To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna during the last year,
we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into
German, besides the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets,
who wrote during a period of five and a half centuries, from A.D. 1000
to 1550. The seven masters of the Persian Parnassus, Firdousi, Enweri,
Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami, have ceased to be
empty names; and others, like Ferideddin Attar, and Omar Chiam, promise
to rise in Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is
communicated in these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good
telescope,—as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the
meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth,—but the one
eminent value is the space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues
in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our
stock, by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of
intuitions, which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede
all histories.
Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in
violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability,
and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East
is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few
and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European
existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on
fruits and game,—the poor, on a watermelon's peel. All or nothing is
the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is
a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as
in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty
which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the
desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it,
and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less.
The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's
empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, that people perish with
cold, at one extremity, whilst they are suffocated with heat, at the
other." The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes.
Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches
an inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man's
history: his birthday, called the Day of the Lot, and the Day of
Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are
his virtues.
The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy, and encouraging
an outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual
organization,—leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the
Hindoos, (more Oriental in every sense,) whom no people have surpassed
in the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs,
with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the
pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which
the improvvisatori produced on the children of the desert. "When the
bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief's excitement was
almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by
these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild
tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their
self-taught poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will drive
warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward,
on their return from the dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The
excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would
understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages
should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild
nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine
and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a
dram, without the evil effect of either."
The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are connected
with the Jewish history, and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch.
The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon.
Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet ring, by which he
commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of
God; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets of his enemies, and
the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east wind, which was
his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl,
who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone
on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none
now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of
birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When
Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of
a length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon,—men
placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When
all were in order, the east wind, at his command, took up the carpet,
and transported it, with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,—the
army of birds at the same time flying overhead, and forming a canopy to
shade them from the sun. It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba
came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of
which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in
which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and
raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the
occasion of Solomon's marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents,
appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant with a blade of
grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier,
at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews, or
evil spirits, found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the
people.
Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the Shah Nameh the annals
of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun, (the Persian
Croesus.) the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures,
lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name;
of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred
years; of Kai Kaus, whose palace was built by demons on Alberz, in which
gold and silver and precious stones were used so lavishly, and such was
the brilliancy produced by their combined effect, that night and day
appeared the same; of Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow
extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his
hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The
crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when
he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in
the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle, and dragged him
from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at the arrogance of the King of
Mazinderan, that every hair on his body started up like a spear. The
gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an enemy.
These legends,—with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of
life,—the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschun, of Chosru and
Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,—pearl-diving, and
the virtues of gems,—the cohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eyebrows
are indelibly stained black,—the bladder in which musk is brought,—the
down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash,—lilies, roses,
tulips, and jasmines,—make the staple imagery of Persian odes.
The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect
short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life, conveyed in a
lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, and contained
in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem
is long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an
inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection
between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the
refrain of our old English ballads,
"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,"
or
"The rain it raineth every day,"
and the main story.
Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following:—
"The secret that should not be blown
Not one of thy nation must know;
You may padlock the gate of a town,
But never the mouth of a foe."
Or this of Omar Chiam:—
"On earth's wide thoroughfares below
Two only men contented go:
Who knows what's right and what's forbid,
And he from whom is knowledge hid."
Or this of Enweri:—
"On prince or bride no diamond stone
Half so gracious ever shone,
As the light of enterprise
Beaming from a young man's eyes."
Or this of Ibn Jemin:—
"Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou
love a life serene:
A woman for thy wife, though she were a
crowned queen;
And, the second, borrowed money, though
the smiling lender say
That he will not demand the debt until the
Judgment Day."
Or this poem on Friendship:—
"He who has a thousand friends has not a
friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him
everywhere."
Here is a poem on a Melon, by Adsched of Meru:—
"Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar,
and musk,—
Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture
rare,—
If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a
crescent fair,—
If you leave it whole, the full harvest-moon
is there."
Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts
adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns
the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at
Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with
an easy audacity. "He only," he says, "is fit for company, who knows how
to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night-cap. Our father Adam
sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it
dear at one grapestone." He says to the Shah, "Thou who rulest after
words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought,
abide firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old
graybeard of the sky." He says,—
"I batter the wheel of heaven
When it rolls not rightly by;
I am not one of the snivellers
Who fall thereon and die."
The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us:—
"See how the roses burn!
Bring wine to quench the fire!
Alas! the flames come up with us,—
We perish with desire."
After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which
might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring.
"In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful."
"Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts."
"On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance;
hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong
speed."
"The earth is a host who murders his guests."
"Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the
traveller never misses."
"Alas! till now I had not known
My guide and Fortune's guide are one."
"The understanding's copper coin
Counts not with the gold of love."
"'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
'Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!'"
"The world is a bride superbly dressed;—
Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul."
"Loose the knots of the heart; never think on
thy fate:
No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl."
"There resides in the grieving
A poison to kill;
Beware to go near them
'Tis pestilent still."
Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence
to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,—and
this is foreseen:—
"I will be drunk and down with wine;
Treasures we find in a ruined house."
Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that
covers it:—
"To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs,
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head."
"The Builder of heaven
Hath sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth.
"On turnpikes of wonder
Wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise, and upward,
West, southward, and north.
"Stands the vault adamantine
Until the Doomsday;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o'er it away."
That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result
from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the
world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an
object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are
in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.
His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily
to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements
enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and
growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims,
belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large
utterance, a river, that makes its own shores, quick perception and
corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new
day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with
great arteries,—this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we
should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and
gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men's
thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered
in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new
form, at once relief and creation.
The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a
certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics
into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are
sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility
of those whom it entangles,—that the mind suffers no religion and no
empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the
use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and
therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.
Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.
"Let us draw the cowl through the brook of
wine."
He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover,
has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and
certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to
him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be
wrong to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to him what a
fence is to a nimble schoolboy,—a temptation for a jump. "We would do
nothing but good; else would shame come to us on the day when the soul
must hie hence;—and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris
themselves would forsake that, and come out to us."
His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader.
