo and Nebraska. Iowa was
a State of boundless fertility, of inexhaustible
resources—cereal, mineral,
commercial. The line would
be part of a main highway to the
Far West, and the Old World and
the New World pour tribute into
the cornucopia of its matchless
wealth. Cities were to spring up,
fair and flourishing provinces were
to blossom, where the virgin soil
now awaited the spade and the
ploughshare: we were to carry
tobacco, madder, corn, cattle, immigrants,
and ore. The gigantic
fortunes we were to make were
thrown into the shade by the benefits
we were to confer on posterity
and our contemporaries. Unborn
millions were to canonise the projectors
of the Grand Nauvoo and
Nebraska; and we were not only
to insure for ourselves the smiles
and blessings of ages yet to come,
but were to feather our nests
pretty handsomely in a few short
months. Not only were we to take
rank as philanthropists of the first
water, but to rig the market as
well. Nor were the advantages of
the new railroad confined to the
eminent and clear-sighted capitalists
who had first embarked in it.
No; in that good cause the widow’s
mite was welcome. Never, it was
pointed out, was so admirable an
opportunity offered to ladies of
limited income, to struggling professional
men, to decayed gentry
or others, to double or treble
their little store by means of the
splendid dividends, the bonuses,
premiums, and other good things,
to be expected from the Company.
Who has not read many such glowing
proclamations as this, promising
to realise the dreams of an El
Dorado for the lucky speculator,
bolstering up each statement by an
imposing array of figures, and always
concluding by the recommendation
that (to prevent disappointment)
immediate application be
made at the office for shares? We
had a secretary and cashier, and
Dr Titus A. C. Bett was so kind
as to undertake the latter responsible
position; while the celebrated
Wyldrake Flam, Esq., a gentleman
who had been concerned with a
good many companies in his time,
was happily secured for the former
situation. Sir George Gullings,
M.P., a rich banker who had earned
his baronetcy by his long course of
voting for a Whig Ministry, was
our chairman; and, of course, Tom
Harris, Colonel Sling, and I, were
among the managing directors. We
took a great many shares amongst
us; but, of course, by far the
greater number were submitted to
public competition, and the frequenters
of the money market bit
with tolerable freedom. But there
were some wary old fish who refused
so much as to nibble at the
glittering bait, and foremost amongst
them was old Muggins, that veteran
stockbroker of whom Tom
Harris had made mention at my
table. Muggins was a character,
and disagreeably outspoken. One
day I met him at the Royal Exchange,
and taking him playfully
by the button, I asked him why he
gave our Company the cold shoulder.
“Mr Bulkeley, sir, I’ll tell you,”
said Muggins, with a frown: “I
shirk your Company, sir, because
I can’t afford to lose my property
in duck-and-drake fashion among
those swindling Yankees. I hate
bubbles, sir, and this is worse, for
it is a cruel robbery.”
“Sir, sir! Mr Muggins!” said
I, choking with anger. What did
this remarkable man proceed to
say? Just this:
“George Bulkeley, I have known
you from a boy, and you are an
honest man, though not very bright
(I was speechless at his effrontery).
When I call this affair a swindle, I
don’t impute blame to you, for I
am aware that you are a dupe, not
a duper. But I don’t pity you for
losing some pen-feathers out of your
wings, as you will do; I keep my
pity for the poor wretches who
will be plucked bare, and who can
least spare the little savings or
capital your fine prospectus has
wheedled them into investing,—I
mean the widows and old maids,
the half-pay officers, the needy
clergymen, that your Company is
to ruin. I wish I could see your
American friends in the pillory,
I know! Good-day.”
And off he went, leaving me very
angry, but a little dismayed as well.
After all, old Muggins passed for
an oracle in the city; and seriously,
had I examined sufficiently into
the foundation of all the alluring
statements we had published with
the sanction of our names? What
Muggins had said about the widows
and poor helpless folks gave me an
unpleasant twinge in my heart, and
conscience came and whispered,
“George Bulkeley, the accomplice
of rogues, is not very far from being
a rogue himself, is he?” I made a
bold resolution. I determined to
go out myself to America, and, on
the spot, thoroughly to investigate
the condition and prospects
of the line of railway. When I
broached this proposal at the next
meeting of the Board, Colonel Sling
and the Doctor were found to be
violently opposed to it, and to be
inclined to resent such interference
on my part as an insult. And the
influence of the two Americans was
very considerable with the committee,
partly because all our information
was derived from the
authority of Colonel Sling, and
partly because the transatlantic
gentlemen had a custom of putting
down and pooh-poohing whatever
any one but themselves happened
to say. But I was firm this time;
and besides, as I offered to go out
without putting the Company to
any expense whatever, the opposition
to my departure could not
decently be continued. Then, to
my surprise, Colonel Coriolanus
Sling very kindly offered to accompany
me, and to save me all trouble
and inconvenience by lending me
the aid of his perfect knowledge of
the localities. The Doctor, as cashier,
must of course remain at his post;
but the Colonel could be spared, he
felt assured he could be spared,
and indeed he proposed that we
should go as a deputation, and at
the cost of the Company. Why
not? Our shares were at a premium.
Money was flowing in. All went
prosperously with us. Why not?
The Colonel’s proposition was carried
nem. con., and it was agreed
that George Bulkeley, Esq., and
Colonel Coriolanus Sling, should
proceed at once to Iowa, there to
survey, report, and inspect. Mrs
Bulkeley’s consent was procured;
and indeed, but for the terrors of
sea-sickness, she would have insisted
on accompanying me. The Cunard
packet, Mersey, was to sail from
Liverpool on the 17th of the month;
our berths were engaged on board
her; and it was duly agreed that
the Colonel and I were to go
down together on the day preceding
that of embarkation. I never
thoroughly understood why the
gallant American officer did not
keep his appointment. He wrote
me a hurried note, saying that important
business detained him in
town, and that he would join me
in Liverpool; but I believe a dinner
at the Star and Garter, at Richmond,
was the engagement in question.
At any rate I travelled alone; alone
I embarked; and though I looked
out for the Colonel till the last
moment, till the bell rang, and the
plank was withdrawn, and the huge
paddlewheels began to revolve, no
Colonel came. And we went to
sea with his name in the roll of
passengers, but without his corporeal
presence on deck or in cabin.
I cannot say that I was altogether
sorry. I felt instinctively that I
was by far more likely to form an
unbiassed judgment when alone. I
felt that in company with a man so
plausible, so fluent of speech, and
so experienced in all the ways of
the singular country for which I
was bound, I should be in danger
of seeing all objects through the
rose-coloured haze in which it was
the Colonel’s policy to mask them.
But, at the same time, I was a little
nervous at the prospect of exploring
the Far West without a Mentor;
and the weight of the responsibility
attaching to my report was not
exactly reassuring. The packet was
crowded, for many were desirous of
making use of the last week or two
of fine still weather, before the
November gales should begin to
expend their fury upon the vast
breadth of the Atlantic. There
were but few Britons on board; but
there were Dons in abundance; and
great numbers of pallid ladies, with
Parisian toilettes and faulty teeth,
and of sallow lean-visaged men in
tail-coats and varnished boots, returning
from a tour of European
baths and cities. Also, there were
plenty of keen-looking persons, who
eyed all mankind with suspicious
scrutiny, who had memorandum-books
sticking out of the pockets
of their black satin vests, and who
were probably not unconnected with
commercial pursuits and the cotton
trade. Aware that I was on my
way to a new world in more senses
of the word than one, a world whose
standard of morality was wholly
novel, I took every opportunity of
acquiring information which might
afterwards prove invaluable. I
therefore associated exclusively with
natives of the Western Continent,
studied their sentiments, and stored
up every scrap of information bearing
on traffic and transit. I will
own that my pride met with frequent
abrasions; that my deepest-rooted
convictions were rudely assaulted;
and that I was unable to
avoid observing that my neighbours
would have been all the better for
a little more attention to the precepts
of Lord Chesterfield. We are
not always very fastidious in the
city: I am constantly obliged to
bargain, dine, and converse, with
uncommonly rough diamonds; but
I do not think that any Cockney
alive can contrive to render vulgarity
so glaringly offensive as his
Yankee congener. I was most
unlucky in my fellow-passengers,
some of whose habits were distressing
to a degree, and did not show
any remarkable improvement since
the days when Mrs Trollope and
Captain Hamilton crossed the Atlantic.
I began to owe Sir Walter a
grudge for his discovery of tobacco,
since tobacco, chewed to pulp, and
lubricating the deck and cabin-stairs
with its nicotian extract, became the
bugbear of my existence. Besides,
I prefer to see gentlemen sit with
their feet in a more normal position
than an undue elevation of the boot
soles can afford. I wish our transatlantic
brothers would smoke a little
less and wash a little more; and I
never could entirely pardon young
Mr Tips for whittling my portmanteau.
Mr Tips—young Mr Tips,
that is—Minos Blackstone Story
Tips—was the sharer of what was
facetiously called my state-room.
The latter was a wedge of a cabin,
with two little berths in it, not quite
so spacious as the box-beds in an
old-fashioned Highland cottage, and
was naturally meant to accommodate
two passengers. Under ordinary
circumstances, Colonel Sling
would have held divided empire
over this den with myself; and I
believe that, in strict justice, the
whole should have been mine, seeing
that I had signed the cheque in
payment for both passages. But
berths were at a premium: several
passengers had come on board at
the last, and had to shift for their
quarters as they might, and among
them the Tips family. Now, although
the “state-room” was rightfully
mine, yet I was easily induced
to permit the installation of young
Mr Tips in the undermost berth,
though I admit that my temper was
sorely tested when I found him in
bed, one rather blusterous afternoon,
very sick, and beguiling the
tedious hours, by operating with a
sharp penknife on the glossy leather
of my new portmanteau—Allen’s
best, fitted for India and the colonies.
Also this delightful youth—a
lawyer from the cradle, as his
names imply—was fond of using
my pet razor, and borrowing my
scissors and brushes; was not over
partial to soap and water; and sang
queer nasal songs at untimely hours,
besides smoking in bed. I might
have had a pleasanter companion,
but I had let him in, and there was
no help for it, while, after all, the
voyage was but for ten days. Why
had I let him in? For two reasons:
firstly, because exclusiveness is most
unpopular among Republicans; and
the old sentiment which dictated
the New York proverb, that “A
man must be a hog to want a bed
all to himself,” still exists in a modified
form. Another reason was,
that I wanted to make friends, and
get letters of introduction to some
Western citizens who would be able
to tell me all about the Nauvoo
and Nebraska Railway, and perhaps
a little about Colonel Sling. I
knew that Americans, amongst each
other at least, were most generous
in this respect. I was aware that
few retired storekeepers or land-jobbers
brought over their charming
families without being provided
with introductions from ex-ministers
and secretaries to half the
peers and princes of Europe; that
American diplomacy was subservient
to any one who could influence
an election; and that very queer
folks indeed had the honour of
figuring at royal levees and state
balls under the wing of Franklin’s
eagle. I determined, therefore, to
be as conciliatory as possible in all
my dealings with the citizens and
citizenesses of the model commonwealth.
I had the pleasure of making acquaintance
with old Mr Tips,—Judge
Tips, of Salem, Mass.—his
Christian name was Magnentius,—in
rather a curious manner. He
sat next to me at the general dinner
in the best cabin or saloon. The
table was crowded, but there were
three below me, on the same side
of the long board. The dinner
was a capital one: the Cunard directors
are famous for good feeding;
and Judge Tips, father to my young
companion, played an excellent
knife and fork. A dish of peas
came round, the last of the marrow-fats,
the latest peas of summer; and
indeed I cannot conceive from what
remote market the steamboat purveyors
had imported them, seeing
that Covent Garden had been barren,
in respect to this vegetable,
for some weeks. I am very fond of
peas, and was rejoiced to see my
favourites once again; and I anxiously
awaited their arrival. Miss
Tips, Miss Julia Tips, and Tips
mère, as the French would say, had
each taken a decorous spoonful
from the flying dish, and now the
black waiter was offering the delicacy
to Tips himself, enough being
left for five persons at least. What
was my horror to behold the Judge
deliberately monopolise the whole—sweep,
as I live, every pea
into his own plate—and then
turning to me, with a greasy smile,
remark, “I guess, stranger, I’m a
whale at peas.”[4] Yes, Mr Bright
tells sterling truth. There are some
matters in which the most acquisitive
of us all are distanced by an
American. Judge Tips was obliging
enough to favour me with a
good deal of his improving conversation,
and by meekness and affability
I won his heart. He not only
invited me to visit him at Salem,
but when I hinted that I was on
my way to the West, and should be
glad to make the acquaintance of
any notable citizens of Illinois or
Iowa, he gave me the coveted letters
of introduction to more than one
magistrate, sheriff, and popular
preacher. Nor did any accident
mar the even tenor of our agreeable
passage to New York. We had almost
uniform good weather; and
before the evening of the eleventh
day, we were standing on the
wooden landing-places of the Empire
City, surrounded by German
porters, Irish car-drivers, and Yankee
touts. The latter race, wise in
their generation, prefer head-work
to the toil of actual muscle, and
permit old Europe to furnish them
with soldiers and foremast-men,
stevedores, navvies, and dock labourers;
while they supply officers,
foremen, mates, and overlookers,
to regulate and profit by the exertions
of their hirelings.
The Astor House is not what it
was. It has been distanced by more
gigantic competitors; and as for the
Tremont, it is left high and dry,
like a stranded whale, by the tide
of fashion. Nevertheless, I bestowed
my patronage on the latter, perhaps
for Sam Slick’s sake, and
spent a couple of days under its
hospitable roof while recovering
from the sensation of cramp, tedium,
and nausea quite inseparable
from a sea voyage. Then I set out
for the West. The journey, as far
as Fort Madison, on the western
boundary of the State of Illinois, I
performed by railway, expeditiously
perhaps, and not very uncomfortably,
in spite of the amount of
rocking and swinging due to a carelessly-metalled
“permanent way,”
if I may employ the phraseology of
engineering. But I could not, with
a clear conscience, agree with the
enthusiastic comments of my fellow-travellers,
as to the immense superiority,
in speed and accommodation,
of American railroads over
those of Britain. After being jolted
and swung till one’s bones ached,
all the time, perhaps, being at a net
speed of thirty miles an hour, it
was rather provoking to listen to
such remarks as the following:—
“Wall, mister, I expect our flying
locomotives do rayther astonish you.
They kinder take the conceit out of
Old England, I some think.” Or,
more gravely, “I believe, sir, it’s
pretty universally admitted that
America whips the world for speed.
We have beaten your yachts, we
have licked your racers, and our
trains must make you think small
beer of your expresses. We go
ahead, we do!”
I take great praise to myself that
I was always able to keep my temper,
and to abstain from polemics. But
argument would have been useless.
I had to do with a people who saw
the outer world through the spectacles
of their journalists, and who
would no more admit the imperfections
of America than a lover will
see a blemish in his mistress. To
them America was all in all; and
the mightiest countries in Europe
were esteemed by them as rotten
and worthless, only existing by the
sufferance of the Giant Republic.
As for my praise of the British
Constitution, they simply laughed
at it, assuring me that I knew nothing
about the matter, and that
there could be no liberty where a
plain man was not allowed to go to
court in his working dress if he
chose. But I had not crossed the
ocean to argue: I had come to
pluck out the heart of the mystery
concerning the Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway. And I was very
careful at dinner-tables, bars,
cafés, and railway cars, to elicit
all available information with respect
to the resources of the West.
What I heard was, of course, vague;
but on the whole it contained some
comfort. It appeared certain that
a great trade was carried on by
land and water; that towns started
up with incredible quickness in the
midst of desolate prairies, or, like
Chicago, on piles in a swamp; and
that hardy men were taming the
wilderness. So far so good. But
it did not appear to me that security
to life and property went in
exactly the same ratio as the increase
of wealth. I heard odd
stories about regulators, vigilance
committees, and Judge Lynch.
Mob-law seemed paramount to
written statutes; and the fiat of a
legal court required to be backed
by the good pleasure of a majority
before its execution could be guaranteed.
Besides, the moral standard
of the community did not rank
as high as perhaps a very delicate
sense of honour required. Commercial
tricks were spoken of as
“clever,” or “ingenious,” which in
other lands would have engaged the
serious attention of the law-officers
of the Crown; and the most unprincipled
ruse was mentioned with
laughter and indulgence, if not with
approbation. All this augured badly,
methought, for the prospects of
the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway.
And yet I did not despair, and still
less did I drop a hint of my suspicions
to any casual acquaintance.
It was not for me, a managing director,
to denounce the project with
which my name was, alas! inextricably
linked, until it should be
proved a bubble on the very clearest
evidence. I reached Fort Madison,
the most remote point to
which the steam-horse could convey
me, and had, at any rate, the
satisfaction of knowing that I was
within a few miles of Nauvoo. I
hired a mule-waggon for the journey,
and sitting down to dinner at
the public table of the hotel, I inquired
what sort of a place Nauvoo
might be?
“Nauvoo, mister,” said a tall
gaunt man whom his friends addressed
as “Major,” “Nauvoo is a
pretty considerable sprig of a city.
It is a tall place, sir. There air
good points and great developments
about Nauvoo. Do you settle down
there, stranger? I could sell you a
lot of land awful cheap.”
“Thank you,” said I, “I have no
intention of becoming a resident at
Nauvoo; I merely wish to visit
it.”
“I see,” observed another guest;
“you want to have a peep at the
great temple the Mormons built before
Joe Smith was shot at Springfield.
’Tain’t much you’ll see,
though, stranger, for the place is
all to ruin. The bhoys were not
soft enough to let so much cedar-pine
and dressed limestone stand,
when houses were costing hat-fulls
of dollars. But Nauvoo has some
fine bluffs, con-sidered aiqual to any
scenery the old Rhine can show.”
“Air you in the hardware line?
If so, we might trade, I guess;”
said a little man at my elbow.
“No, no;” I returned, “my
journey is not of a commercial
character, exactly.”
“Political, eh?” asked the Major:
“picking up news, perhaps, for your
Downing Street wiseacres, and feeling
Uncle Sam’s pulse to know
when the old gentleman is at fever
heat, eh, mister?”
“Not at all,” said I; “I have
no mission of the sort; nor, indeed,
do I believe the British Government
to entertain any peculiar anxiety
on the subject you mention.”
A cough and shrug of disapprobation
pervaded the assembly.
“It is well known, sir,” said the
tall Major, “that the Government
of your benighted land is ever on
the watch for the expression of
American opinion. American opinion,
sir, has great weight in your
House of Commons.”
“I was not aware of it, I give
you my word;” I answered with a
smile.
“Perhaps not, sir, perhaps not,”
replied the Major, pityingly. “Do
you never read the ‘Evening Planet,’
sir, when you are at home?”
I winced. The truth was, that I
did take in the ‘Evening Planet,’
and heedfully perused therein the
valuable dicta of its eloquent proprietor,
a celebrated parliamentary
and platform orator. And I had
been accustomed to give credence
to the confident assurance of this
gentleman, that we were miles behind
the Northern States of the
American Union in all that was
useful and good, and that we could
not do better than copy so shining
a model in all things. I had read
and heard the bold statement, made
in defiance of statistics, that America
was floating peacefully on the tide
of prosperity into the haven of universal
empire—an empire won by
bloodless means, of course; for what
nation, unsaddled with an aristocracy,
would dream of war, while
Britain was sinking into decrepitude
and decay! All this, and much
more, had I heard and read, and I
had believed that Britannia ought
to sit at the feet of her flighty offspring
for instruction, and to remodel
her old institutions after a
republican pattern. But, as not
seldom happens, a nearer view of
the United States did not precisely
confirm the loud assertions of the
Americanising party in the British
press and senate, and I was gradually
losing my ideal admiration for
transatlantic liberty and customs.
After the rapid dinner, and the
more leisurely supplement of juleps
and brandy-cobblers imbibed in the
bar-room of the hotel, I asked a
coloured waiter if my waggon and
mules were forthcoming, as I was
desirous of reaching Nauvoo before
dark.
“Iss, massa!” answered the negro,
and whisked off with his napkin to
inquire after the lingering equipage.
The Major said he was going to
Nauvoo too, and begged the favour
of a lift, which I willingly conceded.
The mules and waggon, with
their whipcracking teamster, soon
rattled up to the door; my bill was
promptly paid, my baggage transferred
to the vehicle; the Major and
I climbed into our places, and we
started.
“How comes it, Major,” said I,
“that there is no line open to Nauvoo?”
The Major knocked the ashes off
his cigar as he replied, “Wall, I
suppose it wouldn’t pay. Rail to
Fort Madison is all right and spry,
because Uncle Sam has property
there; but I guess not a dime could
be drawed from Washington treasury
to make a line on to Nauvoo.”
“And from Nauvoo, westward
through Iowa, say to Nebraska,”
observed I, with affected carelessness;
“what should you say to the
prospects of a railroad in that direction?”
My heart throbbed audibly as I
spoke, for all my feigned indifference,
and I listened with anxiety
for the Major’s reply. I had not
long to wait.
“That depends,” said my fellow-traveller,
with sagacious deliberation,
“on the sort of rail you talk
about. Is it a line to go no farther
than Wall Street, and perhaps your
London Capel Court, that you are
speaking of, mister?”
“Wall Street and Capel Court!
Upon my life, I hardly comprehend
you,” returned I.
“Moonshine, flummery, make-believe,
sleepers, rails, stations, all of
paper, that’s what I mean, stranger;”
rejoined the Major, somewhat impatiently.
“But I spoke of a bona fide concern—of
a real railway, honestly
made and fairly worked,” answered
I; “what would you say to that?”
“Say!” replied the Major, with
infinite contempt, “say! Let me
see the gonies. Trot ’em up to me,
sir. Just let me have a look at the
simple ones that are at the head of
the business, and I’ll tell them what
I think, fast enough. No, Nauvoo
is a rising place, a neat location,
but it can wait for a rail one while,
unless every sage plant on the prairie
turns to silver dollars.”
After this I asked the Major no
more questions. We reached Nauvoo,
and through the dusk I espied
the shingled roofs of its houses, the
bold bluffs of limestone, the rushing
coffee-coloured river, and the unfinished
building-lots with their
heaps of wreck and rubbish. We
put up at the General Jackson
Hotel. I had a letter of introduction
to Squire Park of Nauvoo, a
gentleman in the flatboat interest,
who owed his title of Squire to his
being in the commission of the
peace. But on repairing to his
house I was doomed to disappointment—the
more vexatious because
Mr Park had been eulogised by
Judge Tips as a man who knew the
West thoroughly. Squire Park was
gone to Cairo on business, and was
not expected back before the end of
the month. On consulting the map
I carried, I found that a place called
Keosauque was the nearest of the
few towns in Iowa to the line of
railway, real or imaginary, in connection
with which my name, and
those of other men of respectability
and substance, were flaming, in advertisements
and on the broadsheets of
a prospectus, throughout the British
metropolis. I set off to Keosauque,
mounted on an Indian pony, and
accompanied by a guide in the shape
of a wiry backwoodsman, in an enduring
costume of leather, and who
gave accommodation to my portmanteau
behind his saddle. For
some miles we rode in silence over
the apparently boundless sea of
grass, mottled with weeds and
flowers, and occasionally studded
with lone farmhouses and maize
fields, or by herds of grazing cattle.
Those half-reclaimed mustangs are
not the most pleasant mount for
a timid rider, nor am I, George
Bulkeley of Stamford Hill, a very
adventurous horseman; and before
we had got far, I began to wish the
brute I rode would desist from what
seemed an alternation of starts and
stumbles. My guide, a good-humoured
wild man, observed my embarrassment,
and undertook its removal.
“See here, Colonel,” said he—strangers
in the West are usually
decorated with visionary epaulettes—“you
mustn’t keep the rein
so slack as that, nor yet hold your
hand up level with your cravat, or,
scalp me, but you’ll be spilt! Mustangs
want a tight grip on the bit.
So—steady now. Stick in your
knees, Colonel, and scorn to ketch
hold of the pummel—so. Do as
you see me do; give him a touch
of the spur, but mind his kicking—for
mustangs can kick, they can.
You’ll do nicely, now.”
Ichabod was a skilful riding-master,
by instinct, I suppose; and, thanks
to his forcible instructions, I was
soon on better terms with my refractory
quadruped. On we rode,
over the waving grass, through the
rank weeds, through the belts of
cottonwood timber and maples
that skirted every streamlet, and
past the swampy bottoms where
sluggish waters wound like wounded
snakes. We dined on dried venison,
jerked beef, parched corn, and
hominy, at a farm which did duty
for an inn, and slept at another
house of the same character. Next
day we resumed our route; and as
we rode towards Keosauque, I ventured
to ask Ichabod if he had ever
heard of the Great Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway. I had been hitherto
averse to propounding this query;
for how could I tell whether the interests
of my informant might conflict
with mine?—but with this rough
frontiersman I felt I was safe. He,
at least, was no rival speculator—no
shareholder in a competing line—no
steamboat proprietor, or lord of
many stage-waggons. But his first
answer was not satisfactory. It was
comprised in the one word, “Anan!”
“The Railway”—asked I again—“from
Nauvoo to Nebraska: not a
finished thing, of course; but you
surely must have seen or heard of
the works—the bridges, the embankments,
and the rest of the preparations?”
Ichabod shook his head. “You’re
talking Greek to me, Colonel, and
that air a fact.”
“How is it possible,” cried I, in
an agony, “that there can have
been a railway begun in this
country, and the settlers unaware of
it? Surely you must be a stranger
to this part of the State yourself!”
“You’re wrong there, Colonel,”
answered Ichabod; “I’m Illinois
born, but I’m Iowa bred. In this
State I was raised; and I don’t believe
there’s a thing happened over
the border sin’ I could mount a
horse, be it buffler or deer, loping
Indian, runaway nigger, or Yankee
pedlar, without my hearing on’t.
Stop” (and he smote his knee with a
palm as hard as iron)—“I’ve got it.
You’re talking of Harvey’s Folly.”
And I thought the young backwoodsman
would have tumbled off
his horse in the extravagant burst
of mirth which this discovery produced.
“Who-whoop!” cried he;
“I’ve seen queer sights, but never
did I think to see a stranger come
out in a bee-line from the old country—no
offence, Colonel!—to ax
about Harvey’s Folly. I’d nigh
forgot that the thing existed at all.
Wah! but it beats coon-catching!”
With some trouble I got an explanation.
It appeared from the
borderer’s statement that, years
ago, a speculative individual of the
name of Harvey had undertaken
to construct a railway from Nebraska
to Nauvoo, with a branch
linking it to the Central Illinois
line. He had obtained the usual
charter and grant of land from the
State, and had actually commenced
operations between Keosauque and
New Buda, two little towns not far
from the Missouri boundary. But
he had soon desisted from the
Sisyphean task, ruined, disheartened,
or disappointed of the aid on
which he had somewhat sanguinely
reckoned; and thenceforth no more
had been said of the scheme or
the schemer. “But the property,”
groaned I, “the works, surely they
must remain?”
“Why,” said Ichabod, meditatively,
“I kinder think there’s rails
laid down a bit—yes, for some miles
I guess, and they’ll be there still.
The cussed Indians can’t have
stampedoed them, like they do the
cattle. There’s a tidy bridge over
a creek or two Harvey built, and
some sheds and scantling; and
that’s about all.”
“All,” said I, “think again,
Ichabod. Surely there must be
more plant than that, and then the
rolling stock?”
The frontiersman laughed. “We
know more about gunstocks than
rolling stocks, out here on the pararas,”
said he; “and I never heard
of plants, onless ’twas hickory or
sumach. But I’ve kinder catalogued
the hull fixings for you,
Colonel, without ’tis a pile of rusty
iron, or a few waggon-loads of logs—neat
bits of oak timber they were,
trimmed and dressed, and shaped
mighty like a saddle-tree, that Harvey
left on the ground.”
“The sleepers, I suppose,” returned
I; “are they there still?”
“Well, Colonel, mebbe some of
’em are taking a nap there still,”
replied Ichabod, “but parara men
often camp thereabouts, hunting,
cattle-tending, or prospecting, and
firewood being mortal scarce on the
plains, ’twasn’t to be expected the
bhoys wouldn’t make free with
some chips to cook with. I may
have had a chop at those logs with
my tomahawk, when I wanted a
broil, onst or twice, myself.”
I groaned again. The Great
Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway
was evidently as brittle a speculation
as Alnaschar’s basket of glass.
I finished the ride to Keosauque in
moody reverie. There was no other
guest to share such rugged plenty
as the wooden tavern, called by
courtesy the Eagle Hotel, could afford;
and as the landlord was absent,
and the landlady busy in the
management of her children and
Irish helps, no one talked to me,
and I sat sullen and dejected the
whole evening. Next day, tired as
I was, I set out again, under Ichabod’s
guidance, to visit what he
persisted in naming Harvey’s Folly.
We reached the spot at last. A
swampy level, intersected by runlets
of water, and with a good deal
of thorny brake, and here and there
a clump of cottonwood poplars
diversifying the scene, had been
selected by Mr Harvey for the site
of his preliminary operations. Why
he had chosen that wet ground at
all, when so much dry prairie lay
beyond, of very tolerable smoothness,
it is difficult to conjecture;
but perhaps the more accurate level
had tempted him. There were rails,
certainly there were rails, half-hidden
by the growth of hemlocks and
rank grass; but on dismounting I
discovered that, for lack of proper
metal trams, the rails had been constructed
of wood, covered with a
thin slip of iron—not an unusual
device in out-of-the-way parts of
America, as I was afterwards told.
The fastenings were very defective,
the sleepers loose, and the whole
concern had a crazy haphazard look.
Such as they were, these precious
rails were continued for about 5
miles—5 miles out of 350!—and then
they terminated in a mass of ruin
and confusion. There were roofless
sheds, scantlings and screens blown
down by hurricane gusts, heaps of
rusty iron, broken tools, damaged
wheelbarrows, and a shattered truck
with only one wheel left. Also
there were a quantity of sleepers of
dressed oak, and the fragments of
many more, split by the axe and
charred to coal, as they lay around
the blackened spots of burnt turf,
where many a camp-fire had been
lit by the frontiersmen. That was
all the valuable property left at the
disposal of the directors. The sight
sickened me. “Harvey’s Folly,”
muttered I between my teeth, “say
rather Bulkeley’s Folly—Bulkeley’s
credulity, idiocy, weakness!
And not only mine, but Tom Harris’s,
and that of all of us. What
a long-eared pack were we to be
lured by the crafty piping of such
a dissembling knave as that glib
Colonel!” I rode away, sad and
careworn. Ichabod’s quaint talk
was unnoticed. I had another
companion that claimed my undivided
attention, and that was
Care, Black Care, which sat crouching
behind my saddle. I was
haunted by a ghastly phantom
of impending bankruptcy. The
London Gazette spread its ill-omened
sheet before me, and in its
fatal columns I read, in flaming
characters, “George Bulkeley, of
Cannon Street in the City of London,
and Stamford Hill, Middlesex,
to surrender at Portugal Street on
Monday the 14th inst. Official
Assignee, Mr Wilks!” That it
should have come to this! Ruin,
ruin, ruin. Ruin and disgrace to
us all, the duped directors of this
wretched swindle. Were we not
responsible for the debts of the
undertaking? Was not the paid-up
capital in the treacherous hands
of our Yankee cashier, Dr Titus
A. C. Bett, and could there be a
doubt that it was lost for ever?
Plainly the whole business was a
fraudulent trick from the first—a
net to catch gold-fish! Ah! already
with my mind’s eye I saw
the broker’s men in possession of
Magnolia Villa; I saw my costly
furniture, the cellar of wines I had
been so proud of, carriages, pictures,
everything, submitted to
public competition by a smirking
auctioneer. I heard the hammer
fall, knocking down my Lares and
Penates to the highest bidder. Going,
going, gone! the accursed formula
rang in my ears with baleful
clearness. Magnolia Cottage to let!
My family hiding in poor lodgings
in Boulogne! George Bulkeley, a
moody bankrupt, slinking about
the pier of that refuge for insolvency,
and afraid to face the Stock
Exchange! Even though the Court
might declare me blameless, even
though the commissioner might
whitewash me into commercial purity,
my conscience was less complaisant,
and sternly refused me even a
third-class certificate.
I might have had the right to
ruin myself and family, but what
right had I to make desolate the
hearths of many helpless and confiding
people? How about those
shareholders ignorant of business,
those pinched vicars, needy widows,
poor old half-pay officers, and the
rest, who had been dazzled by our
prospectus, and had invested their
savings in the pocket of Dr Titus
A. C. Bett? It was my respectable
name, in common with those of my
fellows in the Direction, which had
baited the hook for such poor prey
as these. My heart—even City
men have hearts sometimes—was
heavy and mournful with a grief
not wholly selfish. Plump! fluff!
down went the mustang on his
knees, his feet having plunged into
the holes that led to the dwellings
of some “prairie-dogs”—interesting
little brutes that burrow all over
the plains—and over the animal’s
head I flew with the force of a
sky-rocket. Lighting with a great
thump on the hard turf, I ran no
trifling risk of a broken neck; but
my hat saved me, at the expense
of its own demolition, and I was
only stunned. But when Ichabod
hurried to the rescue he found me
bruised and faint, and with a
sprained thumb that caused me
exquisite pain for the time. So
stupified was I by the shock, that
I did not hear the beat of hoofs
upon the green carpet of the prairie,
nor the sound of friendly voices,
and was surprised, on looking up,
to see that I was surrounded by a
large party of equestrians, who were
surveying me from the saddle with
every appearance of interest. Riding-habits
and side-saddles here in
prairie-land! hats and feathers, too,
of most ladylike elegance, and a
pair of pretty, rather pale faces
under the shadow of those plumed
felts. Besides the two girls, there
were a grey-haired elderly man,
two younger gentlemen, and three
or four mounted blacks in suits
of striped cotton, one of whom led
a couple of hounds in a long leash,
while another had a buck strapped
behind him on the horse.
“Is the poor gentleman much
hurt?” asked one of the young
ladies in a sweet kind voice. Ichabod,
as bold as a lion in general,
was awkward and bashful when
addressed by a lady, and seemed
to be weighing the words of his
answer, when I felt it necessary to
reply for myself. On discovering
that I was a stranger in the land,
General Warfield insisted that I
should accompany the party to his
house, just across the Missouri
border, where my injured thumb
should receive every attention, and
where he and his family would
gladly welcome me. Yielding willingly
to this hospitable persuasion,
I permitted Ichabod and one of
the negroes to help me to remount
my mustang, and we rode towards
the Missouri boundary. The family
whose acquaintance I had just made
in so singular a way, bore no similarity
to the travelling Americans
whom it had previously fallen to
my lot to encounter. General
Warfield, his son, daughters, and
nephew, had the well-bred air and
unobtrusive demeanour which I
had hitherto deemed exclusively
insular. They asked me no abrupt
questions as to my station or errand:
they indulged in no diatribes
against my country, nor in
any extravagant laudations of their
own; and I might have fancied
myself the guest of some long-descended
family at home, but for
the wild scenes and unusual objects
that met my eye as we rode along.
It turned out that General Warfield,
a retired military officer, not
a militiaman, was of an old Virginian
family, and had migrated
to the newer soil of Missouri six
years ago. There his children had
grown to be men and women, in
the hardy habits of that wild country,
a mere outpost of civilisation;
and indeed they were returning
from a hunting expedition into
Iowa when they stumbled upon
me in my prostrate condition.
Three hours’ ride brought us to the
General’s house, a large building
of mingled wood and stone, with a
pretty garden on one hand, and on
the other the farm-buildings, the
corrals for horses and cattle, and
the negro huts. Within I found
furniture of old-fashioned dark
mahogany, partridge-wood, and
bird’s-eye maple, old family pictures,
pretty knickknacks picked
up during a three years’ residence
in Europe, and the massive silver
plate which had been handed down
from father to son ever since the
ancestral Warfield settled in Virginia
in the reign of Charles I. I
never knew anything so un-American,
in respect to the usual standard
of comparison, as the mode of life,
the bearing, and tastes, of General
Warfield and his high-spirited
and amiable children. Here was
no exaggeration of sentiment, no
outrageous national vanity, no
rude indifference to the feelings
of others, no prying, no pretension.
I felt, as I conversed with
them, how wide was the gulf that
severed the North from the South.
It was not diversity of interest
alone, but diversity of habits,
principles, and aspirations. Wide
apart in heart and mind as the
poles from each other, the citizens
of the opposite ends of the Union
had but the feeble Federal bond to
delay that violent disruption and
severance of which, even then, the
signs of the times gave fearful
warning. But it is not my purpose
to linger on the happy days I spent
beneath the roof of my kind hosts.
Let me rather relate the information
I received from General Warfield,
when his friendly hospitality
had caused me to confide to his
ear my errand to America, and the
ruin I had too much reason to anticipate.
“My dear sir,” said the General,
“I am glad you have told me of
this—very glad. I can help you
in this matter.”
The General then proceeded to
tell me that, in the first year of his
residence in Missouri, Harvey, a
notorious speculator, had begun the
railway whose miserable wreck I
had visited. He had given it up
for want of funds, had become insolvent,
and was reputed to have
died in Texas. That he had received
a real concession of land and
authentic charters from the State
legislatures, was undoubted. But
the concession had been clogged by
the express stipulation, that in two
years Harvey should have a hundred
and fifty miles in working
order, and that the whole should be
completed in four years. The condition
not having been complied
with, the concession was null and
void. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway Company, had no
right to a corporate existence.
“But,” said I, “I of course perused
the papers. I saw no mention
of such a conditional clause.”
The General smiled.
“Depend upon it, Mr Bulkeley,”
said he, “that erasure and forgery
have been practised to make the
old deeds sufficiently tempting to
effect the only purpose their present
holders have in view—that of raising
cash in the London market.
Colonel Sling—who, by the way, is
no more a colonel, even of militia,
than black Cæsar there—is no novice
at fraud. He was convicted at
Jefferson city of a like offence, and
I was present at his trial, and heard
some of his antecedents; indeed, I
was a witness in the case. But if
you will take my advice, you will
hasten back to England, and, if
possible, save the funds in the
hands of this confederate of his,
this Bett, before the pair can abscond
with their gains. Do not
parley, but apply to the police at
once, if, indeed, it be not too late.”
Finally, General Warfield was so
good as to accompany me to the
chief town of Iowa State, where he
introduced me to the legal authorities,
by whom his statements were
fully confirmed, and the Nauvoo
and Nebraska declared a transparent
swindle. In this town we suddenly
came on “Colonel” Sling,
who had come out by the next
packet, and was tracking me, no
doubt in the hope of hoodwinking
or silencing me in some mode or
other. But when he saw the General,
his swaggering air collapsed,
a guilty crimson suffused his yellow
cheeks, and he slunk away and
entered a tavern without accosting
us. And yet when, after giving
hearty thanks to my kindly Virginian
friend, I hurried to embark
at New York, I had the honour of
finding Colonel Coriolanus Sling,
my fellow-passenger. He now ventured
to address me, but by this
time I was on my guard against his
specious eloquence, and he retired
with an air of mingled effrontery
and shame. At Liverpool, as I took
my seat in the train, which I did
without the loss of a moment, I
saw Colonel Sling dart into the
telegraph office. So busy was my
brain with what was before me,
that I did not, during the principal
part of the journey, attach any particular
meaning to this proceeding
of my treacherous ally. When I
did think of its probable object, I
struck my forehead, and could have
cursed my blind stupidity, my dulness
of conception. After all my
haste, scampering as quickly as
possible to the station at Liverpool,
was I to be too late, after all? Was
this Yankee rascal to be permitted
to warn his brother knave in London
through my inattention, and
was the paid-up capital to fatten
the two harpies whose tools we had
been? Heavy misgivings filled my
heart as I arrived in London, hurried
to Scotland Yard, and requested
that a detective policeman might
at once be ordered to accompany
me to the residence of Dr Titus A.
C. Bett, cashier to the Nauvoo and
Nebraska Company. Luckily I
was a man of credit and character
in the city; my request was granted
instantly, and off whirled the hansom
cab, as fast as hansom cab
could be impelled by the most lavish
bribe, on its way to Piccadilly,
bearing me and a quiet man with a
resolute, thoughtful face, in plain
clothes. Ha! there is a cab waiting
at the door as we jump out—I
hot and breathless, the policeman
cool and steady. The gaping servant-girl
belonging to the lodgings
comes quickly at our knock. It is
morning yet, early morning, from a
London point of view—not much
after nine.
“Is Dr Bett in?”
“Yes, sir,” replies the girl, “but
he’s just a-going. He sent me out
for the cab five minutes ago, and
he’s called away so sudden he won’t
take breakfast.”
“Ah, indeed!” says the detective;
“telegram, I suppose, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the maid,
“and he swore hawful because I
hadn’t woke him up directly it
came, two hour ago, along with the
milk, but I didn’t dare, ’cause he
always stops out late, and always
swears and scolds if I bring up his
hot water before nine o’clock.”
I could have hugged that maid,
Mary Ann, Eliza, or Susan, no
matter what, for she was my preserver—a
most valuable but unwitting
ally. I did give her a sovereign
as I bade her show us up.
We found the Doctor, unshaved,
half dressed, tugging at his boots,
and with a leather dressing-case
weighty with gold and notes lying
on the table at his elbow. We
rushed in with scant ceremony.
The detective tapped him on the
shoulder and took him into custody
with the magic formula of uttering
her Majesty’s name. The
bubble burst, but the funds were
saved; and after some expense,
ridicule, and trouble, we were able
to return their money to the shareholders,
and I washed my hands
most gladly of my American investment.
THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN PAINTINGS.
613
“Und aber nach zweitausend Jahren
Kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.”
“Et puis nous irons voir, car décadence et deuil
Viennent toujours après la puissance et l’orgueil,
Nous irons voir....”
We are so much accustomed to
depend on the four great literary
languages for the whole body of
our information and amusement,
that it occurs to few to consider
that ignorance of other European
dialects involves any inconvenience
at all, except to those who have
occasion to visit the countries in
which they are spoken. Yet there
is much of really valuable matter
which sees the light only in the
minor tongues, especially those of
the industrious North, and with
which the world has never been
made familiar through translation.