There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all
materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He
fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah
becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his
mistress or to his cup-bearer. This boundless charter is the right of
genius. "No evil fate," said Beethoven, "can befall my music, and he to
whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness
which the others drag about with them."
We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make
mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the
erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to
defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and
throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after
the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded
with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that
imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys,
birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and
sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on
these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the
natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the
play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him
for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the
poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most
unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.
Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:—"Bring
wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what is
sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?"—and
sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the
eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:—
"I am: what I am
My dust will be again."
A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is
not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a
supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds,—[Greek:
sunetois phonei], it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for
poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot's, or, as at other
times, with an eagle's quill.
Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your
subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general,
what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to
grandees? Yet in the "Divan" you would not skip them, since his muse
seldom supports him better.
"What lovelier forms things wear,
Now that the Shah comes back!"
And again:—
"Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike
down.
Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening
his spear."
And again:—
"Mirza! where thy shadow falls,
Beauty sits and Music calls;
Where thy form and favor come,
All good creatures have their home."
Here are a couple of stately compliments to his Shah, from the kindred
genius of Enweri:—
"Not in their houses stand the stars,
But o'er the pinnacles of thine!"
"From thy worth and weight the stars
gravitate,
And the equipoise of heaven is thy house's
equipoise!"
It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a
handsome youth,—
"Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy
of Schiraz!
I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand
and Buchara!"—
the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz
with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which
he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I had not
been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!"
The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any
contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of the ghaselle, or
shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza.
Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name
thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It
is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We
remember but two or three examples in English poetry: that of Chaucer,
in the "House of Fame"; Jonson's epitaph on his son,—
"Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry";
and Cowley's,—
"The melancholy Cowley lay."
But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most
playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun
of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels
in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes
shed their pearls, out of desire and longing, as soon as the ship of
Hafiz swims the deep."
"Out of the East, and out of the West,
no man understands me;
Oh, the happier I, who confide to none but
the wind!
This morning heard I how the lyre of the
stars resounded,
'Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!'"
Again,—
"I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and
it said in the early morning, 'I am the disciple
of the sweet-voiced Hafiz!'"
And again,—
"When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken,
and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host,
calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the
dance."
"No one has unveiled thoughts like Hafiz,
since the locks of the Word-bride were first
curled."
"Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who
is not himself by nature noble."
But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical
form which they seem to require:—
"Fit for the Pleiads' azure chord
The songs I sung, the pearls I bored."
Another:—
"I have no hoarded treasure,
Yet have I rich content;
The first from Allah to the Shah,
The last to Hafiz went."
Another:—
"High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine
Fine gold and silver ore;
More worth to thee the gift of song,
And the clear insight more."
Again:—
"Thou foolish Hafiz! say, do churls
Know the worth of Oman's pearls?
Give the gem which dims the moon
To the noblest, or to none."
Again:—
"O Hafiz! speak not of thy need;
Are not these verses thine?
Then all the poets are agreed,
No man can less repine."
He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the
vizier returning from Mecca he says,—
"Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of
thy fortune, Thou hast indeed seen the
temple; but I, the Lord of the temple. Nor
has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder
of the merchant, or from the musky morning-wind,
that sweet air which I am permitted to
breathe every hour of the day."
And with still more vigor in the following lines:—
"Oft have I said, I say it once more,
I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself.
I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
What the Eternal says, I stammering say again.
Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
And according to my food I grow and I give.
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl,
And am only seeking one to receive it."
And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and
camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his
songs, not so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper and tone;
and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not
appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars
collected them for the first time after his death.
In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phoenix alighting on
the Tree of Life:—
"My phoenix long ago secured
His nest in the sky-vault's cope;
In the body's cage immured,
He is weary of life's hope.
"Round and round this heap of ashes
Now flies the bird amain,
But in that odorous niche of heaven
Nestles the bird again.
"Once flies he upward, he will perch
On Tuba's golden bough;
His home is on that fruited arch
Which cools the blest below.
"If over this world of ours
His wings my phoenix spread,
How gracious falls on land and sea
The soul refreshing shade!
"Either world inhabits he,
Sees oft below him planets roll;
His body is all of air compact,
Of Allah's love his soul."
Here is an ode which is said to be a favorite with all educated
Persians:—
"Come!—the palace of heaven rests on aëry pillars,—
Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind.
I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul
Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces.
Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven
Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy?
O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch;
This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest.
Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven;
I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net.
I, too, have a counsel for thee; oh, mark it and keep it,
Since I received the same from the Master above:
Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls;
A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.
This jest [of the world], which tickles me, leave to my vagabond self.
Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks;
Neither to me nor to thee was option imparted;
Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose.
The loving nightingale mourns;—cause enow for mourning;—
Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?
Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech."
Here is a little epitaph that might have come from Simonides:—
"Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest
Mad Destiny this tender stripling played:
For a warm breast of ivory to his breast,
She laid a slab of marble on his head."
The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and fig-tree, and the birds
that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these
musky verses, and are always named with effect. "The willows," he says,
"bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness."
We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue.
"By breath of beds of roses drawn,
I found the grove in the morning pure,
In the concert of the nightingales
My drunken brain to cure.
"With unrelated glance
I looked the rose in the eye;
The rose in the hour of gloaming
Flamed like a lamp hard-by.
"She was of her beauty proud,
And prouder of her youth,
The while unto her flaming heart
The bulbul gave his truth.
"The sweet narcissus closed
Its eye, with passion pressed;
The tulips out of envy burned
Moles in their scarlet breast.
"The lilies white prolonged
Their sworded tongue to the smell;
The clustering anemones
Their pretty secrets tell."
Presently we have,—
——"All day the rain
Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain,
The flood may pour from morn till night
Nor wash the pretty Indians white."
And so onward, through many a page.
The following verse of Omar Chiam seems to belong to Hafiz:—
"Each spot where tulips prank their state
Has drunk the life-blood of the great;
The violets yon fields which stain
Are moles of beauties Time hath slain."
As might this picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri:—
"O'er the garden water goes the wind alone
To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;
The fire is quenched on the dear hearth-stone,
But it burns again on the tulips brave."
Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have
matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.
Hafiz says,—
"Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the
unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."