Joachim Frederic Schouw, the
Danish botanist, is one of the
writers of our day who has suffered
most prejudicially both to
his own fame and to the public
from having employed only his
native language. For his writings
are not only valuable in a scientific
point of view, but belong to the
most popular order of scientific
writing, and would assuredly have
been general favourites, had not
the bulk of them remained untranslated.
His ‘Tableau du Climat
de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared
in French, and is a standard work.
A little collection of very brief
and popular essays, entitled ‘The
Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been
translated both into German and
English. One of these, styled
‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is founded
on a rather novel idea. The
paintings on the walls of the disinterred
houses of that city contain
(among other things) many
landscape compositions. Sometimes
these are accessory to historical
representations. But they
often merely portray the scenery
of ordinary out-door life. The old
decorators of the Pompeian chambers
had indeed an evident taste
for those trivial tricks of theatrical
deception, which are still very popular
in Italy. Their verdure, sky,
and so forth, seem often as if meant
to impose on the spectator for a
moment as realities; and are, therefore,
executed in a “realistic”
though sketchy style. “Consequently,”
says Schouw, “the observation
of the plants which are
represented in these paintings will
give, as far as they go, the measure
of those which were familiar to the
ancient eye, and will help to show
the identities and the differences
between the vegetation of the Campanian
plains a hundred years
after Christ, and that which adorns
them now.”
We propose to follow the Professor
through this confined but
elegant little chapter of his investigations.
But by restraining ourselves
to this alone, we should be
dealing with only part of a subject.
In most regions, two thousand years
have made considerable changes in
the appearance of the vegetable
covering of the earth; but in that
land of volcanic influences in which
Pompeii stood, great revolutions
have taken place, during that time,
in the structure of the ground
itself. Sea and land have changed
places; mountains have risen and
sunk; the very outlines and main
landmarks of the scene are other
than what they were. Let us
for a moment imagine ourselves
gazing with Emperor Tiberius from
his “specular height” on precipitous
Capri, at that unequalled
panorama of sea and land formed
by the Gulf of Naples, as thence
descried, and note in what respects
the visible face of things has changed
since he beheld it.
The central object in his view,
as in that of the modern observer,
was Vesuvius, standing out a huge
insulated mountain mass, unconformable
with the other outlines of
the landscape, and covered then, as
now, with its broad mantle of dusky
green. Then, as now, its volcanic
soil was devoted to the cultivation
of the vine. But in other respects
its appearance was widely different.
No slender, menacing column of
smoke rose perpetually from its
summit. Nor was it lurid, at night,
with that red gleam of the slow
river of fire,
“A cui riluce
Di Capri la marina
E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.”
It was an extinct volcano, and
had been so for unknown ages.
Nor did it exhibit its present characteristic
cone, nor probably its
double top; Vesuvius and Somma
were most likely one; and the deep
half-moon-shaped ravine of the
Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides
them, is thought to be a relic of the
ancient crater. That crater was a
huge amphitheatrical depression,
several miles in circuit, filled with
pasture-lands and tangled woods.
Spartacus and his servile army had
used it not long before as a natural
fortress. But this feature was
scarcely visible to the spectator at
Capri, opposite the mountain, to
whom the summit must have appeared
as a broad flat-topped ridge,
in shape and height very similar to
the Table Mountain at the Cape of
Good Hope.
At the time in question, scarcely
a few vague traditions remained to
record the fact that the mountain
had once “burnt.” The fiery legends
of Magna Græcia related to
the country west of Naples, where
volcanic action had been more recent:
the Phlegræan fields, the
Market-place of Vulcan (Solfatara),
the cone of Gnarime (Ischia),
through which the imprisoned
Typhœus breathed flame, from
whence he has been since transferred
to Vesuvius, as a Genoese
monk informed us when we and
he first looked on that volcano together.
Vesuvius awoke from his
sleep of unknown length, as every
one knows, in A.D. 79, when he
celebrated his resumption of authority
by that grand “extra night” of
the 24th August, which has had no
rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical
entertainment, except on the
distant shores of Iceland, the West
Indies, and the Moluccas. His
period of activity lasted nearly a
thousand years. Then he relapsed
into lethargy for six hundred. In
1631, he had resumed (as old prints
show), something nearly resembling
the form which we have attributed
to him in classical times. His top,
of great height, swollen up by the
slow accumulation of burning matter,
without a vent, was a level
plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled
with a forest of secular oaks and
ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or
smoke-holes, remained here and
there to attest his real character.
Even the legends of his conflagrations
had become out of date. The
old “Orearch” or mountain-spirit,
Vesevus, is portrayed by the local
poet Pontanus in the fifteenth century,
as a rustic figure, with a bald
head, hump back, and cincture of
brushwood—all fiery attributes
omitted. Even his terrible name
was only known to the learned:
the people called him the “Monte
di Somma.” The suburban features
of a great luxurious city, convents,
gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds,
and parks of the nobility, had crept
again up the sides of the mountain,
until they almost mingled with the
trees on the summit. The approaching
hour was not without its premonitory
signs, many and strange.
The phenomena which Bulwer
makes his witch of Vesuvius recount,
by way of warning, to Arbaces,
are very closely borrowed from contemporary
narratives of the eruption
of 1631. Nor were the omens
of superstition wanting, accommodated
to the altered feelings of the
times. At the Plinian eruption,
the people imagined that the old
giants buried in the Phlegræan
fields had risen again, and renewed
their battle with the gods: “for
many phantoms of them,” says Dio
Cassius, “were seen in the smoke,
and a blast, as of trumpets, was
heard.” In 1631, carriages full of
devils were seen to drive, and battalions
of diabolical soldiers to
gather in marching array along the
precipitous flanks of the mountain.
The footsteps of unearthly animals
were tracked on the roads. “A
peasant of the name of Giovanni
Camillo” (so we are informed by
the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a
contemporary), “had passed Easter
Eve at a farm-house of his own on
the mountain. There, without having
taken a mouthful of anything,
he was overtaken by a profound
slumber, from which awakening
suddenly, he saw no longer before
his eyes the likeness of the place
where he had fallen asleep, but a
new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape:
instead of a hill-side covered
with wood, there appeared a wall
crossing the road, and extending on
each side for a great distance, with
a very lofty gate. Astonished at
this new scene, he went to the gate
to inquire where he was. There he
found a porter of the order of St
Francis, a young man in appearance.
Many conjecture that this was St
Antony of Padua. The porter at
first seemed to repulse him, but
afterwards admitted him into the
courtyard, and guided him about.
After a long circuit they arrived at
a great range of buildings breathing
fire from every window.” In short,
the poor peasant was conducted, after
the fashion of such visions, through
the mansions of hell and purgatory,
where he saw, of course, many of his
acquaintance variously tormented.
“At last, on the following day, he
was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius:
and was ordered to inform
his countrymen that a great ruin
was impending over them from that
mountain: wherefore they should
address their vows and prayers to
God. On Easter Day, at noon, he
came home, and was observed of
many with his dress sprinkled with
ashes, his face burnt black, as if
escaped from a fire.” This was
two years before the eruption,
and during the interval Camillo
always told the same story; wherefore,
after passing a long time for
either mad or drunk, he was finally
raised to the dignity of a prophet.
At last, on the night of the 15th
December, the ancient volcano signalised
his awakening by a feat
of unrivalled grandeur. In forty-eight
hours of terrific struggles, he
blew away the whole cap of the
mountain; so that, on the morning
of the 18th, when the smoke at last
subsided, the Neapolitans beheld
their familiar summit a thousand
feet lower than it had been before;
while its southern face was seamed
by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly
rolling at several points into the sea.
Since 1631, the frequency, if not
the violence, of the eruptions seems
to have gradually increased, and
Vesuvius is probably more “active”
now, in local language, than at any
former time in his annals, having
made the fortunes of an infinity of
guides and miscellaneous waiters on
Providence within the last twelve
years, besides burning a forest or two,
and expelling the peasantry of some
villages. But his performances on
a grand scale seem for the present
suspended. Frequent eruptions prevent
that accumulation of matter
which produces great ones. Indeed,
the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of
a Traveller’ show him to have been
that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian
whig” who visited Oxford
in company with Lockhart’s Reginald
Dalton, “reviling all things,
despising all things, and puffing
himself up with all things,” deliberately
pronounced the volcano a
humbug, and believed the depth of
its subterranean magazines to be extremely
trifling. Still, the curious
traveller, like that fabulous Englishman
who visited the lion-tamer every
night for the chance of seeing him
devoured, cannot help looking with
a certain eagerness for the occurrence
of those two interesting catastrophes,
of which the day and hour
are written down in the book of the
Fates—that combination of high
tide, west wind, and land-flood,
which is to drown St Petersburg;
that combination of south-east
wind and first-class eruption which
is to bury Naples in ashes. This
finale seemed nearer in that recent
eruption of December 1860, which
spent its fury on Torre del Greco,
than perhaps on any former occasion;
but once more the danger
passed away.
To return, however, from this
digression, which has nothing to
excuse it except the interest which
clings even to often-repeated stories
respecting the popular old volcano.
Other features in that wonderful
panorama, seen from Capri, have
undergone scarcely inferior changes
since the time of Tiberius. Yonder
rich tract of level land at the mouth
of the Sarno, between Torre dell’
Annunziata and Castellamare, did
not exist. The sea has retreated
from it. Tiberius saw, instead of
it, a deep bay washing the walls of
the compact little provincial city of
Pompeii. But the neighbouring port
of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of
its site remains. Above it to the
right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the
limestone sierra of which it forms
a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged
by time. Only that marvellous range
of Roman villas and gardens which
lined its foot for leagues, almost
rivalling the structures of the opposite
Bay of Baiæ for magnificence,
has disappeared, no one knows how
or when. The diver off the coast of
Sorento can touch with his hand
the long ranges of foundation-work,
brick and marble, which now lie
many feet beneath the deep clear
water. It was a strange fit of short-lived
magnificence, that which induced
the grandest of millionnaires,
the chiefs of the Augustan age, to
raise their palaces, all round the
Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges
of piles laid within the sea, so
that its luxurious ripple should be
heard under the rooms in which
they lived. Niebuhr, who, with
all his curious insight into the ways
of antiquity, was not superior to
the temptation of finding a new
reason for everything, asserts that
they did so in order to escape the
malaria. But that mysterious evil
influence extended some way beyond
the shore. The country craft
will, to this day, keep as far as they
can, in the summer nights, off the
coast of the Campagna, while the
quiet land-breeze is wafting death
from the interior. The real causes
were, doubtless, what the writers
of the time disclose. The land
close to the shore was dear and
scanty, and ill-accommodated for
building, from its steepness. The
first new-comer who set the fashion
of turning sea into land,
was imitated by others in the mere
wantonness of wealth, until the
whole shore became lined with
palatial edifices, like the Grand
Canal of Venice; but not so durably.
These classical structures,
frequently delineated with more or
less detail in the Pompeian frescoes,
were as beautiful and as transitory
as those of our dreams; or like the
vision which Claude Lorraine transferred
to canvass in the most poetical
of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted
Palace.’ Judging from the singular
phenomena exhibited by the
‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other
topographical records, geologists
have concluded that land and sea,
in this volcanic region, wax and
wane in long successions of ages.
Thus the sea rose (or rather the
land sank) on the coast of the Bay
of Naples for about eleven centuries
previous to A.D. 1000; then the
reverse movement took place until
about A.D. 1500: and the land is
now sinking again. If so, these
marine palaces must have gradually
subsided into the sea, and their
owners may have been driven out
by the invasion of cuttle-fish and
sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters
of the Mediterranean shallows,
in their best bedrooms, even before
Norman or Saracen incursions had
reduced them to desolation. But
whatever the cause of their disappearance,
they had vanished before
modern history began: nor has modern
luxury, in its most profuse
mood, ever sought to reproduce
them. Their submarine ruins remain
as memorials of ages when
men were at all events more daring
and earnest in their extravagance,
and the “lust of the eye and the
pride of life” were deified on a
grander scale, than at any other
epoch of the world’s history.
Naples herself, the “idle” and
the “learned” (for the ancients
called her somewhat inconsistently
by both epithets, nor had she as
yet acquired her more recent soubriquet
of the “beautiful”), formed a
far less conspicuous object in the
view than now; it was a place of
some twenty or thirty thousand
souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural
estimate; confined between
the modern Mole on the one
hand, and the Gate del Carmine on
the other; and nestling close in
the neighbourhood of the sister city
Herculaneum. The lofty line of
the houses on the Chiaia—of which
you may now almost count the
windows in the top storeys from
the sea-level at Capri, through that
pellucid atmosphere, while the
lower storeys are hidden by the
earth’s curvature—did not then exist.
But instead of it there extended
the endless terraces and
colonnades, the cypress avenues
and plane groves, of that range of
fortress-palaces erected by Pollio
and Lucullus, enlacing island, and
beach, and ridge, even to the point
of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling
marble. Here, however, the
mere natural changes have been
small, except that an island or two
(like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo)
has since been joined to the continent.
But farther west, round the
Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have
dealt most fantastically with the
scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature
on which the Roman eye rested
remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida
was a smoking semi-volcano.
Yonder level dun-coloured shore,
from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was
under water, and the waves dashed
against a line of cliff now some
miles inland. That crater-shaped
Lake of Agnano, now the common
resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers,
did not exist; it must have been
formed by some unrecorded convulsion
of the dark ages. Yonder
neatly truncated cone, rising five
hundred feet above the plain, seems
as permanent a feature in the landscape
as any other of the “everlasting
hills;” but it was the creation
of a few days of violent eruption,
only three centuries ago—as its
name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether
by “upheaval” or
by “ejection,” philosophers dispute.
But the beautiful Lucrine Lake, the
station of Roman fleets and the
very central point of Roman luxury,
disappeared in the same elemental
commotion; leaving a narrow
stagnant pool behind. Only yon
slight dyke or barrier of beach, between
this shrunken mere and the
sea, deserves respect; for that has
remained, strange to say, almost
unaltered throughout. It is one of
the very oldest legendary spots of
earth; doubtless the very road
along which Hercules dragged the
oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow
shore” on which Ulysses landed,
in order to call up the melancholy
shades of the dead. Farther inland,
again, Avernus remains unchanged,
in shape at least; but many and
strange are the revolutions which
it has undergone in other respects.
We first hear of it as a dark pool,
surrounded by forests; the bed,
doubtless, of an ancient crater filled
with water, and retaining much of
volcanic action; but not (as commonly
supposed) fatal to the birds
that flew over it. That notion is
not classical; or rather, it is
founded on a misconception of
classical authorities. The pool is
not called by the best writers
“lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,”
the lake of the Avernus. What
is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us
that it is a spot where noxious gases
escape from the earth, so that the
birds which fly over it fall dead on
the earth or into the lake if there
happens to be a lake below them.
“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”
And Virgil’s description, accurately
construed, gives exactly the
same meaning.
“Spelunca alta fuit....
....tuta lacu nigro nemorum que tenebris,
Quam super” (not quem super, over the cavern, not the lake)
....“haud ullæ poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis....
Unde locum” (not lacum) “Graii dixerunt nomine Aornon.”
It was the exhalations from the
mysterious cavern that were deadly,
not those from the lake. Such an
“Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or
Valley of Death, in Java, to which
condemned criminals were formerly
sent to perish; whence the romance
about the Upas Tree. And such an
Avernus, on a small scale, still exists
on the shore of the peaceful little
Lake of Laach in Germany, also an
extinct crater: there are spots on
its beach where bird-corpses are to
be found in numbers, killed by
mephitic exhalations. But—to return
to our lake—it must at that
time have lain at or (like some other
extinct craters) below the level
of the sea; for Augustus’s great
engineering operation consisted in
letting the sea into the lake.
“Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur æstus Avernis.”
Fifteen hundred years afterwards,
and just before the Monte Nuovo
eruption, the place was visited
by that painful old topographer,
Leandro Alberti, the Leland of
Italy. The channel made by
Augustus was then gone; but the
lake was still on a level with
the sea, for he asserts that in
storms the sea broke into it: and
the water, as he expressly affirms,
was salt. Now, its level is several
feet above that of the sea, and the
water is fresh. The upheaval must
have been gradual and peaceful, for
the outline of the lonely mere is as
perfectly rounded now as the poet
Lycophron described it;—but a portion
only of that bewildering succession
of changes of which this
coast has been the theatre: the latest
vibration of that vast commotion
figured in the legendary war of the
Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a
conjecture as some have deemed it,
that the tradition which peopled
this bright coast with Cimmerians—then
dwellers in the everlasting
mist, on the border-land between
the dead and the living—had its
origin in the tales of primeval navigators,
who had visited the neighbourhood
during some mighty and
prolonged eruption, covering sea
and shore with a permanent darkness
which “might be felt:” like
the coast of Iceland in 1783, when
for a whole summer continual eruptions
arose from the sea as well as
the land: when “the noxious vapours
that for many months infected
the air, enveloped the whole
island in a dense fog which obscured
the sun, and was perceptible
even in England and Holland.”
Still farther westward in our
panoramic view, the confusion between
past and present becomes
even more undecipherable. Baiæ
has disappeared; a stately city of
pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining
foundations, rose on a hillside
in terraces, something like its
British counterpart Bath, but with
its foot washed by the Mediterranean
instead of the Avon: so has Misenum,
with its naval station: and
not only are these towns gone, but
the land on which they stood seems
so to have changed its shape, through
earthquakes, marine encroachments,
and the labour of men, that its
very outlines are altered, until the
eye rests at last on the peak of
Ischia, which ends the semicircle.
Thus much by way of introduction
to the more immediate point
of our inquiry: the changes in the
general aspect and character of the
earth’s vegetable covering which
have taken place in the same period
of two thousand years, and in the
same locality.
One of the greatest features of
interest to the scientific botanist,
and even to the less instructed lover
of nature, which Italy presents,
consists in the circumstance that
the northern and southern types of
vegetation—to speak more closely,
the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet
together, especially
in its warmer regions, in stronger
contrast than probably anywhere
else. The same remark is true, no
doubt, of the Mediterranean shores
in general: but those of France and
of Turkey approach more to the general
northern aspect; those of Barbary
to the tropical: in favoured
Italy the two types seem sometimes
to blend and sometimes to contrast
in ever-changing and ever-striking
variety. The same was doubtless,
to some extent, the case in ancient
times. But the northern character
was probably far more prevalent
than now. The early Greek settlers
landed on a forest region, where the
common deciduous trees of the
north, now driven back to the scantily
clothed gorges of the central
Apennines, flourished in great abundance.
Such a nature as this may
still be observed in the few forest
patches left in the higher Abruzzi,
the Sila of Calabria, and so forth.
“The beech-forest,” says Schouw,
“is called the symbol of the Danish
character. But I have wandered in
Calabria through large and beautiful
beech-woods, on the higher plateaux
of the Apennines, where the vegetation
as well as the bracing air
constantly reminded me of my
home.” Probably the wild shores
of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia,
with their shaggy growth of northern
forest and their undergrowth
of mixed northern and Mediterranean
shrubs, present an aspect
more resembling what the followers
of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when
they landed, than may elsewhere
be found. We may notice historical
traces of the continued existence
of this ruder and fresher nature,
not only in the agricultural
writers of the Romans, who speak
far more of deciduous trees than
of the evergreen, now deemed so
characteristic of Italy, but in the
well-known pages of Virgil. There
is not in general much of “local
colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’
that is a poetical artifice of
later day. But what there is, represents
the physiognomy, not of the
Lombard plains where he was born,
but of the neighbourhood of Naples
in which he lived. His sea-sand is
“black,” not brown or yellow, like
that of all other bards,—the volcanic
sand of the bays of Baiæ and
Naples—very coal-dust in appearance.
When he recommends the
farmer to place his hives near a tree,
for the bees to swarm on, it is a
“palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice
which he might as well have
tendered to a Scythian as to a
colonus of his native Mantua. Now,
the general idea which the verses of
Virgil convey of the region with
which he is concerned, is that of a
sylvan country—not, emphatically,
the “land of the cypress and myrtle,”
but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm,
beech, citizens of the great Transalpine
forests. Some of the trees
of which he celebrates the grandeur
are now not only become scarce in
his country, but it is difficult to
ascertain with accuracy their real
character. The mighty æsculus,
for example, the noblest denizen of
Latian forests, which formed of itself
great woods, “lata æsculeta,”
is a mere puzzle for antiquarian
botanists: no one knows what it
was, and there may be some question
whether it has not disappeared
from the face of earth, or whether
it survives only in some nearly
extinct variety of oak.[5]
Man has doubtless done much
towards the effecting of this change,
the more valuable plants of the
south having been gradually introduced,
and the indigenous woods
cleared for their reception; but
Nature has done much of herself.