Ibn Jemin writes thus:—
"Whilst I disdain the populace,
I find no peer in higher place.
Friend is a word of royal tone,
Friend is a poem all alone.
Wisdom is like the elephant,
Lofty and rare inhabitant:
He dwells in deserts or in courts;
With hucksters he has no resorts."
Dschami says,—
"A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,
So much the kindlier shows him than before;
Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,
He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor."
Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations,
though it forms the staple of the "Divan." He has run through the
whole gamut of passion,—from the sacred, to the borders, and over
the borders, of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the
celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is
habitual to him. From the plain text,—
"The chemist of love
Will this perishing mould,
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold,"—
or, from another favorite legend of his chemistry,—
"They say, through patience, chalk
Becomes a ruby stone;
Ah, yes, but by the true heart's blood
The chalk is crimson grown,"—
he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his
religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to
afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit
well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika's cheek, she was at a
loss:—
"And since round lines are drawn
My darling's lips about,
The very Moon looks puzzled on,
And hesitates in doubt
If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
Be not her true way to the South."
His ingenuity never sleeps:—
"Ah, could I hide me in my song,
To kiss thy lips from which it flows!"—
and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:—
"Fair fall thy soft heart!
A good work wilt thou do?
Oh, pray for the dead
Whom thine eyelashes slew!"
And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode
in!—
"They strew in the path of kings and czars
Jewels and gems of price;
But for thy head I will pluck down stars,
And pave thy way with eyes.
"I have sought for thee a costlier dome
Than Mahmoud's palace high,
And thou, returning, find thy home
In the apple of Love's eye."
Nor shall Death snatch her from his pursuit:—
"If my darling should depart
And search the skies for prouder friends,
God forbid my angry heart
In other love should seek amends!
"When the blue horizon's hoop
Me a little pinches here,
On the instant I will die
And go find thee in the sphere."
Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:—
"I know this perilous love-lane
No whither the traveller leads,
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
Thy tangled tresses feeds.
"In the midnight of thy locks,
I renounce the day;
In the ring of thy rose-lips,
My heart forgets to pray."
And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:—
"Plunge in yon angry waves,
Renouncing doubt and care;
The flowing of the seven broad seas
Shall never wet thy hair.
"Is Allah's face on thee
Bending with love benign,
And thou not less on Allah's eye
O fairest! turnest thine."
We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.
THE EXILE.
"In Farsistan the violet spreads
Its leaves to the rival sky,—
I ask, How far is the Tigris flood,
And the vine that grows thereby?
"Except the amber morning wind,
Not one saluted me here;
There is no man in all Bagdad
To offer the exile cheer.
"I know that thou, O morning wind,
O'er Kerman's meadow blowest,
And thou, heart-warming nightingale,
My father's orchard knowest.
"Oh, why did partial Fortune
From that bright land banish me?
So long as I wait in Bagdad,
The Tigris is all I see.
"The merchant hath stuffs of price,
And gems from the sea-washed strand,
And princes offer me grace
To stay in the Syrian land:
"But what is gold for but for gifts?
And dark without love is the day;
And all that I see in Bagdad
Is the Tigris to float me away."
"While roses bloomed along the plain,
The nightingale to the falcon said,
'Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?
With closed mouth thou utterest,
Though dying, no last word to man.
Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes,
And feedest on the grouse's breast,
Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels
Squander in a single tone,
Lo! I feed myself with worms,
And my dwelling is the thorn.'—
The falcon answered, 'Be all ear:
I, experienced in affairs,
See fifty things, say never one;
But thee the people prizes not,
Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand.
To me, appointed to the chase,
The king's hand gives the grouse's breast;
Whilst a chatterer like thee
Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!'"
The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets
to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.
BODY AND SOUL.
"A painter in China once painted a hall;—
Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;—
One half from his brush with rich colors did run,
The other he touched with a beam of the sun;
So that all which delighted the eye in one side,
The same, point for point, in the other replied.
"In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;
Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground:
Is one half depicted with colors less bright?
Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!"
"I read on the porch of a palace bold
In a purple tablet letters cast,—
'A house, though a million winters old,
A house of earth comes down at last;
Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All,
And build the dome that shall not fall.'"
"What need," cries the mystic Feisi, "of palaces and tapestry? What need
even of a bed?
"The eternal Watcher, who doth wake
All night in the body's earthen chest,
Will of thine arms a pillow make,
And a holster of thy breast."
A stanza of Hilali on a Flute is a luxury of idealism:—
"Hear what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains,
Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh,
Saying, 'Sweetheart, the old mystery remains,
If I am I, thou thou, or thou art I.'"
Ferideddin Attar wrote the "Bird Conversations," a mystical tale, in
which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a
pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this
poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as
a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite
modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and
difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only
persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.
"The bird-soul was ashamed;
Their body was quite annihilated;
They had cleaned themselves from the dust,
And were by the light ensouled.
What was, and was not,—the Past,—
Was wiped out from their breast.
The sun from near-by beamed
Clearest light into their soul;
The resplendence of the Simorg beamed
As one back from all three.
They knew not, amazed, if they
Were either this or that.
They saw themselves all as Simorg,
Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
When to the Simorg up they looked,
They beheld him among themselves;
And when they looked on each other,
They saw themselves in the Simorg.
A single look grouped the two parties.
The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,
This in that, and that in this,
As the world has never heard.
So remained they, sunk in wonder,
Thoughtless in deepest thinking,
And quite unconscious of themselves.
Speechless prayed they to the Highest
To open this secret,
And to unlock Thou and We.
There came an answer without tongue.—
'The Highest is a sun-mirror;
Who comes to Him sees himself therein,
Sees body and soul, and soul and body:
When you came to the Simorg,
Three therein appeared to you,
And, had fifty of you come,
So had you seen yourselves as many.
Him has none of us yet seen.
Ants see not the Pleiades.
Can the gnat grasp with his teeth
The body of the elephant?
What you see is He not;
What you hear is He not.
The valleys which you traverse,
The actions which you perform,
They lie under our treatment
And among our properties.
You as three birds are amazed,
Impatient, heartless, confused:
Far over you am I raised,
Since I am in act Simorg.
Ye blot out my highest being,
That ye may find yourselves on my throne;
Forever ye blot out yourselves,
As shadows in the sun. Farewell!'"
Among the religious customs of the dervises, it seems, is an
astronomical dance, in which the dervis imitates the movements of the
heavenly bodies by spinning on his own axis, whilst, at the same time,
he revolves round the sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and as
he spins, he sings the song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan:—
"Spin the ball! I reel, I hum,
Nor head from foot can I discern,
Nor my heart from love of mine,
Nor the wine-cup from the wine.
All my doing, all my leaving,
Reaches not to my perceiving.
Lost in whirling spheres I rove,
And know only that I love.
"I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon;
From the shore of souls arrived,
In the sea of sense I dived;
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me who only jewel crave?
Love's the air-fed fire intense,
My heart is the frankincense;
As the rich aloes flames, I glow,
Yet the censer cannot know.
I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;
Stand not, pause not, in my going.
"Ask not me, as Muftis can
To recite the Alcoran;
Well I love the meaning sweet,—
I tread the book beneath my feet.
"Lo! the God's love blazes higher,
Till all difference expire.
What are Moslems? what are Giaours?
All are Love's, and all are ours.
I embrace the true believers,
But I reck not of deceivers.
Firm to heaven my bosom clings,
Heedless of inferior things;
Down on earth there, underfoot,
What men chatter know I not."
* * * * *
EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
——I think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—you must intend that for
one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of
the other day.
I thank you, my young friend,—was my reply,—but I must say something
better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.
——The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there
were on record, and what, and by whom said.
——Why, let us see,—there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, "the great
Bostonian," after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great
many wise things,—and I don't feel sure he didn't borrow this,—he
speaks as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly!—
"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged."
Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the
Historian, in one of his flashing moments:—
"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries."
To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the
wittiest of men:—
"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."
——The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit meant
any irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly
place after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call
John,—evidently a stranger,—said there was one more wise man's saying
that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn't know who said
it.—A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth
wise saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who
brought him to dinner, Shall I tell it? To which the answer was, Go
ahead!—Well,—he said,—this was what I heard:—
"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't
pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar."
Sir,—said I,—I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with
pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with
malignant dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of
Boston,—and of all other considerable—and inconsiderable—places with
which I have had the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think
London is the only place in the world. Frenchmen—you remember the line
about Paris, the Court, the World, etc.—I recollect well, by the way,
a sign in that city which ran thus: "Hotel de l'Univers et des États
Unis"; and as Paris is the universe to a Frenchman, of course the
United States are outside of it.—"See Naples and then die."—It is
quite as bad with smaller places. I have been about, lecturing, you
know, and have found the following propositions to hold true of all of
them.
1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each
and every town or city.
2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is
affectionately styled by the inhabitants the "good old town of"——
(whatever its name may happen to be).
3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen
to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably intelligent
audience."
4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.
5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world.
(One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short
pieces to the "Paetolian" some time since, which were "respectfully
declined.")
Boston is just like other places of its size;—only, perhaps,
considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior
monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the English
language, it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll tell
you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston.
It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be
drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its
second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we
are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that
which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis
in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
their talent and wealth. I have observed, by the way, that the people
who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each
other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual
basin, or suction-range, of one large one, of the pretensions of any
other. Don't you see why? Because their promising young author and
rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the
neighboring big city,—their prettiest girl has been exported to the
same market; all their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding
of glory comes from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.
——Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?—Oh,—an
example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't you
like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest
consideration I must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old
church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there
an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience
of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their
tomahawks,)—if they have, scattered about, those mighty-square houses
built something more than half a century ago, and standing like
architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose
refluent wave has left them as its monument,—if they have gardens with
elbowed apple trees that push their branches over the high board-fence
and drop their fruit on the side-walk,—if they have a little grass in
the side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,—I
think I could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of
those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may
be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight.
My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most
unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live
in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul,
which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles,
and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the
stars by night.
——Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns?—I don't believe there is much difference. You know how they read
Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?—Well,
they read it
"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"
——Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which
they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it
always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a
chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up,
so that nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into
a passage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the interior
apartments. The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none
is given with it!
If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the
words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy
on your soul! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or,
if you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in
Melbourne or San Francisco,—or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break
your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about
as if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.
Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door.
The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very
terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or
receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own
flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the
side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have
a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your
sensibilities in semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist
strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as
great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman
is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the
great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are
struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument
possesses. A few exercises on it dally at home fit a man wonderfully for
his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them.
No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul;
it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister,
intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many
have them already.
——You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a
frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If
we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should
sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into
our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were
fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming
round these women's hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white
breasts beneath the laces!
A very simple intellectual mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch
tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about
with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand, and is not
a repeater, nor a musical watch,—though it is not enamelled nor
jewelled,—in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required
for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful
hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble
they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to
genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not
subject to the spasms and crises that are so often met with in creative
or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or
friendship.—Observe, I am talking about minds. I won't say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the
understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often
runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages
of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
happy, I have no question.
If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all,
if we think of it, most of the world's loves and friendships have been
between people that could not read nor spell.
But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all
that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles
or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of
sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where
young womanhood is the sacrifice.
——You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a
few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among
them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a
stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as
companions or as instructors. But I can't help remembering that the
world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great
scholars great men. The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think,
if any; yet they represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of
manhood, and, I think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of
letters next Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.
What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which
every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
——I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the
divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of any
state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression
by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can
hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the
power of music. The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the
Professor tells me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow, just
where it is widening to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its
seat in the region of sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces
a continuous and, as it were, logical sequence of emotional and
intellectual changes; but how different from trains of thought proper!
how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!—Think of human passions as
compared with all phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by
the reading of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because
Desdemona was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are
more expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part with
her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she
was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she
quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people
in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest
experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can read, his
paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can read, his thought has
slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an
expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common
person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise
above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's
reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's
reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs
from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above—not the author, but the reader's mental version of the
author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into
exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may
drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words.
We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless
there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we,
dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass
of earthly intelligences.
——I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,—I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it
becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind,
before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts
and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, strike in, as they
say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.