In the remaining woodland districts
of maritime Italy—such as
the Maremme of Tuscany and the
Latian Campagna—the evergreen
species seem to be gradually supplanting
the deciduous, the foreign
the indigenous. We talk familiarly
of the hardy vegetation of the
North; but, where the two meet
on conditions of climate endurable
by both, the children of the tropical
sun seem to show the greater
hardihood, and to come out survivors
in the great battle for existence.
Their every aspect, their
rough bark and leathery leaves,
seem indicative of a stronger vitality
than that which animates
the more majestic but more delicate
structure of the leafy giants of the
northern temperate zone. A similar
law—if the analogy does not appear
too fanciful—seems to govern the
migrations of trees and shrubs, and
of the human family itself. The
North produces the races of more
commanding aspect: it sends them
forth conquering and to conquer;
they establish empires, they subjugate
the so-called feebler races
of the South; but, in the midst of
their conquests, they sicken and
perish, and become extinct. The
children of the South gradually
penetrate northwards, and by their
own more prolific multiplication,
as well as by crossing or intermixture,
in which their more essentially
vigorous nature attains predominance,
they efface the type of
the Northern race, and cause it
ultimately to disappear. What has
become of the descendants of those
hordes which swarmed from the
populous North, in the decline of
the Roman Empire, over all the
regions adjacent to the Mediterranean?
They have vanished, or
are scarcely recognised by antiquaries
in a few problematical instances,
where small insulated communities,
thought to be of Teutonic
or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious
existence among the descendants
of their former subjects.
Where are the historical Gauls, with
their tall figures, their fleshy frames,
their golden hair, and eyes of truculent
blue? A few of them, possibly,
to be found in Flanders;
but anything less like the Gaul of
antiquity than the sinewy, nervous,
agile, undersized, brown-skinned,
and black-haired biped, who now
inhabits some eighty out of the
eighty-five departments of France,
can hardly be imagined. What is
become even of the purer Northern
breed of Germany itself? Scarcely
to be found, except on the shores
of the Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary
European type prevails, olive
skin and cheveux châtains. “I
sought for the fair population of
classical Germany in vain,” says
Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.”
On the other hand, the
Greek in Provence, the Moor in
Spain, Southrons, transplanted into
those countries in no very great
numbers, have impressed their type
on the general population, and, as
it were, changed the very breed.
When dark and fair intermix, the
odds seem to be greatly in favour
of the dark complexion prevailing
in the offspring. We heard lately
of a society formed in France for
the conservation of the “Xanthous,”
or yellow-haired variety of the human
race, which they regard as the
true aristocracy of nature, and
rightly conceive to be threatened
with extinction: their object to be
attained by portioning from time
to time blonde maidens who might
take to themselves husbands of the
same complexion. Even so—to return
to our trees—the meridional
vegetation gradually drives back
that of the North in the battlefield
of species. If we figure to ourselves
the appearance of the plains of England
two thousand years ago, with
their indigenous vegetable covering
only—without the common elm, the
linden, plane, sycamore, poplar,
acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every
kind, and cultivated plants in general—without,
probably, a single
species of pine or fir, or indeed any
evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and
remember that every foreign
plant has displaced a native, we
may gather some idea of the conquests
which the South has effected
even here, not indeed without the
aid of human industry, but in part
by sheer physical superiority. But
on the Mediterranean coast these
conquests have been much more
marked. Take the following description
of the change which two
thousand years have made in the
common flora of Greece, from the
work of a German botanist (Fraas,
Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—
“The following species from the
flora known to Theophrastus have
either entirely disappeared from
Greece, or have emigrated from the
habitations which he assigns to them,
and withdrawn into the moister climate
of more northerly regions; the
varieties commonly known to the
ancients of the Linden; the Yew,
that child of damp and shady hillsides,
of which rare and dwarfed
specimens only are now to be found
on the highest mountains; the
Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder
of Homer; and, with scanty exceptions,
the ‘spear-furnishing’
Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead
of these, another class of plants has
conquered for itself greater space in
the vegetable realm—thick-leaved,
hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny
and prickly bushes, evergreen for
the most part, and adding, by their
rich flowers, great beauty to the
spring. This vegetation, analogous
to that of the American savannas
and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced
the ancient flowery meadows,
resembling those of middle Europe,
with wastes of heath and pines,
carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together
with these we have the various
kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander,
philyreæ, pistachios, kermes-oaks,
rosemary, thyme, and the
flora of dry mountain regions in
general.”
Let us now see how far the historical
indications furnished by the
Pompeian relics corroborate what
has been already said respecting
this “intrusion of the climate of
the South,” as Fraas terms it, into
the regions north of the Mediterranean.
In order to ascertain the plants
known to the citizens of Pompeii,
says Schouw, two records remain to
us—namely, the pictures discovered
in its ruins, and the remnants of
plants themselves. But, he adds,
the use of the first requires some
care:—“Many representations of
plants are naturally so little precise
that their particular species cannot
be ascertained, as would be the case
in modern pictures of the same
kind. And, if the plant be recognisable,
it does not follow as certain
that it was known at Pompeii,
for the plants of foreign countries
are also occasionally represented.
Thus the Nile-nature is often delineated—marshy
landscapes, with
the lotus and the nelumbium, the
hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of
geese, and date-palms at the water’s
edge; as, for instance, in the lower
rim of the famous mosaic supposed
to represent Alexander and Darius.
Frequently, also, the representations
are fanciful—for instance, a
laurel growing out of a date-palm,
and even appearing to rise out of it
as a shoot from the same root—a
physiological impossibility, unless,
perhaps, it has reference to that
strange practice of the ancients—the
planting of different kinds so
close to each other that they might
appear to the eye connected.”
After making these allowances,
we may safely arrive at the following
conclusions. Among the
trees which gave the Neapolitan
landscape its character were then
(as now) the stone-pine and the
cypress. The former is frequently
represented, with its peculiar
branchless stems and cloud-like
head—the product not only of close
planting but of actual pruning in
nurseries, as may now be noticed
in the neighbourhood of Naples.
This tree was cultivated for its
edible nuts; and pine cones have
been found among the charred
objects in the shops of Pompeii.
The beautiful cypress often occurs
in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently
mingled with the pine,
and gracefully combining with the
outlines of the fanciful villas and
temples represented. It is Gilpin,
we think, who points out the peculiar
adaptation, by contrast, of the
spiral cypress and poplar to the long
horizontal lines of southern buildings;
while the square masses of
the lime and elm combine well with
the pointed Gothic. The “Pinus
halepensis,” adds Schouw (the common
maritime pine of Italy), is also
found in these pictures. The vine,
of course, occurs constantly—so
does the olive. They were, no
doubt, as universal then as now;
and preferred respectively, as they
do now, the volcanic and the calcareous
hills in the vicinity of Naples.
Preserved olives were found in
Pompeii, which even retained something
of their taste. The myrtle,
and the beautiful oleander, or
laurel-rose, as the French call it—common
shrubs of to-day—also appear
in the frescoes. Add to these
the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex,
fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax”
or gigantic reed—cultivated
then as now for its various uses,
and covering the marshy grounds
with its dense brake, strange to the
northern eye, are most of them recognisable
also in these pictures. And
we are enabled to say that the common
vegetable forms on which
the eye of the Pompeian citizen
rested were, to this extent, similar
to those on which his descendant
gazes now.
But there were many species,
now common, then rare or unknown,
some of which are mentioned
by Schouw in the little essay
before us; others, we are able to
add, from different sources. The
aloe or agave, and the Indian fig
(figue de Barbarie, as the French
call it), are now among the familiar
plants of maritime Italy. The
former vigorously protrudes itself
in every stony, solitary spot, from
the old ramparts of Genoa to the
lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is
half-cultivated in a careless sort of
way for its luscious bulb; and
the two seem, in many places,
to have almost extirpated the
older vegetation. Both of these
lusty children of the South are
of quite modern origin in Italy,
having come over from America.
Some have fancied that the pineapple
is represented in one Pompeian
fresco. “But this,” says our
Professor, “is undoubtedly the edible
crown of a young dwarf palm,
or chamærops humilis.”
A still more important want of
classical ages was that of the whole
tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians
call them—the orange, lemon, citron,
and so forth. “Italy was not
then,” says our Professor, “the land
Wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die gold-orangen glühn;”
and was consequently without one
of the favourite features with which
æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions
of Italy. They are of course
absent from the frescoes. They were
known to Pliny as foreign plants
only. The “Median Apple” (citron)
was cultivated in Italy no earlier
than the third century after Christ;
lemons came from the Saracens;
oranges, last of all, were brought
by the Portuguese from the East.
The white, or silk-worm mulberry,
now the commonest of all trees in the
richer parts of Italy, was also unknown
to the Pompeians. Its cultivation
on the peninsula began, according
to Schouw, in the sixth century.
Silken fabrics were scarce
and expensive, and imported by the
Romans from the East. Voltaire
somewhere makes the great superiority
of a femme de chambre of
Madame de Pompadour over the
Empress Livia consist in the unlimited
enjoyment of silk stockings.
It may, however, be questioned
whether the Empress would
have appreciated such a luxury, or
whether, as the audacious French
traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted
respecting the Glasgow ladies not
many years ago, she would not
have got rid of such incumbrances
whenever free from the restraints
of company. The picturesque Carouba
tree (Ceratonia siliqua), which
now forms groves along many parts
of the Italian coast, is also probably
of modern introduction. We may
add another more important plant
which the Professor has omitted—the
chestnut. Not, of course, that
this magnificent native of Thessaly
was unknown to Roman antiquity.
It was, on the contrary, extensively
cultivated in ancient Italy for its
fruit. Naples was particularly famous
for the excellence of its chestnuts—
“Quas docta Neapolis creavit,
Lento castaneas vapore tostas”—
such as Martial appetisingly describes,
and such as that flâneur
of a poet had doubtless often purchased,
scalding hot, from the tripod
of some hag-granddaughter of Canidia
or Sagana, in the alleys of the
learned city. But it was probably
as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced
but two centuries before Christ,[6]
it had not had time to form
forests; to become, as it now is, the
characteristic tree of the lower
Apennines, supplanting its ancient
but thriftless relative the beech, and
driving the latter back to the narrow
domain which it still occupies
on the top of Monte Sant’ Angelo.
The gnarled and twisted chestnut
trunks, with their pointed foliage,
under which Salvator Rosa studied
his art when sojourning among the
brigands at the back of Amalfi,
have no counterpart in the drawings
of Pompeii any more than in
the poetry of Virgil.
Of cultivated crops, wheat and
barley are represented in the Pompeian
frescoes, and grains of them
have been discovered in the houses.
In one pretty sketch a quail is
picking at an ear of barley; in another
at a kind of millet. Other
less known cereals seem to have
been familiar to the ancients. But
two of the most important, both
in an economic and picturesque
point of view, are missing from
these sketches,—maize and rice.
Both are of modern introduction.
The “polenta” of the classical peasant
was of barley. Cotton, it need
scarcely be added, is of very modern
introduction; it now covers extensive
fields at the southern foot of
Vesuvius.
After this long list of acquisitions,
we must turn to some few instances
of vegetable forms familiar to the
ancient eye, and which the modern
misses. The absolute extinction of
a species is indeed a rare thing.
Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’
likens the changes in
vegetation to those which take
place in a language: the appearance
of a new word, or a new species,
attracts observation at once; the
disappearance of an old one is very
gradual, and seldom total. We have
already spoken of the comparative
scarcity at present of deciduous
trees, and of one—the æsculus—which
modern botanists have been
unable to define. But one or two
ornamental foreigners, introduced
in old times, have also disappeared,
or nearly so. The most remarkable
of these is the oriental Plane.
Every Latin scholar is well aware
of the modish passion for these
trees which prevailed among the
wealthy Romans, a preference not
wholly æsthetic; it was partly a
fashion, borrowed like other fashions
from the despotic East, in
days when republican millionaires
at Rome, like those of Washington,
had begun to discover that
everything really meritorious came
from lands possessing a “strong
government.” The Platanus had
been from hoary antiquity the object
of veneration of Persian monarchs
and Grecian heroes. No tree
had anything like the same amount
of historic and fabulous tradition
attached to it. Marsyas was hanged
on one, when duly skinned, by
Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus
planted a couple, each of which, a
monstrous relic, was shown to
Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes
had caused his whole host to halt
before a noble specimen in Lycia.
“He was so enamoured of it,” says
old Evelyn, “that for some days
neither the concernment of his expedition,
nor interest of honour, nor
the necessary motion of his portentous
army, could persuade him from
it. He styled it his mistress, his
minion, his goddess: and when he
was forced to part from it, he caused
a picture of it to be stamped on a
model of gold, which he continually
wore about him.” As it is now the
glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it
was of the Greek cities of yore.
The groves of the Academe and
Lyceum were composed of it. “By
the Plane Tree” was the favourite
oath of Socrates: the more shame
to him, said his accuser Melitus,
that he should blaspheme so fine a
tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré
on the Bosphorus is popularly
said to serve even now as a tent for
the Seraskier when he encamps
there. The Romans took to it, as we
have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm
which characterised their
follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny,
in his sententious stoical way,
“which ever was transplanted for
the sake of its shade alone.” Julius
Cæsar himself planted the first
specimen in Spain, at Corduba; it
was a noble tree in Martial’s time,
and flourished, as he says, by being
irrigated with wine.
“Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.”
It became so common in the
Roman pleasances, that groves of
planes, as well as laurels, are spoken
of by the same poet as the ornaments
of every citizen’s place of ordinary
pretensions.
“Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.”
Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania,
it must have been so common
as to form a familiar feature in the
landscape. But it perished with
the remainder of that luxurious
civilisation. In a convent garden
at Naples—so a traveller tells us—there
remains one enormous specimen,
of an antiquity which can
only be conjectured: the grandchild,
it may be, of some forlorn ornament
of a ruined villa, which had seen the
Goths march into Italy. We have
heard of no others of the genuine
race. Of late years, indeed, the
plane has begun to resume its popularity
as an ornamental tree, and
for the same reasons—its delightful
shade, namely, and its adaptation
to the atmosphere of great cities;
being able to throw off the noxious
residuum of coal smoke by the peeling
of its bark. Planes are now
the common trees of the market
place in Southern Europe, as they
are in our London squares. But,
unhappily, the variety almost always
seen is of new importation, not of
the old stock; not the princely
oriental, but its plebeian cousin the
occidental, or button-wood of the
United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger
perhaps—but incomparably
uglier: a melancholy instance
of the encroachments of
modern democracy.
To the Oriental plane we must
add the date-palm: not indeed as
strange now to the Italian eye, nor
as very abundant in classical times;
but as certainly more abundant then
than now; an exception to the general
law which we have indicated of
the increasing prevalence of Southern
forms of vegetation. The date-palm
in Italy is, after all, but an occasional
exotic. Mayer, the painstaking
German author of a book
on ‘Naples and the Neapolitans,’
says there are scarcely a dozen or
two of them in the gardens of that
city and its suburbs. There are
eight or ten only in Rome, says M.
Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit.
It dwells uncomfortably, in the
uncongenial neighbourhood of the
pine; for in America and other
unsophisticated regions, the natural
limit of the palm ends where that
of the pine begins. Picturesque as
its solitary form often is, in the
villa garden, or behind the convent
wall, we cannot look at it without
thinking of some poor captive Saracen
maiden, shivering at the door
of a Northern crusading baron.
Even on the coast of the Riviera,
where it appears to thrive the most,
it affords a melancholy sight when
writhing under the icy Mistral,
which ever and anon turns the
flank of the precarious barrier of
the Maritime Alps, and whirls its
blasts of snow-dust against the
broad leaves. It appears in many
of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw
suggests that this does not prove it
a native, as the scenes represented
may be foreign or symbolical. But
the caution is unnecessary. The
date-palm was certainly common of
yore in maritime Italy, though no
doubt in single specimens.[7] “Vulgo
in Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny:
who accurately distinguishes it from
the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then,
as now, more characteristic of Sicily.
We have already noticed the use for
which Virgil recommends it in the
‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’
is still more to the point, when he
classes the fibres of the palm along
with flax, hemp, and reeds, among
materials grown on the farm, which
may be turned to account for making
cordage.
“Thus we perceive,” concludes
our naturalist, “that the vegetable
world, and in particular the list of
cultivated vegetables, has undergone
many changes since the age
when Pompeii flourished; and that,
while the ancient Pompeians enjoyed
a great superiority over the
moderns in respect of many enjoyments
of life, particularly those
arising from the arts, they lacked
nevertheless some very valuable
plants which increased geographical
knowledge and extended commerce
have procured for their descendants.”
But however this may be, no one
can well contemplate in earnest
these relics of a most curious and
refined civilisation—in some respects
perhaps the most curious and
refined which the world has ever
seen—and return with satisfaction
to the coarse generalisation of the
disciples of universal progress in
the affairs of humanity, with whose
speculations we have been lately
surfeited. The feelings which such
inquiries excite are assuredly more
akin to those with which they inspired
the proud and melancholy
Leopardi, when he turned from
them and from the wealth of conception
and nobleness of sentiment
with which the ancient world
abounded, to that long degradation
of subsequent ages, out of which
humanity is in truth only now emerging.
Very grand, though profoundly
sorrowful, are those lines
of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’ in
which he portrays the expiring patriot,
not as bewailing his present
catastrophe, nor calling on the gods
for present revenge, but as brooding,
in utter hopelessness of spirit, over
“the dark forward and abysm of
time”—the Erebus-like blackness
of that prospect of coming degeneracy
and decay: the trance of ages,
into which the human soul was
about to fall.
“In peggio
Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida
Ai putridi nipoti
L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema
De’ miseri vendetta.”
For the duration of that era of
decline was indeed such as we are
sufficiently accustomed to measure
backwards, in historical reflection;
but such as, when contemplated as
a future, the conception shrinks from
with a painful sense of incapacity.
Thirteen centuries were to elapse ere
the first Italian could stretch his
hand across the chasm to the last
Roman. As the paradise of cultivation,
in which those Campanian
cities nestled, was separated from
the fertile aspect of the same region
in modern times by a formidable
blank of centuries of duration, so
was the ancient civilisation from
the modern by a similar space of
intellectual desert; and in each instance
alike, the succeeding age can
scarcely appreciate its predecessor
as a reality.
“Credetne virûm ventura propago,
Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt,
Infra urbes populosque premi.”
And yet there are those who persist
in cramming us with that dry
formula of Positivism, that each
generation enjoys the “accumulated
knowledge” of preceding ones! Ask
those countless millions of Chinese
who vegetate, generation after generation,
in the vast interior of their
empire apart from all foreign influence,
how much of “accumulated
knowledge” their community has
gathered since the days of Confucius;
ask the black nations of the
interior of Africa what amount of
“progress” distinguishes them from
their ancestors known to Herodotus
or to Leo Africanus; ask the
wretched remnants of tribes which
wander over the American wilderness,
whether their progenitors, the
sons of those who came thither over
the ocean, were fewer and feebler
and more ignorant than they? For
those who seek truth and not
phrases, “progress,” as the term is
used in social science, is an attribute
not of mankind, but of the
European family alone; and of that
family only since the discovery of
printing. What that incomparably
greatest of all merely human events
may have done towards fixing the
elements of social improvement, and
converting into a permanent advance
that which was before only a
precarious, oscillatory movement,
we need not now consider. It may
be that the so-called triumphal
march of humanity is now secured
from repulse, and that, as some of
our latest speculators seem to hold,
the powers of nature which we employ
will begin of themselves to
decay before our capability of employing
them abates. But all this,
if so, does not annul the melancholy
record of previous periods of
loss and retreat. It is extremely
difficult, no doubt, for us to realise
those periods. In our healthy exuberance
of life we can hardly conceive
a state of chronic political ebb
or decline—a state, that is, in which
each generation, instead of profiting
by the “accumulated knowledge”
of its predecessors, lets something
of the results of that knowledge
drop from its enfeebled grasp; is
reduced in numbers, less provided
with the external comforts of life,
weaker against aggression, poorer
in substance, feebler in spirit, inferior
in mental acquirements;
nevertheless, such periods have been
beyond all doubt. The history of
the Byzantine empire furnishes one
well known to all: and many such
have rolled drearily away in the
dimmer ages of early time, since
the subjects of Nimrod were dispersed
on the plain of Shinar. But
let us take the most familiar, and
at the same time the truest, instance
of what we mean, and which happens
also to be most germane to the
matter in hand. Could a modern
really do what many a visitor to
Pompeii has striven to do in intense
eagerness of fancy; could he
restore those truncated columns and
repeople those desolate streets, and
actually converse with some cultivated
contemporary of Pliny and
Juvenal, or Cicero and Horace;
one can fancy that the feeling on
both sides, after the first strangeness
of the meeting had been got
over, would be one of surprise, that
two specimens of humanity of such
distant origin could have so much
in common. In moral and social
philosophy; in political speculation;
in appreciation of eloquence, literature,
art, they would really find
themselves—some exceptions apart
which would give zest to the conversation—almost
on the same
ground. In respect of matters of
still more intimate interest—the
inner clothing, as it were, of civilised
existence—in their estimate of
physical and mental pursuits, tendencies,
weaknesses, pleasures, and
pains, and their relation to each
other—each would feel that he
understood his companion; each
would be conscious, as it were, of
possessing a key to many of the
other’s inmost feelings. This would
be partly owing, no doubt, to the
circumstance that the ancients have
been our tutors, and that much
of our mental furniture is derived
directly from them. But
also, in great measure, to mere
similarity of circumstances, which
engenders similarity of ideas. Civilisations
so nearly resembling each
other, even in many points of
minuteness, as those of modern
Europe and of the Rome of Cicero
or the Athens of Demosthenes,
must, from the necessity of the case,
have strongly corresponding spiritual
and mental emotions, and corresponding
language wherein to express
them.