I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day
of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of
births,—with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs
and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were
ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment
send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the
essences ever distilled.
——Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere?—No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my
rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and
listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.
——Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a
good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind.
Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a
year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last,
you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has
domiciliated itself, so to speak,—become at home,—entered into
relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole
fabric of the mind. Or take a simple and familiar example. You forget
a name, in conversation,—go on talking, without making any effort to
recall it,—and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and
unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought,
and the name rises of itself to your lips.
There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.
——I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that
exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly
dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once
lived might think I was drawing their portraits.
——Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether the
piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural
History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description.
At any rate, when I gave my translation to B.F. to turn back again into
French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in
English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local
bearing or other,—which the author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as
he could not be acquainted with anything on this side the water.
[The above remarks were addressed to the schoolmistress, to whom I
handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came
and read over her shoulder,—very curious, apparently, but his eyes
wandered, I thought. Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried and
high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched
her a little more closely.—It is none of my business.—After all, it
is the imponderables that move the world,—heat, electricity,
love.—Habet.]
This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;—the mistakes give
a relish to it, I think.
Ces Sociétés là sont une Institution pour suppléer aux besoins d'esprit
et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survécu à leurs émotions à l'égard
du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de l'habitude de boire.
Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Sociétés, on doit avoir le moins
de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
dépilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques connaissances,
n'importe dans quel genre. Dès le moment qu'on ouvre la porte de la
Société, on a un grand intérêt dans toutes les choses dont on ne sait
rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste démontre un nouveau flexor du tarse
d'un melolontha vulgaris. Douze savans improvisés, portans des
besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des insectes, si ce n'est les
morsures du culex, se précipitent sur l'instrument, et voient—une
grande bulle d'air, dont ils s'émerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est
un spectacle plein d'instruction—pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite
Société. Tous les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec
un air d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours
d'une demi heure que O^6 N^3 H^5 C^6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est
bonne à rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur très désagréable, selon
l'habitude des produits chimiques. Après celà, vient un mathématicien
qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin un x+y, dont
vous n'avez pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos relations avec
la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations spéciales des animaux
excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez jamais soupçonné l'existence.
Ainsi il vous décrit les follicules de l'appendix vermiformis d'un
dzigguetai. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un follicule. Vous ne
savez pas ce que c'est qu'un appendix vermiformis. Vous n'avez
jamais entendu parler du dzigguetai. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces
connaissances à la fois, qui s'attachent à votre esprit comme l'eau
adhére aux plumes d'un canard. On connait toutes les langues ex
officio en devenant membre d'une de ces Sociétés. Ainsi quand on entend
lire un Essai sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout celà de
suite, et s'instruit énormément.
Il y a deux espèces d'individus qu'on trouve toujours à ces Sociétiés:
1° Le membre à questions; 2° Le membre à "Bylaws."
La question est une spécialité. Celui qui en fait métier ne fait
jamais des réponses. La question est une manière très commode de dire
les choses suivantes: "Me voilà! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,—je respire
encore! J'ai des idées,—voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas,
vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de celà! Ah, nous avons un
peu de sagacité, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement la bête qu'on
pense!"—Le faiseur de questions donne peu d'attention aux réponses
qu'on fait; ce n'est pas là dans sa spécialité.
Le membre à "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les émotions mousseuses
et généreuses qui se montrent dans la Société. C'est un empereur
manqué,—un tyran à la troisième trituration. C'est un esprit dur,
borné, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les grandeurs, selon
le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans la Société, mais on le
respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un mot pour ce membre audessus
de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce que l'Om est aux Hindous. C'est sa
religion; il n'y a rien audelà. Ce mot là c'est la CONSTITUTION!
Lesdites Sociétés publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les
trouve abandonnés à sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveau-nés, faute
de membrane cutanée, ou même papyracée. Si on aime la botanique, on y
trouve une mémoire sur les coquilles; si on fait des études zoölogiques,
on trouve un grand tas de q[square root]-1, ce qui doit étre infiniment
plus commode que les encyclopédies. Ainsi il est clair comme la
métaphysique qu'on doit devenir membre d'une Société telle que nous
décrivons.
Recette pour le Dépilatoire Physiophilosophique.
Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
Dépilez avec. Polissez ensuite.
——I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the piece
that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I
could, on the spot.
The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that,
a depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might
send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd
have to do anything to the outside of his head to get into any of
the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he played a part in a
tabullo.
No,—said I,—I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll tell
you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town,
there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What
if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?—that makes no difference.
Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart
here, and in all large places.—You never studied averages, as I have
had occasion to.
I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was
one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week,
through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do,
that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.
——Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?—said the landlady's
daughter,—who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
conversation.
I was going to talk about averages,—I said,—but I have no objection to
telling you about lectures, to begin with.
A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind.
After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with
its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until,
after one has repeated it a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he
rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time,
before a new audience. But this is on one condition,—that he never lays
the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes on a
loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered
manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.
A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while
with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it.
By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any
sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear;
and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the
blisters.—The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a
sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times.
A lecture doesn't begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth
delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that
number. These old lectures are a man's best, commonly; they improve by
age, also,—like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other
day. One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off
their weak ones, to take out the really good things which don't tell on
the audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery. A
thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.
——No, indeed,—I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful
of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the average intellect
of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It may be
sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound.
A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about
something which interests everybody. I think, that, if any experienced
lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be
one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the
charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,—even when they don't
talk very well.
But an average, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the
most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is awful in its
uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two communities of
ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can
see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike,
that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite
mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell
the "remarkably intelligent audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from
one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle
of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young
men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the
assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one
knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in. Front seats: a few old folks,—shiny-headed,—slant up best ear
towards the speaker,—drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins
to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young
and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—(pick out
the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance
sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about.
An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—happy, but not always
very attentive. Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces
here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull people, but faces
without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what
kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and
stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They
render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as
those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.
Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—a great
compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two
mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs,
and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you
make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable
movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices
his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place
of your lecture, always. I declare to you, that, as the monk said about
the picture in the convent,—that he sometimes thought the living
tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,—I
have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and
coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless
eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!
——Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,—a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts,
but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are
memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor
unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be
met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But
when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as
the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses——Pardon me, that
was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy
lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had
therefore sold his sensibilities.—Family men get dreadfully homesick.
In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.
"There are his young barbarians all at play,"—
if he owns any youthful savages.—No, the world has a million roosts for
a man, but only one nest.
——It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made
in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence,
with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness
of earning a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the
individual thus armed. When a person is really full of information, and
does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real
talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of
vocalists.
——What do I mean by the real talkers?—Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts
always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about
facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key
and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have known three of
these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,—and one of
them was tyrannical.
——Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes.—He? Veneers in first-rate style. The mahogany
scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light
stuff.—I found —— very fine in conversational information, the other
day, when we were in company. The talk ran upon mountains. He was
wonderfully well acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the
Apennines, and the Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to
say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various other mountains that were
mentioned. By and by some Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed
singular familiarity with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many
details relating to Major André. A point of Natural History being
suggested, he gave an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes.
He was very full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion. So
he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but did not
pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was something so
odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge, that I suspected
all at once what might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an
opportunity.—Have you seen the "New American Cyclopaedia?" said I.—I
have, he replied; I received an early copy.—How far does it go?—He
turned red, and answered,—To Araguay.—Oh, said I to myself,—not quite
so far as Ararat;—that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he
must have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember
what is in this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he
will know more than I ever thought he would.
Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related a
similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.—I made a comparison
at table some time since, which has often been quoted and received many
compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye;
the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. The simile is a
very obvious, and, I suppose I may now say, a happy one; for it has just
been shown me that it occurs in a Preface to certain Political Poems of
Thomas Moore's, published long before my remark was repeated. When a
person of fair character for literary honesty uses an image such as
another has employed before him, the presumption is, that he has struck
upon it independently, or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his
own.
It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a comparison
which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a recollection. I
told you the other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to
me comparatively good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it
had been borrowed. But I confess I never suspected the above comparison
of being old, except from the fact of its obviousness. It is proper,
however, that I proceed by a formal instrument to relinquish all claim
to any property in an idea given to the world at about the time when
I had just joined the class in which Waster Thomas Moore was then a
somewhat advanced scholar.
I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing the
liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for that reason
feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing it, do hereby
renounce all claim to being considered the first person who gave
utterance to a certain simile or comparison referred to in the
accompanying documents, and relating to the pupil of the eye on the one
part and the mind of the bigot on the other. I hereby relinquish all
glory and profit, and especially all claims to letters from
autograph collectors, founded upon my supposed property in the above
comparison,—knowing well, that, according to the laws of literature,
they who speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do also agree
that all Editors of Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all
Publishers of Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein,
shall be at liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on
the supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison aforesaid
was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and wholly my own,
and as I have good reason to think that I had never seen or heard it
when first expressed by me, and as it is well known that different
persons may independently utter the same idea,—as is evinced by that
familiar line from Donatus,—
"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixcrunt,"—
now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-disposed
persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am open to any
accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison, and, if they have
so asserted or implied, that they will have the manliness forthwith to
retract the same assertion or insinuation.
I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than myself.
If I had even suspected that the idea in question was borrowed,—I
should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the coincidence, as
I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on an idea of
Swift's.—But what shall I do about these verses I was going to read
you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me of stealing their
thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that several of you,
especially if you are getting a little on in life, will recognize some
of these sentiments as having passed through your consciousness at some
time. I can't help it,—it is too late now. The verses are written, and
you must have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear
That age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.
That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.
That—mother, sister, wife, or child—
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown!
That but for this our souls were free,
And but for that our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.
Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race,—
Though doctors think the matter plain,—
That ours is "a peculiar case."
That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.
That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.
That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but one thousand more!"
That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.
Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with what we think,
Their echoes dumb to what we know;
That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: GOD is LOVE!
* * * * *
Have you read in the Talmud of old,
In the legends the Rabbins have told
Of the limitless realms of the air,
Have you read it,—the marvellous story
Of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory,
Sandalphon, the Angel of Prayer?
How, erect, at the outermost gate
Of the City Celestial he waits,
With his feet on the ladder of light,
That, crowded with angels unnumbered,
By Jacob was seen, as he slumbered
Alone in the desert at night?
The Angels of Wind and of Fire
Chant only one hymn, and expire
With the song's irresistible stress,—
Expire in their rapture and wonder,
As harp-strings are broken asunder
By the music they throb to express.
But serene in the rapturous throng,
Unmoved by the rush of the song,
With eyes unimpassioned and slow,
Among the dead angels, the deathless
Sandalphon stands listening, breathless,
To sounds that ascend from below,—
From the spirits on earth that adore,
From the souls that entreat and implore
In the frenzy and passion of prayer,—
From the hearts that are broken with losses,
And weary with dragging the crosses
Too heavy for mortals to bear.
And he gathers the prayers as he stands,
And they change into flowers in his hands,
Into garlands of purple and red;
And beneath the great arch of the portal,
Through the streets of the City Immortal,
Is wafted the fragrance they shed.
It is but a legend, I know,—
A fable, a phantom, a show
Of the ancient Rabbinical lore;
Yet the old mediaeval tradition,
The beautiful, strange superstition,
But haunts me and holds me the more.
When I look from my window at night,
And the welkin above is all white,
All throbbing and panting with stars,
Among them majestic is standing
Sandalphon the angel, expanding
His pinions in nebulous bars.
And the legend, I feel, is a part
Of the hunger and thirst of the heart,
The frenzy and fire of the brain,
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain.
* * * * *
Mr. Buchanan came into power with the prestige of experience; he was
known to have been long in public life; he had been a senator, a
secretary, a diplomatist, and almost everything else which is supposed
to fit a man for the practical conduct of affairs.
This presumed fitness for office greatly assisted his chances in the
Presidential campaign; and it assisted him especially with those timid
and conservative minds, of which there are many, apt to conceive that a
familiarity with the business and details of government is the same as
statesmanship, and to confound the skill and facility acquired by mere
routine with a genuine ability in execution. Had these men, however,
looked more closely into Mr. Buchanan's official career, they would have
found causes for suspecting the validity of their judgment, in the very
length and variety of his services. They would have discovered, that,
long as these had been and various as they had been, they were quite
undistinguished by any peculiar evidences of capacity or aptitude.