Now let us alter the picture: let
the man of the nineteenth century
wake up under the shadow of Winchester
or Canterbury Cathedral,
such as the Saxons had reared
them, and, to give him the best
company of the day, let him consort
with a baron or an abbot of
the time of the Norman conquest.
Except the subject of religion, of
which we would not now speak,
what single topic could they have
in common? Would they not be
separated from each other by a barrier
as high and strong as any
which divides contemporary civilised
from savage man? What object (except
possibly horses and dogs), could
they appreciate together? What
points of morals or science or politics,
small talk, sentiment, or humour,
would suit them both? How could
they argue on premises which one
would assume as certain and the other
would treat with contempt? The
medieval wight would certainly rate
the modern at a very different value
from his own estimate of himself;
and if the modern escaped with a
whole skin from the interview,
which is greatly to be doubted of, he
would find his romantic respect for
the baron, or veneration for the
ecclesiastic, very little increased.
They would be denizens of alien
spheres, and would converse in
utterly dissonant tongues.
And yet the Norman was our
countryman; was nearer to us by
many an age than the Roman; and
possessed the “accumulated knowledge”
(had such a thing really existed
before the invention of printing),
of many an intervening generation.
But these were in truth
generations of decline, not of advance;
a decline often hardly sensible,
or arrested for a time, but on
the whole prodigious. And if the
enthusiastic disciple of progress
chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant
exceptions to his general
theory of flow, let us remember
that a space of a thousand years,
however unimportant to a geologist,
is a considerable fraction of the
historical existence of man.
And this, as many have said,
though not many truly feel it, is
one of the most real advantages of
classical study, and one of the
charms which make us turn back
to it with recurring affection, after
resultless wanderings in company
with the “Positivists.” He who
has imbibed its lessons deeply can
hardly find his judgment much affected
by those metaphors turned
into arguments which pass commonly
current, likening the youth,
manhood, and old age of the world
to those of an individual; nor will
he readily adopt the formulas of a
recent clever writer of the Positive
school, that “we may expect to
find, in the history of man, each
successive age incorporating into
itself the substance of the preceding,”
and that “this power, whereby
the present ever gathers into itself
the results of the past, transforms
the human race into a colossal man,
whose life reaches from the creation
to the day of judgment.” Classical
study made men pedants, after a
fashion, two centuries ago; at present
its effect is to preserve them
from an equally tasteless and less
innocent pedantry. By bringing
clearly before our view that magnificent
phantasma of great communities
entombed, and great conceptions
buried with them, it weakens
the ordinary temptation to overvalue
ourselves and our age. It
displays to us the vast ocean of
moral and intellectual being such as
it really is, subject to æons of rise
and fall, and not a steady onward
current continually gaining ground;
and, by so doing, administers a
reasonable check to that “Excelsior”
tendency which elevates but
often misleads us—an indiscriminating
confidence in the destiny and
powers of our species.
AMERICAN STATE PAPERS. [8]
628
It is not probable that many of
our readers will meet with the
volumes, lately published in Washington,
containing the correspondence
of American diplomatists during
the period of the civil war;
but, after perusing some of the
specimens we shall offer, they will
no doubt agree with us in thinking
it a pity that these productions
should not be generally known.
Under any circumstances, most
people would find something comical
in a set of elderly gentlemen, engaged
in important business, exchanging
by letter moral sentiments
suited to a schoolboy’s theme. But
when the compositions thus embellished
are of the kind known to the
world as State Papers, and when
the writers, who thus aim, like the
interlocutors in a religious novel,
at the instruction of the universe
through the medium of dialogue,
are American politicians, the effect
produced is such as few professed
humorists could hope to rival.
For most people are aware nowadays
that the atmosphere through
which those politicians must pass
before they can attain to that eminence,
one condition of which is
the writing of state papers, is much
more likely to develop in them the
wisdom of the serpent than the
guilelessness of the dove. Remembering
the pushing and scrambling,
the elbowing of vile competitors,
the truckling and corruption, the
wire-pulling and log-rolling, the
acquaintance with all the small and
dirty ramifications of tickets and
platforms, which success in politics
demands in the States, the very
last vein of composition we should
expect to find these gentlemen
especially cultivating would be that
in which the sage Imlac addresses
Rasselas, or in which the good
godmother improves every occasion
in a children’s story. A difficulty
to believe in the existence
of craft or guile or self-interest
as motives of political conduct,
yielding at last to a surprised and
mournful conviction of the sad
truth, and a touching and simple
style of moralising over human
delinquency, are the characteristics,
on paper, of the diplomatists
who have particularly distinguished
themselves in the pleasing and pastoral
pursuits we have attempted to
enumerate. Everybody who has
read American speeches must have
noticed in them a tendency to flowery
sentiment and to ancient and
fish-like metaphors, such as the
audiences of the Old World would
reject. Why the not very immaculate
or poetical classes who constitute
a New York mob should especially
relish this style of oratory, we
cannot explain; but it is the fact
that it seems to succeed in America
whether the audience be a constituency,
or a house of assembly, or
the population of a Boston lecture-room,
or the entertainers of an
American celebrity, or a jury in a
criminal case—and all the scribes
of their newspapers indulge in the
same vein. That it does succeed
may appear to be a sufficiently good
reason why the parliamentary and
stump orators of America should
habitually launch at their audiences
such sentences as are, on this side
of the water, never addressed to
any but the galleries at a Surrey
melodrama. But directly the speakers
are placed in relation to foreign
Governments, they think it necessary
to engraft on the florid Rosa-Matilda
style which deals with “star-spangled
banners,” “great, glorious,
and free people,” and “the best
Government the world ever saw,”
the virtuous didactic style we have
attempted to describe, and which
we suppose they imagine to be
particularly likely to influence the
counsels of such guileless and simple-minded
statesmen as Gortchakoff,
Rechberg, Russell, Palmerston,
and the Emperor Napoleon.
The principal agent in the pious
attempt to inoculate mankind,
through their Governments, with
virtuous principles, is Mr William
Henry Seward. The circumstances
under which the benevolent sage
perseveres in his philanthropic
efforts are not such as are favourable
to placid meditation or composition.
His lucubrations must have been
disturbed not unfrequently by the
booming of Confederate cannon.
The sudden irruption on his privacy
of a distracted Finance Minister, a
desperate War Secretary, or a bewildered
President, must have been
extremely unfavourable to the prosecution
of the task. Yet that he
struggled successfully with those
hostile influences is proved by the
enormous volume of his essays,
which must, we estimate, be equal
in bulk, for one year, to about four
volumes of the original edition
of ‘The Rambler’—under which
title, indeed, they might not inappropriately
have been published.
Seated at his desk, with the copybooks
of his boyhood at hand
for quotation, in a glow of philanthropy
that cannot fail to warm
what he would himself call the
“moral atmosphere” of barbaric
Europe, he can shut his eyes to
passing events, and find sermons
in civil wars, and good in everything.
Immediately on his accession
to office, he begins a circular
to all the Ministers at foreign courts
in the following style: “Sir,—The
advocates of benevolence, and
the believers in human progress,
encouraged by the slow though
marked meliorations of the barbarities
of war which have obtained
in modern times, have been, as you
are well aware, recently engaged,”
&c.
Since that was written, the advocates
of benevolence and the believers
in human progress have been
further encouraged by the “meliorations”
of stone fleets, of corps of
licensed plunderers, of the submersion
of great tracts of cultivated
land, of the devastation of half a
State, of the incitement to servile
insurrection, and of the rule of
Benjamin F. Butler at New Orleans—illustrations
of his remark, which
the eminent essayist probably did
not at that time expect.
In the early part of his correspondence,
Mr Seward’s opinions of
the policy to be pursued towards
the South are much more indulgent
than at a later period. “The
Union,” he says, on March 22, 1861,
“was formed upon popular consent,
and must always practically stand
on the same basis.” He says, on
April 10, that Secession is “a bad
enterprise,” and that the Secessionists
are “a misguided portion of
our fellow-citizens.” But he goes
on to say that the President “would
not be disposed to reject a cardinal
dogma of theirs (the citizens of
the Southern States), namely, that
the Federal Government could not
reduce the seceding States to obedience
by conquest, even although
he were disposed to question that
proposition. But, in fact, the President
willingly accepts it as true.
Only an imperial or despotic government
could subjugate thoroughly
disaffected and insurrectionary members
of the State. This Federal republican
system of ours is, of all
forms of government, the very one
which is most unfitted for such a
labour.” And he goes on to suggest
the following paternal method
of bringing back the prodigal South,
and providing a fatted calf for it:—
“The system has within itself adequate
peaceful, conservative, and recuperative
forces. Firmness on the part
of the Government in maintaining and
preserving the public institutions and
property, and in executing the laws
where authority can be exercised without
waging war, combined with such
measures of justice, moderation, and
forbearance as will disarm reasoning
opposition, will be sufficient to secure
the public safety until returning reflection,
concurring with the fearful experience
of social evils, the inevitable fruits
of faction, shall bring the recusant
members cheerfully back into the family,
which, after all, must prove their
best and happiest, as it undeniably is
their most natural, home. The constitution
of the United States provides for
that return by authorising Congress, on
application to be made by a certain majority
of the States, to assemble a national
convention, in which the organic
law can, if it be needful, be revised so
as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion,
so suitable to the habits of the
people, and so eminently conducive to
the common safety and welfare.”
These be brave words and high
sentiments; but their value as an
expression of conciliatory policy is
a little diminished by the fact that,
as the seceding States were then
seven out of thirty-four, the concession
spoken of, being dependent on
the “application to be made by a
certain majority of the States” (two-thirds),
was an impossibility. And
in fact one of the best arguments in
favour of Secession is, that the constitution
provides no means whereby
a minority, or indeed anything
but a large majority, of States can
obtain a remedy for their grievances,
should the interests of the remainder
render them adverse.
On the 19th of June, however,
a change has come over the spirit
of the Secretary’s dream, leading
him to retract even this visionary
compromise.
“What is now seen in this country,”
he tells Mr Adams, “is the occurrence,
by no means peculiar, but frequent in
all countries, more frequent even in
Great Britain than here, of an armed
insurrection engaged in attempting to
overthrow the regularly constituted and
established Government. There is, of
course, the employment of force by the
Government to suppress the insurrection,
as every other Government necessarily
employs force in such cases. But these
incidents by no means constitute a state
of war impairing the sovereignty of the
Government, creating belligerent sections,
and entitling foreign States to intervene
or to act as neutrals between
them, or in any other way to cast off
their lawful obligations to the nation
thus for the moment disturbed. Any
other principle than this would be to
resolve government everywhere into a
thing of accident and caprice, and ultimately
all human society into a state
of perpetual war.”
Here the facts of the Union,
founded on consent, and of the President’s
acceptance of the dogma,
together with the unfitness of the
Federal system for the task of subjugation—a
task proper to imperial
or despotic governments—are suddenly
lost sight of along with the
benevolent scheme for calling on
the misguided citizens to abandon
their “bad enterprise,” and return
within the fold of the Union; and
this great, glorious, and free Government
is driven to confess that
its only alternative is the rude and
barbarous one hitherto repudiated,
of force, such as the most abject
monarchy might adopt. To such
complexion must even the most
beneficent institutions come under
the pressure of necessity. And this
change of Mr Seward’s tone is contemporaneous
with his observation
of the sudden appearance of inflexible
and enthusiastic resolve on the
part of the people of the North to
put down the Secession by military
power.
At this time two objects are diligently
prosecuted by the high-minded
Seward, always on the
highest grounds. The one is the
task of convincing the British Government
that it has fallen into a
grave error in acknowledging the
South as a belligerent, and warning
it against receiving the “missionaries
of the insurgents,” as he terms
the commissioners of the Southern
Confederacy. “The cause of the
North,” he says, “involves the
independence of nations and the
right of human nature.” “We feel
free to assume that it is the general
conviction of men, not only here,
but in all other countries, that this
Federal Union affords a better system
than any other that could be
contrived to assure the safety, the
peace, the prosperity, the welfare,
and the happiness of all the States
of which it is composed.” “It is a
war,” he says elsewhere, “against
human nature;” and again, “The
wit of man fails to suggest, not
merely a better political system,
having the same objects as the present
Union, but even any possible
substitute for it.” And on the 21st
July, “I cannot leave the subject
without endeavouring once more,
as I have so often done before, to
induce the British Government to
realise the conviction which I have
more than once expressed in this
correspondence, that the policy of
the Government is one that is
based on interests of the greatest
importance and sentiments of the
highest virtue, and therefore is in
no case likely to be changed, whatever
may be the varying fortunes
of the war at home, or the action
of foreign nations on this subject,
while the policy of foreign States
rests on ephemeral interests of commerce
or ambition.” “Sure we are
that the transaction now going on
in our country involves the progress
of civilisation and humanity,
and equally sure that our attitude
in it is right, and no less sure that
our press and our statesmen are
equal in ability and influence to
any in Europe.”
Manifestly, to countenance any
power hostile to so beneficent a
system would be almost as bad as
to acknowledge Satan and the rebel
angels as belligerents. But lest
“the cupidity and caprice of Great
Britain,” to which, he says, the disunionists
will appeal, should render
her blind to such high considerations,
he takes a lower ground with
her, and delivers, May 21, 1861,
the following ominous and prophetic
warning:—
“Great Britain has but to wait a few
months, and all her present inconveniences
will cease with our own troubles.
If she take a different course, she will
calculate for herself the ultimate as well
as the immediate consequences, and will
consider what position she will hold
when she shall have for ever lost the
sympathies and affections of the only nation
on whose sympathies and affections
she has a natural claim.”
It is a sad picture thus presented
to us of the British Pythias abandoned
by the American Damon, and
left alone and friendless in the
world. Yet with that direful consequence
we are threatened unless
we accept the idea of neutrality entertained
in common by Mr Seward
and Mr Bright, who regard it not
as a “cold and unfriendly,” but as
a highly enthusiastic, condition.
But, as we said, this was not the
only point to which the high-minded
Secretary at this period directed his
efforts. At the Congress of Paris
in 1856 the maritime Powers of
Europe had come to an agreement
in order to mitigate the severities
of war, by which, among other
stipulations, privateering was abolished
so far as the parties to the
compact were concerned. In this
agreement America had refused to
join, unless an article, specially favourable
to herself, should be introduced.
But the flame of philanthropy
which glowed so ardently
in Mr Seward’s breast, now lit up
the question which had been buried
in obscurity since 1857, and he proposed,
of course from the most elevated
motives, that America should
now join the convention. As provision
had originally been made for
the admission of parties wishing
subsequently to accede to it, no
difficulty appeared, and everything
seemed to work smoothly—Ministers
arranging and conceding, conventions
made ready for signature,
and all going merry as a marriage-bell.
But it had occurred to the suspicious
mind of Lord Russell, whose
political morals had been debauched
by long diplomatic intercourse with
the barbaric Cabinets of Europe,
and who was incredulous of public
virtue even in the immaculate
statesmen of America, that a great
advantage would accrue to the
Northern Government by joining
in the Declaration at this juncture,
because the abolition of privateering
would exclude the South from
all the ports of Europe, which
would of course still be open to the
regular navy of the North. Not
that the proposals of Mr Seward
were likely to inspire the suspicion;
for, taking the lofty grounds of
benefit to the human race, his
papers on the subject contained but
two slight incidental allusions to
the minor point. The Provisional
Government of the Confederates
had, he said, “taken the bad resolution
to invite privateers to prey
upon the peaceful commerce of the
United States.” And on the 21st
May he says to Mr Adams, “You
already have our authority to propose
to her our accession to that
Declaration. If she refuse it, it can
only be because she is willing to
become the patron of privateering
when aimed at our devastation.”
These are the only hints on the
subject given to the American
Ministers. Towards foreign Governments
the elevated tone of
public virtue was never for a moment
jarred by the discordant note
of immediate advantage.
But the crafty Russell, led by
the low cunning of the European
diplomatic mind, had, while appearing
to accede with perfect
frankness to the American proposal,
made this seemingly casual
remark, “I need scarcely add that,
on the part of Great Britain, the
engagement will be prospective,
and will not invalidate anything
already done”—meaning, of course,
We shall be happy to receive your
adhesion to the compact, but the
prohibition of privateering must
not apply to the Confederates,
whom we have already acknowledged
as belligerents.
The manner in which the virtuous
statesmen of the Republic
viewed this passage or “implied
reservation” was highly characteristic.
Incapable of guile themselves,
they could not suspect that
they could be the objects of suspicion.
It was impossible to say
what might be hidden behind the
mysterious words. Mr Seward professed
himself totally in the dark,
and demanded explanation. Whereupon
Lord John declares “that her
Majesty does not intend thereby to
undertake any engagement which
shall have any bearing, direct or
indirect, on the internal differences
now prevailing in the United
States.”
If the high-minded Secretary was
startled by the original passage, he
was deeply wounded by the explanation.
To suppose that the American
Government were aiming at
any petty advantage over the Confederates
in the matter was a point
beneath notice. The Minister appointed
to conclude the convention
says, indeed—
“The natural effect of such an accompaniment
would seem to be to imply
that the Government of the United
States might be desirous at this time
to take a part in the Declaration, not
from any high purpose or durable policy,
but with the view of securing some small
temporary object in the unhappy struggle
which is going on at home. Such an inference
would spoil all the value that
might be attached to the act itself.”
It might be supposed that the
best way to restore the full value
to the act would have been to reject
the petty despised advantage by
accepting the convention with the
reservation. But so deeply have
the virtuous statesmen been wounded
by the unworthy suspicion, that
they have no heart to proceed in
the business. They have done
their best for humanity, and failed.
The reservation was so unusual, so
informal, and it so complicated the
matter, that the negotiation must
be suspended, said the American
Secretary—hoping, however, with
habitual pathos, that it might be
resumed “in some happier time.”
Britannia having thus, by the refusal
of the American Government
to proceed with the negotiation,
clearly constituted herself the patron
of privateering, and having
also declined to accept Mr Seward’s
interpretation of neutrality, must
henceforth expect him to regard
her as a Puritan conscious of being
in a state of grace would regard
some wretched backslider still in
the bonds of iniquity. But in the
midst of his homilies an event had
occurred which had forced from him
a very natural expression of alarm,
the effect of which in the state
papers is very much as if Mr Spurgeon,
in the delivery of an eloquent
sermon, should howl with anguish
on feeling a sharp twinge of the
gout. Mr Seward’s howl being a
short one, we give it entire:—
“[Confidential.]
Department of State,
Washington, July 26, 1861.
“Sir,—My despatch, No. 42, dated
July 21, was delayed beyond the proper
mail-day by circumstances entirely beyond
my control. I trust, however,
that it will still be in time.
“Our army of the Potomac on Sunday
last met a reverse equally severe and
unexpected. For a day or two the panic
which had produced the result was followed
by a panic that seemed to threaten
to demoralise the country. But that
evil has ceased already. The result is
already seen in a vigorous reconstruction
upon a scale of greater magnitude
and increased enthusiasm.
“It is not likely that anything will
now be done here hastily or inconsiderately
affecting our foreign relations.
“I am, sir, respectfully, your obedient
servant,
William H. Seward.
Charles Francis Adams, Esq.,
&c. &c. &c.”
An interval of three days sufficed,
however, in a considerable degree,
to restore the elastic spirits of the
buoyant Secretary, for on 29th
July he says:—
“You will hear of a reverse of our
arms in Virginia. The exaggerations
of the result have been as great as
the public impatience, perhaps, which
brought it about. But the affair will
not produce any serious injury. The
strength of the insurrection is not
broken, but it is not formidable. The
vigour of the Government will be increased,
and the ultimate result will be
a triumph of the Constitution. Do not
be misled by panic reports of danger
apprehended for the capital.”
And on the 12th August Seward’s
himself again,—
“The shock produced by the reverse
of our arms at Bull Run has passed
away. The army is reorganised; the
elections show that reaction against
disunion has begun in the revolutionary
States, and we may confidently look
for a restoration of the national authority
throughout the Union. If our foreign
relations were once promptly reestablished
on their former basis, the
disunion sentiment would languish and
perish within a year.”
In this way, after each defeat, or
“reverse of our arms,” he presently
consoles himself by extracting a
precious jewel, in the shape of a
moral, from the front of adversity,
and transmitting it for the comfort
of the American envoys. We all
remember the achievement which
first made Jackson famous, of turning
suddenly on Banks at Winchester
and driving him headlong
over the Potomac, previous to joining
in the general movement against
M‘Clellan on the Chickahominy.
Upon that event Mr Seward remarks
to Mr Adams:—
“The defeat of General Banks at
Winchester yesterday, and his withdrawal
across the Potomac, are just now
the prominent incidents of the war.
A careful consideration of the affair
results in the satisfactory conclusion
that the movement of the enemy was
one of merely energetic strategy.”
What this can possibly mean, or
why it should be satisfactory to
Mr Seward, or what satisfaction it
could convey to Mr Adams, we are
utterly at a loss to divine. Again,
on July 7th, when M‘Clellan had
been driven from the York to the
James River, he tells Mr Adams
that—
“The efficiency of the army of the
Union is improved.... If the representative
parties had now to choose
whether they would have the national
army where it is and as it is, or back
again where it was and as it was, it is
not to be doubted that the insurgents
would prefer to it the position and condition
on the Pamunkey, and the friends
of the Union the one now attained on
the banks of the James.... The
insurgents and the world abroad will
see that the virtue of the people is
adequate to the responsibilities which
Providence has cast upon them.”
July 12th, he states the cheering
fact that a force is “under the
command of Major-General Pope,
who has achieved great successes
in the Western States, and is esteemed
an officer of great ability.”
July 28th, he says: “Our assault
upon Richmond is for the
moment suspended. No great and
striking movements or achievements
are occurring, and the Government
is rather preparing its
energies for renewed operations
than continuing to surprise the
world with new and brilliant victories.”
Thus much in the way
of particular information, but the
moral presently follows:—
“It is not upon isolated events, much
less upon transitory popular impulses,
that Governments are expected to build
their policies in regard to foreign countries.
What I think is important, not
less for foreign nations than for ourselves,
is always to hold our civil war
under contemplation, not merely as
streams of unequal widths and intermitting
currents, but as one continuous
river, and so not to forget its source,
its direction, and not only its immediate
and local, but also its ultimate
and universal, effects.”
And before the reader can recover
from this tremendous passage, it is
followed up by another:—
“It is only the reflecting observer
who habitually considers the course of
events occurring in any one country as
being determined, or at least materially
influenced, by natural causes lying
wholly or in part outside of that country,
and which create a force commonly
recognised under various names as the
opinion of mankind, or the spirit or the
genius of the age or of the times.”
After uttering this extraordinary
sentence, one might expect the
oracle to become exhausted; but
not at all: it continues to pour
forth pages of reasoning equally
close and clear on this same 28th
July. And what do our readers
think of this splendid passage,
written April 14th?—
“It is believed that this survey of
the military position of the Government
may serve to satisfy Great Britain
that those statesmen here and abroad
who, a year ago, mistook a political
syncope for national death and dissolution,
altogether misunderstood the resources,
the character, and the energies
of the American Union. The blood
that at first retreated to the heart, is
now coursing healthily through all the
veins and arteries of the whole system;
and what seemed at first to be a hopeless
paralysis, was in fact but the beginning
of an organic change to more robust
and vigorous health than the nation has
ever before enjoyed.”
And when M‘Clellan finally
abandoned the peninsula with the
wreck of his army, it is announced
to Mr Adams, and to Mr Dayton,
the Minister to France, in this
way:—
“General Halleck, upon taking command
of the army, made a careful survey
of the entire military position, and
concluded thereupon to withdraw the
army of the Potomac from the peninsula,
and to combine all our forces in
front of Richmond. It is believed to
have been substantially accomplished
without any casualty. Our new levies
are coming in in great numbers and in
fine spirits. The gloom has passed
away from the public mind. Although
our arrangements for resuming offensive
operations are yet incomplete, we
have much confidence in being able to
do so speedily and with decisive effect....
It is represented to us that the
popular determination to maintain the
Union has at no time been as unanimous
and as earnest as it is now.”
And so on of all events, whether
promising success or ending in
disaster; the object being to persuade
foreign Governments what a
mistake they made in countenancing
such a failing business as Secession.
And when the prospect is
especially cheerful—when patriots
under arms are counted by hundreds
of thousands, and when any
successes call for a fresh enumeration
of the triumphs of the Republic—a
judicious menace is insinuated in
the despatch, by hinting that as
soon as the rebellion is crushed
(which it is always just going to be)
the shortcomings of those whose
duty it was to assist the Union in
its “hour of distress,” will not be
forgotten by the victorious and
thrice-potent Northern people. For
instance, on January 31 he says:—
“I have observed that the British
people were satisfied with the vigour
and the energy of the preparations
which their Government made for the
war which they expected to occur between
them and ourselves. It may be
profitable for us all to reflect that the
military and naval preparations which
have been made by this Government to
put down the insurrection have, every
day since the 1st of May last, equalled,
if not surpassed, the daily proportion
of those war-preparations which were
regarded as so demonstrative in Great
Britain.”
And again, 2d June 1862:—
“The President thinks it desirable
that the Government of Great Britain
should consider, before the war closes,
what are likely to be the sentiments of
the two nations in regard to each other
after that event shall have occurred.”
We wonder whether it ever occurred
to Mr Seward that if the imaginary
injuries of one nation upon
another are to be visited with such
remote vindictiveness, it may be
probable that very real and deep
sufferings may leave still more indelible
rancour behind them; and
that there is a people at this moment
not only undergoing treatment
at the hands of the Union
which excites the horror of civilised
nations, but proving itself perfectly
capable of executing future vengeance.
But in providing for the probability
that Great Britain will be
indifferent to the high moral ground
which he indicates for giving her
sympathies to the Union, Mr Seward
does not trust entirely to
threats. A lower argument, better
suited to her defective moral sense,
consists in pointing out that it is
the interest of European countries
to see the war terminate as quickly
as possible; that it is also the interest
of the Union to terminate
the war as quickly as possible:
ergo, the way to attain the common
object is to unite in procuring it.
But he omits to show why the
same argument might not apply
with equal force to an alliance
with the South.
All this eloquence and logic has
a double object—first, to avert the
recognition of the South, followed
by subsequent intervention; and,
secondly, and chiefly, to induce the
European Powers to retrace the
step they had taken of acknowledging
the South as a belligerent.
The original protest against this
step had been on the particular
ground that the Government had
taken it more hastily than was
needful, and ought to have awaited
the arrival of Mr Adams, charged
with the reasons which the Federal
Government might urge in protesting
against it. As the measure
was one of neutrality, it was manifestly
proper that it should be
adopted without hearing the arguments
of one side only. However,
the North considered itself
injured, and expressed its sense of
injury; but until we read these
papers we had thought that the
precipitation of the measure was
the chief ground on which it was
complained of. But so far from
that being the case, the measure
itself constitutes, down to the present
time, the chief point of dispute.
It is not going too far to
say that, had the Federal Government
accepted the position of neutrality
of foreign Governments,
and conducted its relations with
them on that basis, the greater
part of these despatches need never
have been written. Nine-tenths of
them are the result of looking at
the same facts from two points of
view—of looking at the war, on the
one side, as a conflict between great
sections, each possessed of power
sufficient to maintain itself against
the other, and to produce consequences
highly important to neutrals;
on the other side, as a domestic
difficulty caused by a weak and
failing faction, and which should
not be noticed by foreign Powers
any more than any other insignificant
outbreak. Our Government
saw in it the division of the Republic
into portions, strongly defined
by a territorial line, arming themselves
for a conflict in which the
balance of right was a subtle question
open to opposite interpretations,
but in which, it was evident,
the Federal Government could never
be victorious consistently with its
own principles. The magnitude of
the quarrel was such as powerfully
to affect our own interests, and to
render the probability imminent
that the Queen’s subjects would
be involved in the struggle, on
the one side or the other, in such
a manner as to compromise themselves,
perhaps the Government.
That the nature of the war was
rightly estimated, events have more
than sufficiently proved; that it
was the first duty of the Government
to protect its own subjects
will probably be admitted by most
moralists. But there is one moralist,
Mr Seward, who thinks that the
British Government, however bound
to protect the interests of its own
subjects, as it might be, he admits,
in an inferior degree, is still more
bound to consider the interests of
the human race as involved in the
maintenance of the Federal Union,—of
the system, be it remembered,
whose inevitable results have been
to make a Lincoln the chief magistrate,
and a Seward the chief minister—a
system which has for years
been the most corrupt ever known,
and the inability of which to produce
any kind of political merit is
one of the wonders of the world.
Mr Seward’s view, which he
insists that foreign Governments
should adopt, is that they must not
admit the existence of any war at
all; that Bull’s Run and Fredericksburg,
and all the disasters of
M‘Clellan and Pope, are the work
of a small insurrectionary faction;
that the inability of the Federalists
to recover authority in the South
does not at all affect the integrity
of the Republic; and that the millions
of men whom he so complacently
describes as determined to
restore the Union have been called
to arms to quell a few “misguided
fellow-citizens” who have taken the
“bad resolution” of seceding from
its authority. But neither great defeats,
nor vast armaments, nor huge
debt, nor impending dissolution, can
divert Mr. Seward from his singular
efforts to persuade foreign Governments,
chiefly ours, to adopt his
extraordinary fiction as their rule
of action. If mere acquiescence in
his view were all that he demanded,
it might be no great matter; but
he requires that we shall not
merely admit the fictitious view,
but proceed to found thereon the
extraordinary measures which we
shall presently find indicated in
his correspondence. What the view
itself is may be gathered from a
few extracts.
19th June 1861:—
“The United States are still solely
and exclusively sovereign within the
territories they have lawfully acquired
and long possessed, as they have
always been.... Great Britain, by
virtue of these relations, is a stranger
to parties and sections in this country,
whether they are loyal to the United
States or not; and Great Britain can
neither rightfully qualify the sovereignty
of the United States, nor concede nor
recognise any rights or interests or
power of any party, State, or section, in
contravention to the unbroken sovereignty
of the Federal Union.”
6th March 1862:—
“If Great Britain should revoke her
decree conceding belligerent rights to
the insurgents to-day, this civil strife,
which is the cause of all the derangement
of those relations, and the only
cause of all apprehended dangers of
that kind, would end to-morrow. The
United States have continually insisted
that the disturbers of their peace are
mere insurgents, not lawful belligerents.
This Government neither can
nor is likely to have occasion to change
this position; but her Majesty can, and
it would seem that she must, sooner or
later desire to relinquish her position.
It was a position taken in haste, and
in anticipation of the probable success
of the revolution. The failure of that
revolution is sufficiently apparent. Why
should not the position be relinquished,
and the peace of our country thus be
allowed to be restored?”
10th March 1862:—
“Let the Governments of Great Britain
and France rescind the decrees
which concede belligerent rights to a
dwindling faction in this country, and
all their troubles will come to a speedy
end.”
15th March 1862:—
... “We are brought to lament
anew the precipitancy with which foreign
Powers so unnecessarily conceded
to the insurrection belligerent rights.
The President trusts that you are sparing
no efforts to convince Earl Russell
that the time has come when that concession
can be revoked with safety to
Great Britain and advantage to the
great material interests of that country.”
To which Mr Adams responds,
27th March:—
“I am bound to notice in several of
your late despatches a strong disposition
to press upon the British Government an
argument for a retraction of its original
error in granting to the rebels the rights
of a belligerent. There may come a
moment when such a proceeding might
seem to me likely to be of use. But
I must frankly confess that I do not see
it yet.”
We will now show by a few other
extracts what consequences Mr Seward
expected to follow the adoption
of his view.
6th March 1862—Mr Seward to
Mr Adams:—
“Is it not worth your pains to suggest
to him the inquiry whether it
would not be wiser and better to remove
the necessity for our blockade than
to keep the two nations, and even the
whole world, in debate about the rightfulness
or the expediency of attempting
to break it, with all the consequences
of so hostile a measure?”
2d April:—
“It is a matter of deep regret to us
that our troubles at home render it
hazardous to withdraw a part of our
great land and naval forces from operating
here, and send them to China to
co-operate with the forces of the Allies
there. As you are well aware, the
continuance of the insurrection in the
United States is due to the attitudes of
Great Britain and France towards our
country. It would seem to be desirable
for those two States to have our co-operation
in China in preserving a commerce
of vast importance to them as
well as to ourselves. That co-operation
we could give if we were relieved from
the necessity for maintaining a blockade
and siege of our southern ports.”
Whether Mr Seward desired that
Great Britain should herself undertake
the blockade of the Southern
ports, or should pass a law, and persuade
other States to pass similar
laws, prohibiting all commercial intercourse
with the South, and should
enforce the prohibition, does not
appear. But that he desired one
of these measures to be adopted is
clear, and the one would not be
more extraordinary than the other.
Another operation of the adoption
of Mr Seward’s fiction is seen in
the case of the British Consul at
Charleston. The British and French
Governments agreed that it was
expedient to communicate to the
persons exercising authority in the
Confederate States the desire of
those Governments that certain
articles of the Declaration of Paris
should be observed by them in
the prosecution of hostilities. Mr
Seward remarks thereupon—
“It is enough to say that in our view
the proper agents of the British Government
to make known its interest here,
are the diplomatic, not the consular
agents of her Majesty; and that the
only authority in this country to which
any diplomatic communication whatever
can be made is the Government of
the United States itself.”
The articles to which France and
England desired to call attention
were those which relate to the capture
of the property of neutrals at
sea. It was very necessary to the
protection of our commerce that
they should be made known, and
to do so was not in any way contrary
to any of the pretensions of
the Federal Government. Yet because
the Powers had chosen the
English Consul as their medium, instead
of the Federal authorities, who
did not acknowledge or maintain
communications with the Southern
Government, the Consul’s exequatur
was withdrawn.
The case of the Trent is too well
known, and that of the Alabama is
too recent, to need recapitulation
here. It is only necessary to remind
the reader that in the late debate
in Parliament it was shown that
Mr Seward’s demands could only
be complied with by passing a
special law, having for its exclusive
object to aid the Federal Government
by stopping vessels, not on
evidence, but on suspicion, that
they were intended to become Confederate
ships of war. In the case
of the Emily St Pierre he expressly
tells us his views. That vessel had
been captured in attempting to run
the blockade, and had then been
recaptured from the prize-crew and
brought into Liverpool. Whereupon
the Federal authorities demanded
that she should be restored
to them by the British Government.
Lord Russell replied that “neutral
nations are not bound to punish
their subjects for offences committed
only against the laws of war
as enforced by belligerents, nor to
restore property rescued by their subjects
from foreign captors.” When
our Government communicated its
decision declining to restore her,
Mr Seward remarked—
“I think it proper to observe at present
that the reasons seem to be limited
to a want of power vested in the Government
to restore, and do not bear at all
on the justice or legality of the demand.
Under such circumstances this Government
has in more than one instance admitted
the claim, and appealed to legislative
authority for the power to satisfy it,
and it has been promptly conferred and
exercised.”
The American Minister was directed
to press these demands for
an alteration of the law. In reply,
Lord John Russell, after adverting
to the injury sustained by England
in the blockade, says:—
“Yet Her Majesty’s Government
have never sought to take advantage of
the obvious imperfections of this blockade,
in order to declare it ineffective.
They have, to the loss and detriment
of the British nation, scrupulously observed
the duties of Great Britain
towards a friendly State. But when
Her Majesty’s Government are asked
to go beyond this, and to overstep the
existing powers given them by municipal
and international law, for the purpose
of imposing arbitrary restrictions
on the trade of Her Majesty’s subjects,
it is impossible to listen to such suggestions....
If, therefore, the
United States consider it for their interest
to inflict this great injury on
other nations, the utmost they can
expect is that European Powers shall
respect those acts of the United States
which are within the limits of the law.
The United States Government cannot
expect that Great Britain should frame
new statutes to aid the Federal blockade,
and to carry into effect the restrictions
on commerce which the United
States for their own purposes have
thought fit to institute, and the application
of which it is their duty to
confine within the legitimate limits of
international law.”
Mr Seward’s demand, that we
should adopt his interpretation of
the character of the war, would entail
the consequences that we should
ourselves enforce the Federal blockade;
that we should refuse all
Southern vessels admission to our
ports, while allowing the freest use
of them to the Federal ships; that
we should stop all exports of commodities
to the South, while granting
fullest commercial intercourse
with the North: and that we should
alter our own laws for the purpose
of making ourselves the agents of
the belligerent interests of the
Federal Government. His interpretation
of neutrality in affording
supplies to the belligerents is
amusingly, though we daresay quite
unintentionally, illustrated by himself
in a couple of sentences. It
will be recollected that, at the
time of the Trent affair, Federal
agents had bought up a great quantity
of saltpetre here, and that, in
expectation that this might be used
against ourselves in case of war,
the export of the article was prohibited
by an Order in Council.
This prohibition was withdrawn
when the settlement of the Trent
affair removed the apprehension of
war. “It affords me pleasure,”
says Mr Seward thereupon, “to
know that the inhibition of saltpetre,
which was so unnecessary,
has been rescinded.”
“It has been only European
sympathies and European aid,” he
proceeds in the next sentence,
“that have enabled our disloyal
citizens to prolong the civil war.”
The coupling of his pleasure at
getting munitions of war from
England with his complaint against
European aid to the South, is too
impudent not to be, we hope, accidental.
Now, does any foreign European
statesman living think that it would
be a light task to persuade England
to restrain the liberty of her
subjects, or to change her laws?
Would any such statesman think
that he was labouring for a practicable
object, if he were to found his
efforts on the assumption that such
changes would be made at his suggestion?
Would any European people,
of whose Government he should
be the agent, regard such efforts
with other feelings than derision?
Yet there are ministers of potent
Governments who could show plausible
reasons for expecting that their
efforts might prevail, and who could
urge their arguments with skill and
eloquence. But even if, confident
in their long experience and profound
knowledge of diplomacy, they
might venture on the experiment,
is it possible to suppose that, when
the failure should be manifest, they
would, instead of abandoning the
ground for surer footing, continue
to build an entire policy on the
shadowy foundation, though certain
to see the baseless fabric sink as
often as it should be raised? Yet
such is the hopeless task in which
the American Secretary persists with
dreary pertinacity. Some malign
spell seems to rule his course like
that by which Michael Scott compelled
the devil to make ropes of
sand, and to bale out the sea with
a limpet-shell. All his arguments,
all his complaints, all his homilies,
are based on the delusion that he
can compel the British Government,
by the marvellous force of
his persuasive eloquence, to occupy
with him a cloudland of his own
creation; where a resolute people in
arms is a dwindling faction; where
a strife that drenches a continent
in blood is a waning insurrection;
where the victorious result always
seems close, yet is always receding;
where in the obstruction of a commercial
system there is nothing
which the partners in that system
are entitled to take note of; where
the Union, repelled at all points,
and staggering under a load of debt,
is said to exercise authority in all
but a few rebellious spots, and to
keep firm hold on the affections of
all but a few misguided men; and
where nefarious contracts, armies
of mercenaries and deserters and
plundering generals, are bright examples
of the virtue and patriotism
of a great people elicited in the
hour of trial. All his instructions,
all his remonstrances, all his prophecies,
proceed upon the assumption
that these delusions are facts.
If it were not so, the vast volume
of despatches would shrink to the
size of a pamphlet; for every dispute,
every argument, every feeling
of injury, has its root in the shadowy
standing-ground which he
chooses to occupy. Of this he appears
sensible himself when he
says:—
“I have not failed to see that every
wrong this country has been called
to endure at the hands of any foreign
Power has been a natural if not a logical
consequence of the first grave error
which that Power committed in conceding
to an insurrection, which would
otherwise have been ephemeral, the
rights of a public belligerent. It has
seemed, therefore, to be wise, as well as
more dignified, to urge the retrogression
upon that false step, rather than to
elaborate complaints of the injuries that
have followed it.”
It would have been well had he
done so; but instead he has, without
ceasing to urge retrogression,
indulged in ceaseless complaints.
Wrapt in his delusions, he drifts
calmly on the tide of events that
is bearing him and his despatches
to chaos, and takes the crack of
doom for a wholesome thunderstorm
which is to clear the political atmosphere.
Nothing can surpass
the feeble complacency with which
he records his perpetual illusions as
incontrovertible facts. On Feb. 19,
1862, he writes to Mr Adams:—
“I was just about instructing you
how to answer the querulous complaints
in Parliament which you have anticipated,
the chief of which is the assumed
incompetency of Government to suppress
the insurrection. But a very shrewd
observer, a loyal, and at present exiled
Virginian, fell in at the moment, and
expressed to me the opinion that the
end of the war is in sight; that there
will be a short and rapid series of successes
over a disheartened conspiracy,
and then all will be over. I give you
these opinions as entitling us to what is
sometimes granted by candid tribunals—namely,
a suspension of judgment.”
It is a pity that the name of the
shrewd observer has not been preserved.
So sagacious a man ought
not to be anonymous.
On the 10th of February he tells
us:—
“The process of preparation has
steadily gone on in the loyal States,
while that of exhaustion has been going
on in the disloyal.... We have the
most satisfactory evidence that the
Union will be hailed in every quarter
just as fast as the army shall emancipate
the people from the oppression of
the insurgent leaders.”
March 15—“The financial and
moral, as well as the physical, elements
of the insurrection seem to
be rapidly approaching exhaustion.”