He had been, senator, secretary, and diplomatist, it is true; but in no
one of these positions had he achieved any remarkable successes. The
occasion could not be indicated on which he had risen above the average
level of respectability as a public man. There were no salient points in
his course,—no splendid developments of mastery,—no great reports, or
speeches, or measures, to cause him to be remembered,—and no leading
thoughts or acts, to awaken a high and general feeling of admiration on
the part of his countrymen. He was never such a senator as Webster
was, nor such a secretary as Clay, nor such a diplomatist as Marey.
Throughout his protracted official existence, he followed in the wake
of his party submissively, doing its appointed work with patience, and
vindicating its declared policy with skill, but never emerging as a
distinct and prominent figure. He never exhibited any peculiar largeness
of mind or loftiness of character; and though he spoke well and wrote
well, and played the part of a cool and wary manager, he was scarcely
considered a commanding spirit among his fellows. Amid that array of
luminaries, indeed, which adorned the Senate, where his chief reputation
was made,—among such men as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and
Wright,—he shone with a diminished lustre.
Now, forty years of action, in the most conspicuous spheres,
unillustrated by a single incident which mankind has, or will have,
reason to cite and applaud, were not astonishing evidence of fitness for
the chief magistracy; and the event has shown, that Mr. Buchanan was to
be regarded as an old politician rather than a practised statesman, that
the most serviceable soldier in the ranks may prove to be an indifferent
general in command,—and that the experience, for which he was vaunted
and trusted, was not that ripening discipline of the mind and heart,
———-"which doth attain
To something of prophetic strain,"—
but that other unlearning use and wont, which
——"chews on wisdom past,
And totters on in blunders to the last."
His administration has been a series of blunders, and worse; it
has evinced no mastery; on the other hand, it may be arraigned for
inconsistencies the most palpable, for proceedings the most awkward, for
a general impotence which places it on a level with that of Tyler or
Pierce, and for signal offences against the national sense of decorum
and duty.
It is scarcely a year since Mr. Buchanan assumed the reins at
Washington. He assumed them under circumstances by which he and his
party and the whole country had been taught a great lesson of
political duty. The infamous mismanagement of Kansas, by his immediate
predecessor, had just shattered the most powerful of our party
organizations, and caused a mighty uprising of the masses of the North
in defence of menaced freedom. His election was carried amid the
extremest hazards, and with the utmost difficulty. Two months more of
such ardent debate and such popular enlightenment as were then going
forward would have resulted in his defeat. As it was, nearly every
Northern State—no matter how firm its previous adherence to the
Democratic party—was aroused to a strenuous opposition. Nearly every
Northern State pronounced by a stupendous majority against him and
against his cause. Nothing but a systematic disguise of the true
questions at issue by his own party, and a gratuitous complication of
the canvass by means of a foolish third party, saved his followers from
the most complete and shameful rout that had been given for many years
to any political array. Men of every class, of every shade of faith,
joined in that hearty protest against the spirit which animated the
Democratic administration, and joined in it, that they might utter the
severest rebuke in their power, of its meanness and perfidy.
Mr. Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across
the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to
have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest,
and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight
cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of
popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of
mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in
them; but they well up from the deep heart of nations, showing that a
chord of sympathy has been touched, with which it is fatal to tamper or
to sport. Call it fanaticism, if you will; call it delusion; call it
anything; but recollect also that it is out of such feelings that
revolutions are born, and by them that awful national crises are
determined.
But Mr. Buchanan has not profited, as we shall see, by the monition. His
initial act, the choice of a cabinet, in which the only man of national
reputation was superannuated, and the others were of little note, gave
small hope that he would do so; and his subsequent mistakes might have
been augured from the calibre of the counsellors by whom he chose to
be surrounded.—But let the men pass, since our object is to discuss
measures.
The questions with which the President and his cabinet have had to deal,
without following them in the order either of time or importance, may
be classified as the Mormon question, the Financial question, the
Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. All these required, for
a proper adjustment of them, firmness rather than ability,—a clear
perception of the principles of right, rather than abstruse policy,—and
vigor of execution, rather than profound diplomatic skill. Yet we do not
perceive that our government has displayed, in regard to the treatment
of any of these questions, either firmness or ability. It has employed
policy enough and diplomacy enough, but the policy has been incoherent
and the diplomacy shallow. At the end of the first year of its rule, the
most striking result of its general management is the open defection of
many of its most powerful friends, and the increased earnestness and
energy of all its foes.
The difficulty with the Mormons originated, before the accession of the
present administration, in a hasty and improper extension of the Federal
authority over a people whose customs and religious opinions were
utterly incompatible with those of our own people. The inhabitants of
Utah were averse from the outset to the kind of government provided for
them at Washington. Having adopted a form of society more like that of
Congo and Dahomey than of the United States, and having accepted too
literally the prevalent dogma, that every community has the right to
form its own institutions for itself,—they preferred the polygamy
of barbarism to the monogamy of civilization, and the rod of the
priest-prophet Brigham or the seal of Elder Pratt to the sceptre
of Governor Steptoe or the sword of Colonel Johnston. Under these
circumstances, the duty of the government of the United States was to
relinquish its pretensions to supremacy over a nation opposed to its
rule, or to maintain that supremacy, if it were necessary, with a strong
and unflinching hand. Mr. Buchanan, on his own principles of popular
sovereignty, as far as we can understand them, ought, logically, to have
adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not
involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an
impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of
dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable
embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the
mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of
their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little
force was despatched to the Plains when it was too late in the season; a
part of it was needlessly delayed in assisting to choke down freedom in
Kansas; and when it attained the hills which guard the passages to the
valley of the Salt Lake, it found the canons obstructed by snow, and
the roads impassable. The supplies required for its subsistence were
scattered in useless profusion from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie, and
assistance and action were alike hopeless until the arrival of the
spring.[A]
[Footnote: A: More recently the energy and wisdom of Col. Johnston
have repaired some of the mischief produced by the dilatoriness of his
superiors.]