On 25th March it seems impossible
to the sanguine Secretary that the
organisation of the insurgents can
be longer maintained. On 28th
April he asserts that “to-day the
country is assuming that the fate
of this unnatural war is determined
by the great event of the capture of
New Orleans.” On the 5th May
the fiscal system of the insurgents
must, he calculates, have exploded,
and their military connections be
everywhere broken. On 28th May
the Federal Government is said to
possess the Mississippi and all the
other great natural highways. And
on June 2—
“The war in the Mississippi valley
may be deemed virtually ended....
The army of General M‘Clellan will be
rapidly strengthened, although it is already
deemed adequate to the capture
of Richmond.... No American now
indulges any doubt that the integrity of
the Union will be triumphantly maintained.”
24th June:—
“You tell me that in England they
still point to the delays at Richmond
and Corinth, and they enlarge upon the
absence of displays of Union feeling in
New Orleans and Norfolk. Ah, well!
scepticism must be expected in this
world in regard to new political systems,
insomuch as even Divine revelation
needs the aid of miracles to make
converts to a new religious faith.”
On 7th July, after M‘Clellan’s
disasters, he says:—
“The military situation is clearly intelligible,
and ought to be satisfactory
to the cool and candid judgment of the
country.... We have a rumour that
Vicksburg is actually taken. But the
report is premature, though we have no
doubt but the capture has before this
time occurred.”
And on the 10th November, just
before the defeat of Fredericksburg,
we find him “apprehending no insurmountable
obstacles to complete
success.”
Nor are his prophecies addressed
only to England. On the 15th
April he tells Mr Dayton:—
“A few days will probably complete
the opening of the Mississippi river,
and restore to the country that national
outlet of the great granary of America
which disunion, in its madness, has
temporarily attempted to obstruct, in
violation not more of political laws than
of the ordinances of nature.”
22d April:—
“We have reason to expect Savannah
to come into our possession within
the next ten days.”
5th May:—
“We shall have peace and union in
a very few months, let France and
Great Britain do what they may. We
should have them in one month if either
the Emperor or the Queen should speak
the word, and say, If the life of this
unnatural insurrection hangs on an expectation
of our favour, let it die. To
bring the Emperor to this conviction is
your present urgent duty.”
On the 10th May he has a vision
of a Yankee millennium:—
“Less than a year will witness the
dissolution of all the armies; the ironclad
navy will rest idly in our ports;
taxes will immediately decrease; and
new States will be coming into the
Confederacy, bringing rich contributions
to the relief and comfort of mankind.”
On the 10th July he says:—
“The reduction of Vicksburg, the
possession of Chattanooga, and the
capture of Richmond, would close the
civil war with complete success. All
these three enterprises are going forward.
The two former will, we think,
be effected within the next ten days.”
And in September he actually
bites his thumb at the Emperor:—
“We have not been misled,” he says,
“by any of the semblances of impartiality
or of neutrality which unfriendly
proceedings towards us in a perilous
strife have put on. When any
Government shall incline to a new and
more unfriendly attitude, we shall then
revise with care our existing relations
towards that Power, and shall act in
the emergency as becomes a people who
have never yet faltered in their duty
to themselves while they were endeavouring
to improve the condition of the
human race.”
Compared with these prophecies
the ravings of Mother Shipton become
respectable oracles. Yet on
them was founded the entire foreign
policy of the Federal Government;
the complaints that foreign
statesmen and other sane persons
would not confide in them were incessant;
and they were the lights
by which American envoys were
expected to steer.
These gentlemen, with more or
less sense and discretion, all write
in the stilted creaking style, stuck
over with hard metaphors, which
distinguishes the master-spirit Seward,
and which appears to be the
characteristic of American public
compositions. They seem to have
caught, and to express very honestly,
not only his style but his
ideas, and to represent perfectly
the querulous, arrogant, exacting
tone of the Secretary. It is not,
probably, from a wish to do him
homage that they thus accurately
reflect him, but rather because it is
natural to American politicians to
take abroad with them that idea of
the pre-eminence of their country
which they have passed their lives
at home in asserting, and because
their habit of regarding England as
the abode of a jealous aristocracy,
and as being always in the wrong,
places them in a position of natural
antagonism to us in every case that
can arise. But, granting this to be
inevitable, we may consider ourselves
very fortunate that America
is represented among us by a gentleman
in every way so entitled to
respect as Mr Adams. The son of
one President and the grandson of
another, both of whom were elected
to the chief place in the Republic
at a time when something else besides
obscurity and the absence of
any quality which could excite the
jealousy of aspiring men, was demanded
for the attainment of the
position which Washington had
filled, the claims of Mr Adams as
a public man evidently rest on
other grounds than those of ordinary
American politicians. We do
not doubt that the expressions of
goodwill and courtesy addressed
to him from our Foreign Office are
perfectly sincere and deserved. It
is true that the tone of his correspondence
with that office is often
captious, and his demands are
sometimes unreasonable. Without
prompting from his own Government
he seems often to prejudge
questions of international law with
a bias that blinds him to the true
bearing of the question, as in the
case of the Emily St Pierre, and
leads him to treat as an injury
the denial of concessions which
are denied because impossible
to be granted. But this is the
traditionary character of American
diplomacy: it thus expresses the
spirit of the people, with the promptings
of which a Minister may think
himself bound to comply; and both
Mr Adams and Mr Dayton, Minister
to France, appear in their correspondence
to discharge their
duties with great zeal and fidelity,
and, moreover, to display the virtue,
not by any means universal
among their brethren, of confining
themselves to the business of their
own legations.
We need not say that our remarks
relate only to Mr Adams’s
share in the published correspondence,
and not to his later acts.
The extraordinary step he took on
the 9th April, in granting a permit
to an English vessel enabling her
to pass the blockade, is fraught
with consequences too important
to be dwelt on here, and, if unexplained,
would force us largely to
qualify our encomium.
It might be supposed that the
ties between Austria and America
are neither numerous nor close, and
that consequently the Minister to
Vienna would find but a narrow
field for the display of his qualities
as a diplomatist. Accordingly we
find Mr Motley, in the dearth of
other matter, falling back upon the
grand resource of American politicians,
and discussing English affairs
as the most natural topic possible
to engage the attention of an envoy
at Vienna. From that convenient
point of observation, then, he proceeds
to enlighten the Washington
Cabinet on the disposition and intentions
of the statesmen, and
organs of the press, of Great Britain;
and as other ministers elsewhere
imitate this course, the
Government of Mr Lincoln has the
advantage of seeing British policy
represented, not merely in the aspect
in which it is seen by Mr
Adams the special photographer,
but as it appears when viewed by
amateurs from the various capitals
of Europe.
Should a Tory Government succeed
the present Cabinet, Mr Motley
anticipates much trouble. Nothing,
he says, can exceed the virulence
with which the extreme Conservative
party regard America, nor the
delight with which they look forward
to its extinction as a nation. The
hatred to the English Radicals is,
he has discovered, “the secret of the
ferocity and brutality with which
the ‘Times,’ the ‘Saturday Review,’
and other Tory organs of the press,
have poured out their insults upon
America ever since the war began.”
How the journals thus classified
may approve being linked together
as Tory organs, we cannot
say. To ourselves we, of course,
see nothing personal in the general
allusion, our leaning to Radicalism
and Republicanism being too
notorious to admit of any mistake.
Subsequently Mr Motley writes a
long essay about British matters,
explaining the sentiments of the
“venerable Premier of England”
and our Foreign Minister, and criticising
the speech made by Mr
Gladstone at Newcastle, part of
which makes him very angry, and
causes him to express a hope that
that statesman’s tongue may be blistered.
Nor, unusual as his style of
diplomatic correspondence may appear,
does he stand quite alone in it.
It is possible that the godfathers
and godmothers of Mr Cassius Marcellus
Clay are, in principal degree,
responsible for the efforts made by
that gentleman to attain notoriety.
It would be mean to sneak obscurely
about the world under such magnificent
appellations. Better, in such
a case, be called John Thomas.
Hence, without any quality apparent
that would entitle the bearer
of these historic names to claim distinction
amid the company of a pothouse,
his efforts to become known
in the world have been as unceasing
as if he were some wronged
genius entitled to a hearing. At the
outbreak of hostilities he launched
from Paris a tremendous defiance
against our unfortunate country.
Then he published a letter in the
‘Times,’ telling us what we ought
to do in the American quarrel, and,
in case we should not comply,
threatening our great-grandchildren
with the vengeance of we forget
how many millions of unborn Yankees.
At this time he was on his
way to St Petersburg as United
States Minister to Russia. For his
guidance he had received one of
Mr Seward’s most elaborate moral
essays, beginning in this remarkable
way: “Sir,—Nations, like individuals,
have three prominent
wants: first, freedom; secondly,
prosperity; thirdly, friends. The
United States early secured the two
first objects by the exercise of courage
and enterprise. But, although
they have always practised singular
moderation, they nevertheless have
been slow in winning friends.”
Fortified with a great deal of this
kind of composition, Mr Clay arrived
in the Russian capital. From
his own correspondence we learn
that he found the Emperor “absent
in the direction of Moscow,” and
being advised by the Assistant-Secretary
of State to await his Majesty’s
return, “I presumed,” he says,
“it would not be agreeable to the
Emperor for me to follow on.” In a
few days he had an interview with
Prince Gortchakoff, who “asked
after Pickens” (whether Pickens is
something, or some place, or somebody,
does not appear), “my family,
and other things in a familiar way,
when I was dismissed by again
shaking hands.” Soon after we
learn that he and “his suite, Green
Clay, William C. Goodloe, and T.
Williams,” set out for Peterhoff,
where the Emperor received them,
and addressed Mr Clay in a set
speech, which was delivered in
Russian, though, says he, “the
Emperor spoke American mostly.”
We are at liberty, therefore, to suppose
that his Majesty, during great
part of the interview, spoke through
his nose; and, no doubt, Prince
Gortchakoff, who spoke only English,
beheld with wonder, not unmixed
with envy, this exhibition of
his Imperial master’s accomplishments
as a linguist.
Mr Clay then addressed to the
Emperor an essay on the moral
government of Russia, which, from
internal evidence, we pronounce to
have been learnt by heart from a
prize paper by Seward. “The
Emperor,” he says, “seemed much
gratified and really moved by this
last remark,” possibly because it
was the last; and, besides speaking
Russian and American, Alexander
was so ostentatious as to conclude
the interview by speaking English,
perhaps deeming it appropriate to
the subject-matter. “He wanted
to know if I thought England
would interfere. I told him we
did not care what she did; that
her interference would tend to
unite us the more; that we
fought the South with reluctance;
we were much intermarried and of
a common history; but that the
course of England had aroused our
sensibilities towards her in no very
pleasant manner. The Emperor
seemed to like my defiance of old
John Bull very much. He wanted
to know if I was a relative of
Henry Clay, and what was my
military rank. I told him I was
only a distant relation of Clay, and
that I wore the uniform of an
American colonel” (borrowed, perhaps,
from another relation, Pipe
Clay), “which rank I filled in my
own country.” His Majesty then
shook hands twice with the Ambassador,
and dismissed him.
Before concluding the despatch
from which we learn the foregoing
interesting particulars, it seems to
have occurred to Mr Clay that it
would be judicious to show Mr
Seward that moralising on the war
was a game which two could play
at; and he wound up in the following
style:—
“I have already made this letter too
long; but I cannot conclude without
saying how much more and more I
value the great and inestimable blessings
of our Government, and how I
trust in God that no compromise will
be made of the great idea for which we
have so long fought, but that General
Scott, following out the programme of
Mr Lincoln’s inaugural, will slowly and
surely subdue the rebellion, ‘stock,
lock, and gun-barrel,’ ‘hook and line,
bob and sinker,’ and that we may all be
spared to see once more the glorious
old banner restored,—‘Liberty and
union, now and for ever—one and inseparable.’”
These extracts from the Clay correspondence
of 1861 will no doubt
cause the reader keenly to regret
that we cannot give more. But the
fact is that, whether Mr Seward was
jealous of Mr Clay’s native humour
as displayed in these papers, or
considered him a formidable rival
as a moral essayist, or whatever the
cause might be, the omissions are
so numerous that a great part of
the Ambassador’s correspondence
consists of asterisks, leaving only
the driest details, such as any ordinary
John Thomas or Green Clay
might have written. So numerous
are the stars between the stripes of
print, that the successive pages look
like so many representations of the
American banner. But in January
last year he wrote an essay on the
subject of the perfidy and general
villainy of Great Britain, which has
fortunately been preserved entire.
“In this critical time,” he says,
“whether war or peace with England
ensues, I deem it my duty to
give the President my impressions
of European sentiment.” He then
details the reasons why the monarchies
and aristocracies of Europe
have always regarded his republic
with jealousy. “Their jealousy,
their secret hate, their blind vengeance
verges,” Mr Clay thinks, “upon
insanity;.... they renew with us
the fable of the wolf and the lamb;
though we are below on the mountain
stream, we are accused of
muddying the waters.” His method
of dealing with Secession is tersely
expressed—“I have always thought
that the whole property of the
rebels, slaves and all, should be
summarily confiscated.” But before
prescribing this treatment for
the South, he devotes a paragraph
to the way in which England
should be handled:—
“In case of war with England,” he
says, “Canada should be seized at all
hazards. A large force should be first
placed in fortifications in some place
suitable near the coast, which would
cut off reinforcements from England.
Union with us, with equal rights,
should be offered the Canadians, and
the lives and property of friends secured.
Men and money should be sent
to Ireland, India, and all the British
dominions all over the world, to stir
up revolt. Our cause is just; and vengeance
will sooner or later overtake
that perfidious aristocracy.”
Such was the esteem in which the
Cabinet of Washington held either
the practical qualities evinced in this
essay, or the diplomatic services veiled
under the asterisks, that they were
considered to entitle him, on his
return to America, to the position
of a Brigadier-General. In the
records of the war we cannot, however,
find that Brigadier Cassius
Marcellus ever performed any military
achievement worthy either
of the foe of Cæsar or the foe of
Hannibal. He seems to have worn
his warlike honours with remarkable
meekness, and never to have
done anything to fulfil his own
aspiration that “liberty and union
may be for ever inseparable,” by
taking the smallest step towards
the subjugation of the enemy. Under
these circumstances Mr Seward,
finding his military so inferior to
his diplomatic talents, seems to
have thought that the Brigadier
who had failed to bid defiance to
the South would find a more appropriate
field of action in resuming
his employment of gratifying
the Emperor of Russia with other
defiances of “old John Bull”—and
accordingly we learn that the eminent
statesman either is, or is to
be, once more Minister to St Petersburg,
and may possibly be at this
moment engaged in his favourite
occupations of shaking the hand of
the Emperor, and shaking his own
hand at the British monarchy. If
it be so, we may perhaps hope to
read, in another state paper, of his
second reception at the Court of
Russia—which, judging from the
familiar cordiality displayed in the
first, may, if the Czar should again
deign to express himself in the
American language, open something
in this way,—“Wal, Cassius M.
Clay, how air you, old hoss? Do
you feel pretty brisk and spry, sir?
How is it you ha’n’t chawed up
them rebels yet, lock, stock, and
gun-barrel, hook and line, bob and
sinker? What do you think of our
insurrection to Poland, sir?”
Future volumes of these documents
will probably reveal Mr
Seward as still assuring his correspondents
that the end of the
rebellion is at hand; that foreign
Governments will soon see dire
reason to repent their hostility;
that the Union is growing stronger
with every “reverse of our arms;”
that discord and desertion and corruption
are only “fresh developments
of patriotism;” and that the
flooding of the lands on the Mississippi,
far from being an act of barbarous
vindictiveness, will be as
beneficent in its consequences as the
overflowing of the Nile. We shall
probably see, too, that American
envoys, addressing themselves, not
to Mr Seward, but to the masses
behind him, his masters and theirs,
are still denouncing our perfidious
aristocracy and jealous monarchy.
Is it a comedy or a tragedy that
these men are acting? If unconscious
absurdity and ludicrous
unfitness for the conduct of grave
affairs were all the elements of the
exhibition, we might well afford
to laugh; but, unfortunately, the
grotesque display has its terrible
side, and incapacity and conceit
only increase the tremendous power
of mischief wielded by the principal
characters in the burlesque.
Meanwhile the course of foreign
Governments is not likely to be
materially affected by the lucubrations
of the American Secretary of
State; and, amidst the strange displays
of weakness made by the
North, not the least strange will
be the futility of its diplomacy.
THE BUDGET.
645
The soundness of the position
taken up by the Opposition last
year in regard to the national finances,
has this year been fully established
by the admissions and procedure
of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. It may seem remarkable
that the Chancellor of the
Exchequer should preface his financial
statement by referring to a
resolution of the House, which was
adopted at the instance of the
Opposition,—that he should avowedly
base his present Budget upon
that resolution. But Mr Gladstone
is a Minister of consummate Parliamentary
tact, who avails himself of
every plea which best serves his
purpose for the time; and, as we
shall see in the sequel, he had a
special reason for thus seeking to
cover with the authority of Parliament
a Budget which is not quite
so accordant with the resolution of
the House as he desires it to be
thought. The resolution, which
was adopted at the instance of the
Opposition, and upon which the
Chancellor of the Exchequer professedly
bases his present Budget,
insisted upon the necessity of reducing
the national expenditure.
It was urged upon the Government
that the financial administration of
the three previous years had been
such as to trench deeply upon the
extraordinary resources of the country,
and that, while ostensibly adding
to the military strength of the
country, we were really diminishing
our power by exhausting the
sources by which the expenses of
war and national defence could be
sustained. It was pointed out that
during these years we had not only
abolished, and put out of reach,
several important taxes for the remission
of which there was no
urgent necessity, but that, in order
to do so, we had actually incurred
a considerable deficit. Of late
years not only the leaders of the
Opposition, but some of the highest
financial authorities on the Ministerial
side of the House—including
Lord Overstone, Lord Monteagle,
and Earl Grey—had denounced as
most impolitic the hand-to-mouth
system pursued by Mr Gladstone,
and had urged the necessity of
framing the estimates with a view
to obtaining a substantial yearly
surplus. These were the considerations
which led the House of Commons
last summer to adopt the
resolution to which the Chancellor
of the Exchequer now appeals in
justification of his Budget; and
they must not be forgotten when
examining how far the financial
programme of the present year is
in accordance with that resolution.
A new critic now takes the field
against Mr Gladstone, and adds his
protest to those which have already
been made by the other leading
financial authorities. In a new edition
of his work on Taxation, that
veteran Liberal and political economist,
Mr M’Culloch, severely criticises
the recent financial policy of
the Government, and endorses with
his high and obviously impartial
authority the opinions by which
that policy has been so often combated
by the Conservatives. To
all the special features of Gladstonian
finance Mr M’Culloch is opposed.
He is strongly in favour of
the maintenance of a good yearly
surplus, as an indispensable feature
of a prudent system of finance; he
condemns as most impolitic that
narrowing of the area of taxation
which Mr Gladstone extols as a
“simplification of the tariff;” and
he moreover objects, in the strongest
terms, to the manner in which
that principle of “simplification”
has been applied.
It is not surprising that the voice
of protest should thus be raised
from all quarters against the principles
of Mr Gladstone’s finance.
To begin with, he has been a most
prodigal financier, and cares not a
jot for the future. At a time when
the charges on the National Debt
were reduced by the falling-in of
the terminable annuities, to the
extent of two millions a-year—when
there was an unexpected repayment
of a portion of the Spanish loan,
and other windfalls—and when he
found a surplus of considerable
amount left to him by his predecessors
in office,—then surely, if ever,
the country had a right to expect
from the Chancellor of the Exchequer
a succession of good annual
balance-sheets. If the policy
of maintaining a substantial surplus
is not carried out under these
favourable circumstances, the fault
must lie with the administrator of
the national finances. Yet, so far
has Mr Gladstone been from adhering
to the old and sound maxim
of financial policy, that he has not
only given us no surplus, but has
recklessly incurred us a deficit, of
which he now makes no mention.
Had this bad condition of the finances
been incurred in consequence
of an exceptional increase of the national
expenditure which could only
be met by the imposition of new
taxes, it might have been excusable.
But there was no such difficulty:
the revenue was sufficient, if let
alone, to have more than kept pace
with the expenditure. The peculiar
culpability of Mr Gladstone as
a financial Minister—the pernicious
feature of his system which called
forth the eloquent denunciation of
Lord Overstone, and the emphatic
protest of Earl Grey and Lord Monteagle,
and of the ablest financial
journal of the Liberal party, the
‘Economist’—is, that during this
period of so-called exceptional
expenditure he has deliberately
thrown away the means which were
at his disposal for meeting it. He
has abolished taxes against which
there was no peculiar ground of
complaint, and he has reduced
others in order to cheapen certain
commodities for which there was
no general demand.
This financial system of Mr
Gladstone is, unfortunately, not a
mere thing of the past. Its consequences
weigh upon us now, and
there is no sign of his abandoning
it. It is a novel system—novel
even to himself; but he adheres
to it with an obstinacy which
threatens to embarrass us in the
future not less than in the past.
A grave question must be at stake
when the greatest financial authorities
of the Liberal party come forward
prominently to side with the
Conservatives in opposing and denouncing
the policy of the Chancellor
of the Exchequer. They feel
strongly that the recent hand-to-mouth
system of Mr Gladstone
will not do, and that in times of
emergency it would entail grave
disaster upon the national fortunes.
“Great nations—such, for example,
as England and France,” says Mr
M’Culloch, “with colonies and
dependencies in all parts of the
world, and with jealous and powerful
neighbours, must expect to
be every now and then involved
in difficulties; and on that account
they should have a considerable
surplus revenue—i. e., a considerable
surplus after defraying the
cost of their usual establishments,”
And he adds—“Had the affair
in regard to the Trent led, as it was
not unlikely to do, to a war with
the United States, it would have
found us in an awkward situation—without
any surplus revenue,
with discredited customs and excise
duties, and nothing to fall back
upon but an increase of the Income-tax
and loans.” We regret to say
that the calamity from which we so
narrowly escaped two years ago,
cannot be regarded as unlikely of
occurrence now; and there are also
elements of strife sufficiently formidable
on our own side of the
Atlantic to engage the thoughts of
our statesmen, and to invest with
peculiar interest the at all times
momentous subject of the national
finances. When we hear so old a
Liberal and so practised a political
economist as Mr M’Culloch echoing
Lord Castlereagh, and charging the
country in the very words of the
Tory statesman, with an “ignorant
impatience of taxation,” we cannot
but be confirmed in the views which
we have repeatedly expressed in
regard to the policy of the present
Chancellor of the Exchequer; and
the country at large will do well to
reconsider that policy and the principle
upon which it is based.
On one occasion in 1857, when
the late Sir G. C. Lewis—whose
death is a loss alike to the country
and to the Ministry—referred to an
opinion of one who had as good a
knowledge of the practical working
of taxation as any man either before
or since, Mr Gladstone exclaimed
with the utmost contempt—“He
goes back to Arthur Young,
sir: old Arthur Young he takes for
his authority!” And when, in
his own recent Budget speech, Mr
Gladstone, with all the ingenuity
of rhetoric, was calling upon the
House to stand amazed at the rapid
increase in the [nominal?] income
of the country (one-fifth during eight
years), which he claimed as the result
of his policy,—and Sir J. Packington
quietly suggested that it is
Australia and the new gold mines
that have caused the difference,—Mr
Gladstone rejoined, “Australia!
Oh no: the right honourable gentleman
is lost in the depths of heresy
on that point.” This overbearing
presumption is natural to Mr Gladstone,
who finds it a convenient
way of summarily evading difficulties
which are more easily scoffed
at than answered. But we take
leave to think that there are few
intelligent men in this country who,
for width of view and soundness of
judgment, would not have preferred
the late Sir George Lewis to
his more eloquent and ingenious
colleague. And for ourselves we
entertain no doubt that Sir J. Pakington
was perfectly correct in his
suggestion, and that the great increase
alike in the income of this
country, and in certain branches of
the expenditure, is in part attributable
to the rise in the monetary
value of property and labour in
consequence of the new markets for
our goods in Australia, and the
great addition to the stock of gold.[9]
Mr Gladstone would probably treat
Mr M’Culloch in the same contemptuous
fashion,—especially as
Mr M’Culloch’s opinions and arguments,
if correct, totally demolish
the “system” which Mr Gladstone
of late years, and in contradiction
to his former self, has been labouring
to establish. But we shall give
the public an opportunity of judging
whether Mr M’Culloch’s opinions
are not as well founded as
they are harmonious with those of
the Conservative party.
Mr M’Culloch maintains that it
is more than doubtful whether any
remission of taxation should take
place unless the revenue exceed the
ordinary expenditure by some 5
or 10 per cent of its amount. In
other words, he considers that, with
an expenditure equal to that of the
United Kingdom, the estimates
should always be so framed as to
have a conjectural balance of four or
five millions. Mr Gladstone rarely
aims at having a surplus of even
a tenth of that amount; and sometimes
£80,000 or less seems to him
enough to meet the chapter of accidents,
and sustain the moral power
and financial credit of the country!
The following passage, which appears
in the new edition of Mr
M’Culloch’s work, seems to have
been written expressly in reference
to the financial administration of
the present Chancellor of the Exchequer:—
“In countries under free or constitutional
governments the reduction or repeal
of taxes is frequently proposed in
the view of courting popularity, or of
favourably influencing public opinion.
And the desire to grasp an immediate
advantage, to be relieved of a burden,
without caring for the ultimate consequences
of its extinction, is so extremely
prevalent, that such projects, though
often very undeserving, seldom fail to
procure a less or greater share of the
public sympathy for those by whom they
are put forth. Statesmen, however, and
those intrusted with the duties of government,
should take a less circumscribed
view of such matters, and are bound to
inquire into the real character of the
measures that come before them, and to
weigh and consider their more remote as
well as their proximate results. Their
duty is to oppose, not to pander to the
selfish and unfounded prejudices of the
public.... The real questions are, can
the tax be spared; and, if not, can it
be replaced by a less inconvenient or injurious
tax? If it can neither be spared
nor replaced by another that is less objectionable,
its repeal would be as futile,
as inexpedient, and as unadvised a measure
as can well be imagined.”
Mr Gladstone, in his desire for
popularity, has carried the practice
thus emphatically condemned by
Mr M’Culloch to a most dangerous
extreme. He totally disregards the
sound principle of ending every
year with a surplus, in order to
meet sudden and unforeseen contingencies,
and he lavishes every
spare pound upon the reduction
of taxation. Moreover, in making
these reductions, he has adopted a
practice which, although he presents
it under the attractive guise
of a “simplification of the tariff,”
is paving the way for a serious
popular agitation against some of
the indispensable elements of our
fiscal system. Sir Robert Peel, it is
true, simplified the tariff; but he did
so more wisely and prudently. It was
not merely for the sake of simplicity
that he reduced the list of taxed
commodities, but because many of
the taxes at that time vexed trade
without appreciably swelling the
revenue. Previous to his administration,
our customs tariff comprised
above a thousand articles, many of
which were insignificant, and all
but unproductive to the State. But
Mr Gladstone has carried out the
same practice on a very different
principle. The tariff, as left by Sir
Robert Peel, embraced above four
hundred items; now it is restricted
to about forty. Indeed, this branch
of our revenue at present is raised
almost entirely from sugar, tea,
tobacco, spirits, wine, beer, corn,
coffee, currants and raisins, timber,
and pepper. This is objectionable
in many respects. In the first place,
it renders our revenue liable to be
much more seriously affected by the
fluctuations of trade and the condition
of the masses of the people, than
under the old system; and by
concentrating taxation upon a few
commodities, it makes the fiscal
pressure more obvious and more
felt, and furnishes proportionately
greater scope for popular agitation.
“When the public attention is
fixed exclusively on a few leading
and indeed necessary articles,” says
Mr M’Culloch, “it is all but certain
that the duties on them, even
should they be moderate, will come
to be looked upon as being, in no
ordinary degree, objectionable and
oppressive. But were a great variety
of articles, suitable for the
consumption of all classes, subject
to duties, there would be but little
probability of the public attention
being concentrated on a few only.”
And what are the few commodities
which now furnish the principal
part of our revenue? As we have
seen, precisely those which are consumed
in greatest quantity by the
bulk of the people. There is no
real inequality in the distribution
of our taxation; for the Income-Tax,
the Succession-Duties, &c., do
not fall at all upon the lower classes,
and have been framed so as to keep
the balance of taxation equal between
the rich and the poor. But
we fear this fact will not be fairly
considered by the masses, who, under
the influence of demagogues
like Mr Bright, are too prone to
think themselves unjustly dealt
with. Two months ago we pointed
out this feature of Mr Gladstone’s
financial policy, as one eminently
provocative of agitation against
some branches of our revenue which
it is indispensable to preserve. Mr
M’Culloch holds a similar opinion.
He says—
“When such duties apply to all kinds
of things [the raw materials of industry
and the prime articles of food being excepted],
it is seen that they must affect,
in one way or other, every class, and,
indeed, every individual, and being
merged in and forming a part of the
price of the articles on which they are
charged, they attract little or no attention.
But such will not be the case with
us in time to come. Consumption
duties have ceased to be general, and are
now (1862) unfortunately restricted to a
few leading articles, comprising some of
the principal necessaries and luxuries of
the labouring poor. So striking and
momentous a change cannot fail to rouse
the public attention; and will, it is to
be feared, give rise to a belief that it is
essentially partial and unfair. And such
belief will be better founded than it is
at all desirable it should be; for, while
we admit various luxuries of the rich
and the great, including the most recherché
wines, at very low duties, and
many more, comprising, among others,
the finest laces, velvets, porcelain, tablecloths,
carpets, silks, gloves, ornamental
furniture, bronzes, and so forth, free of
all charge, we lay heavy duties on the
tea and sugar, which are indispensable
to the labouring poor, and heavier still
on the tobacco, the spirits, and the beer
which constitute their luxuries. Is it
to be supposed that such a policy should
be considered by the bulk of the people
as other than unfair and offensive?”
It is a most important principle
of judicious finance that the incidence
of taxation should be as little
felt as possible, and also that it
should not only be fair, but be seen
to be fair. We believe that the
present taxation of this country falls
very equally on all classes; but, unfortunately,
under Mr Gladstone’s
“reforms,” it has assumed an appearance
of gross inequality. We
have largely increased the spirit
duties, and we have kept up the
taxes on malt and beer, yet we have
greatly reduced the duties on wine.
Moreover, we have made the reduction
of the duties on wines in such
a way that the finest wines pay no
more than the cheap wines. Several
articles of luxury have likewise,
under the operation of the
French treaty, disappeared from
the tariff, and their absence, though
of no great importance as affecting
the revenue, gives a handle to demagogues
who desire to excite the
masses against the taxation of the
country. The “Financial Reform
Association,” and the Radical party
in general, could have no better
ally than Mr Gladstone; and the
chief result of his “popular” Budgets
will inevitably be to render our
whole system of taxation extremely
unpopular.
Mr Gladstone’s new Budget is
less ingenious, less experimental,
less obviously hazardous, than those
which have preceded it. The balance
is, in appearance at least,
kept even between direct and indirect
taxation: and the twopence off
the income-tax, and the fivepence
off the duties on tea, reduce these
taxes to the level at which they
stood prior to the Russian war.
The modification of the Income-tax
upon incomes between £100 and
£200 a-year is an improvement.
Mr Gladstone has also done well
in admitting a past error of his,
by abolishing the small charges on
certain operations, of trade which
he imposed in 1860, but which
have been found exceedingly vexatious
to commerce. Nor can any
objection be taken to the change
which he proposes to make on the
taxation of railways, by which the
tax on the passenger traffic is reduced
from 5 to 3½ per cent, while
the exemption at present enjoyed
by parliamentary and excursion
trains is abolished. His proposal
to levy the Income-tax upon the
revenues of corporations which are
expended in charity, and on the
income of endowed charities, is
more open to question; and so
are some of his other minor proposals;
but the interests affected
are not sufficiently powerful to
offer much opposition to the Government.
The main facts of Mr Gladstone’s
financial statement are briefly as
follows. Warned by the strong expression
of opinion on the part of
the House in favour of a reduction
of expenditure, the Government resolved
to anticipate farther opposition
by curtailing the estimates
which the House had so reluctantly
voted, and last year spent about
£800,000 less than they had taken
power to do. In respect to the
Revenue, Mr Gladstone’s estimates
were singularly at fault. As on
previous occasions, his estimate of
the Excise greatly exceeded the
actual return, which this year has
fallen short of his estimate by more
than a million sterling. But the
Income-tax yielded nearly half a
million more than he calculated,
and so have the Customs; and the
total produce of the national taxes
has been so favourable as to leave
a surplus of about £400,000 above
the estimate, and an excess of
£1,300,000 above the expenditure.
The revenue of the past year
amounted to £70,603,000, the expenditure
was £69,302,000: surplus
£1,301,000. If the taxes were
to remain on the same footing this
year, they would yield (according
to Mr Gladstone) £71,490,000;
and he proposes some trifling new
taxes amounting to £133,000: together
equal to £71,623,000. And
as the estimated expenditure for the
ensuing year is only £67,749,000
(£1,553,000 less than last year’s),
the surplus at the end of the ensuing
year, if the taxes were kept
at their present rate, would be
£3,874,000. But the proposed reductions
of taxation, chiefly on the
Income-tax and Tea-duties, will
cause a loss of revenue in the
ensuing year to the extent of
£3,343,000; so that the actual surplus,
as estimated by Mr Gladstone,
will be £531,000. The Budget
stands thus:
REVENUE.
Customs,
£22,737,000
Excise,
17,658,000
Stamps,
9,000,000
Taxes,
3,160,000
Income-tax,
8,675,000
Post Office,
3,800,000
Crown Lands,
300,000
Miscellaneous,
2,950,000
£68,280,000
EXPENDITURE.
Debt,
£26,333,000
Consolidated Fund,
1,940,000
Army,
15,060,000
Navy,
10,730,000
Collection,
4,721,000
Miscellaneous,
8,965,000
£67,749,000
Surplus,
£531,000.
The surplus which Mr Gladstone
thus reckons upon this year
is far below the amount which our
best financiers consider requisite
for the maintenance of a sound
system of finance. It is true, and
we attach great weight to the consideration,
that the present depressed
state of an important branch
of national industry renders it desirable
that the taxation of the
country should be reduced as low
as possible. But this argument,
unhappily, cuts two ways. For the
same depression of trade, which
calls for a minimum of taxation this
year, to at least a similar extent
places in jeopardy the surplus
which the Chancellor of the Exchequer
reckons upon. In his
estimate of the produce of the
excise, especially, we believe that
he commits his usual mistake of
being too sanguine. But the really
hazardous feature of his Budget
consists in this: That only a part
of the proposed reductions of taxation
will take effect during the ensuing
year; and, therefore, the
estimates which suffice for the
financial year, upon which we have
entered, will be inadequate for the
year following. The reductions of
taxation which will take place before
April next will, as we have
said, amount to £3,343,000; but
the total yearly loss of revenue consequent
upon the reductions proposed
by the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
is £4,242,000; so that if
they took entire effect during the
present year, instead of a surplus of
£531,000, there would be a deficit
of £368,000. But of the loss on
the Income-tax, £850,000 will only
fall on the following year (1864–5),
and £49,000 of loss from the abolition
of some petty taxes will likewise
be passed on to next year.
Thus we obtain a surplus of £531,000
for the present financial year only
by passing on to next year a loss
of £900,000. If the finances had
been in a thoroughly good condition,
and if the state of the country
promised to be prosperous, and our
relations with other Powers peaceful,
the heavy legacy of loss for the
year 1864–5 might be contemplated
with less alarm; for the experience
of late years shows that, in ordinary
times, the productiveness of
the revenue tends to augment at
the rate of £700,000 a-year. But
this is not the case. And, moreover,
as Mr Gladstone’s estimate of
the miscellaneous receipts for the
present year embrace half a million
sterling of the China indemnity
money—a payment which will not
take place again—the deficit which
we are preparing for the year 1864–5,
is an exceedingly formidable one =
£1,400,000.
This is the weak point of Mr
Gladstone’s Budget. Suppose his
expectations are fully realised—suppose
he have a surplus at the
end of this year of half a million,
and that the productiveness of the
taxes increase next year to the
extent of £700,000 (which is not
likely),—there would nevertheless
be a deficit in the year 1864–5 of
£200,000. Such a result, the most
favourable that can be expected,
cannot be regarded with indifference.
But this is not all. Is it
not a fact that the balances in the
Exchequer in March last year were
£2,684,000 less than they were in
1860, when Mr Gladstone began
his present financial administration?
And as he does not take
any account of that deficit in his
new Budget, the deficit remains unprovided
for, and of course renders
his present financial programme
doubly hazardous. It was only by
the help of the two and a half millions
abstracted from the Exchequer
balances, and also by creating
new Debt to the extent of £461,000,
that he escaped bankruptcy during
the two first years of his financial
administration: and if he had been
a Minister of ordinary prudence, he
would have felt bound to replace
those sums before he proceeded to
make further reductions of taxation.
But he is determined to produce
popular Budgets, however dear
a price the country may have to
pay for them in the long run. He
justifies anew the censure which
Mr M’Culloch has passed upon such
a system of finance. He makes the
show of a surplus for the ensuing
year, only by ignoring nearly three
millions of deficit which he has
accumulated in past years, and by
preparing a new deficit for the year
1864–5.
Every proposal to reduce taxation
is sure to be popular,—we are
equally sure that the present reductions
are exceedingly dangerous.
It is one thing to cut down expenditure—and
this, we conceive, was
what the Conservatives last year
urged upon the Government: it is
quite another thing to dispense
with a real surplus, to resign ourselves
to a past deficit, and prepare
for ourselves a new one. The errors
of Mr Gladstone’s previous Budgets
now begin to weigh heavy
upon the national fortunes. The
abandonment of the paper-duties
has rendered our present financial
position one of no ordinary embarrassment.
Had these duties still
been in operation, the present reductions
of taxation, so desirable
in themselves, and so repeatedly
called for by the Conservative party,
could have been effected without any
risk. As it is, we think the financial
position of the country eminently
unsatisfactory and unsafe. Not
only must we experience a deficit
in the year 1864–5, but we are
totally unprepared for any untoward
contingencies in the present
year. The peace of Europe (if
peace it may be called) is obviously
insecure; hostilities seem impending
between this country and Japan;
and our relations with the Federal
States of North America are such
as, unhappily, and from no fault of
ours, to render the occurrence of
war between the two countries a
contingency which cannot entirely
be overlooked. But if any exceptional
expenditure be forced upon
us, how are we to meet it? Under
Mr Gladstone’s management, the
taxation of the country has been so
concentrated upon a few articles of
universal consumption, and the
duty upon some of those commodities
(such as spirits) has been so obviously
carried to the highest possible
point, that to increase the revenue
from its present sources would be
extremely difficult and unpopular.
We cannot reimpose the old duties
on wines, silks, gloves, and other
articles embraced in the French
treaty, for in respect to these we
have sold our freedom of taxation
to a foreign power. The
paper duties are irretrievably abandoned;
for, however impolitic may
have been the abolition of those
duties in times like the present,
their reimposition would be a great
hardship and injustice to the manufacturers
who have made new
arrangements in accordance with
the abolition. A few months hence
the same will be the case with the
Tea-duties. A large increase of the
Income-tax, and an issue of Exchequer
bonds, are the only means
by which we can hope to make head
against an emergency. The surplus
is merely nominal—the balances
in the Exchequer cannot
be further reduced,—and even the
issue of Exchequer bonds can be
resorted to only to a small extent,
in consequence of Mr Gladstone’s
repeated postponement of paying
off, as they fell due, the amounts
already in circulation. Over the
term of Mr Gladstone’s present
financial administration, as over his
previous one, the country will yet
have to write the words, so damnatory
of the reputation of a statesman,
Improvidus futuri. In the
present aspect of affairs, we begin
to think anew of his Budgets before
the Crimean War; and we can
only hope that the year 1864 will
not be like 1854, and that the country
will not find itself again in
straits and embarrassments like
those which proved wellnigh overwhelming
ten years ago.
Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.
1. ‘Prehistoric Man; Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the
New World.’ By Daniel Wilson, LL. D., Professor of History and English Literature
in University College, Toronto; Author of the ‘Archæology and Prehistoric
Annals of Scotland,’ &c. Macmillan & Co., Cambridge.
2. There is one instance of a fragment of human bone found in company with these
flints, but we have heard doubts thrown on the nature of this fragment.
3. ‘The Life of General Sir Howard Douglas, Bart, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., F.R.S.,
D.C.L. From his Notes, Conversations, and Correspondence.’ By S. W. Fullom.
John Murray, London.
5. Heldreich (author of ‘An Essay on the Useful Plants of Greece’) finds it in a
single oak forest in Elis.
6. According to the prevalent opinion: the high authority of Decandolle is the
other way; he believes it indigenous in the South of Europe generally; but the
contrary evidence is very strong.
7. It was noted as something semi-prodigious that a palm-tree took root at Rome,
in the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol, during the war with Perseus; and another
in the pavement of Augustus’s house on the Palatine.—Ampère, ‘L’Histoire Romaine
à Rome.’
9. The Times itself takes this view. After stating that “no one doubts that
Australia, like India, China, and other countries, has contributed to the prosperity
of our trade by developing its own resources, pastoral, metallic, or otherwise,”
it makes this important admission: “It is also true that Australia and
California, by increasing enormously the quantity of gold in the world, have
diminished its value; so that, even if the wealth of the country had not increased,
its amount, as represented in gold [i. e. its value in money] would certainly have
been larger.” This alteration in the value of money since 1853 is the main
explanation of the fact which seems to Mr Gladstone “so strange as to be almost
incredible,” but which he coolly attributes to “the legislation of Parliament
setting free the industry and intelligence of the British people.” This, he says,
is “the real and new cause that has been in operation,” and which has so marvellously
increased the wealth of the country 20 per cent in eight years! But if
this were the case, surely he need not cut his estimates so fine. A nation that
has grown so enormously rich in a few years’ time could well afford to keep a good
balance at its banker’s—i. e., in the Exchequer.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.
Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.