The same feebleness, which left the poor soldier to perish in the
desert, has brought an overflowing treasury nearly to default. Mr.
Buchanan, in his Message, discussed the existing financial crisis with
much sounding phrase and very decided emphasis. He rebuked the action of
the banks, which had presumed to issue notes to the amount of more than
three times that of their specie, in a tone of lofty and indignant
virtue. He commended them to the strictest vigilance and to the
exemplary discipline of the State legislatures, while descanting at
large upon the safety, the economy, the beauty, and the glory of a sound
hard-money currency. When he entered upon his office, he found the
Treasury replete with eagles and dimes; it was so flush, that, in the
joy of his heart, he ordered the debts of the United States to be
redeemed at a premium of sixteen per cent.; and he and his followers
were disposed to jubilate over the singular spectacle, that, while all
other institutions were failing, the Treasury of the United States was
firm and resplendent in its large possession of gold. It was deemed a
rare wisdom and success, indeed, which could utter a note of triumph in
the midst of so universal a cry of despair; it was deemed a rare piece
of liberality, that the government should come to the aid of society in
an hour of such dark distress. The stocks of the United States, which
had been originally sold at a small advance, were bought back on a very
large advance; the usurers and the stock-jobbers received sixteen per
cent. for what they had bought at a premium of but two or three per
cent.; and an unparalleled glory shone around the easy vomitories of
the Treasury. The foresight and the sagacity of the proceeding were
marvellous! In less than a quarter by the moon, the coffers of the
government were empty,—the very clerks in its employ went about the
streets borrowing money to pay their board-bills,—and the grand-master
of the vaults, Mr. Cobb, counting his fingers in despair over the vacant
prospect, was compelled, in the extremity of his distress, to fill
his limp sacks with paper. Of the nineteen millions of gold which in
September distended the public purse, little or nothing remained in
December, while in its place were paper bills,—founded, not upon a
basis of one-third specie, but upon a basis of—We promise to pay! It
was a sad application of the high-sounding doctrines of the Message,—a
dreadful descent for a pure hard-money government,—and a lamentable
conversion of the pompous swagger of October into the shivering collapse
of January!
It may be said, that, by this pre-purchase of its own stocks, running at
an interest of six per cent., the government has saved the amount of
interest which would else have accrued between the time of the purchase
and the time of ultimate redemption. And this is true to some
extent,—and it would show an admirable economy, if the Treasury had had
no other use for its money. A government, like an individual, having a
large balance of superfluous cash on hand, can do no better with it than
to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a
Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment
in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all
points,—it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to
get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of
this folly, and, for the sake of the poor éclat of coming to the
relief of the money-market, (which was no great relief, after all,) they
sacrificed the hard-money pretensions of the government, and sunk its
character to the level of that of the needy "kiteflier" in Wall Street.
Their true course, in the existing condition and aspect of affairs, was
to retain their capital, and to institute a most rigid economy, a most
searching reduction, in every branch of the public service. We have,
however, yet to learn whether any such economy and reduction have been
effected.
All this was simply weakness; but in turning from the conduct of
the Finances by the administration, to consider its management of
Filibusterism, we pass from the consideration of acts of mere debility
to the consideration of acts which have a color of duplicity in them.
On the Filibusters, as on the Finances, the First Annual Message of the
President was outspoken and forcible. It characterized the past and
proposed doings of William Walker and his crew, as the common sense
and common conscience of the world had already characterised them, as
nothing short of piracy and murder. Recognizing the obligations of
fraternity and peace as the rule of right in international relations, it
pledged the utmost vigilance and energy of the Federal powers against
every semblance of freebootery. In pursuance of this promise, orders
were issued to the various civil and naval authorities, (orders not very
clear, it is true, but clear enough to bear but one meaning in honest
and simple minds,) to the effect that they should maintain a sharp
watch, and execute a summary arrest of every person suspected of or
discovered in unlawful enterprises. The authorities on land, to whom it
was easy to hold secret communication with Washington, were found to
have very blind eyes and very slippery hands. General Walker and his
confederates were taken at New Orleans, but they passed through
the courts far more rapidly than goods are apt to pass through the
custom-houses. Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with
flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom,
it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too
conspicuous.
But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from
Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the
habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word.
Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out
for Walker. He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore
Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil.
Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste
to the President. Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read
the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant
black, and white, white. Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride
with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action,
in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in
maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his
mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a
sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly
not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant
black,—nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the
President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. It
was the present of a herd of elephants,—of a sea of troubles. Mr.
Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words
for the public ear; secretly he cherished a penchant for freebooters,
or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those
circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief
of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of
simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of
obedience, in any subordinate. What to do was the question. He had
menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and
here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,—so he menaced
Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he
set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be
sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late
innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had been ruthlessly
torn by an over-officious sailor.
The history of the farce is both argument and comment. Walker was either
a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign
state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,—or
he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our
protection to organize warlike enterprises against his fellow-citizens,
and as such also amenable to our neutrality laws. In either capacity,
and however taken, he should have been severely dealt with by the
President. But, unfortunately, Mr. Buchanan, not left to his own
instincts of right, is surrounded by assistants who have other than
great public motives for their conduct. Walker's schemes were not
individual schemes, were not simple projects of piracy and plunder,
got up on his own responsibility and for his own ends. Connected with
important collateral issues, they received the sympathy and support of
others more potent than himself. He was, in a word, the instrument
of the propagandist slave-holders, the fear of whom is ever before a
President's eyes. As the old barbarian Arbogastes used to say to the
later Roman emperors, whom he helped to elevate, "The power which made
you is the power which can break you," so these modern masters of the
throne dictate and guide its policy. Mr. Buchanan was their man as much
as Walker was, and, however grand his speeches before the public, he
must do their bidding when things came to the trial.
But this allusion brings us, by an obvious transition, to the last and
most important question submitted to the administration,—the question
of Kansas,—in the management of which, we think, it will be found that
all the before-noted deficiencies of the government have been combined
with a criminal disregard of settled principles and almost universal
convictions. In reference to Kansas, as in reference to the other
topics, the President began with fair and seductive promises. He did
not, it is true, either in his Message or anywhere else, that we know
of, narrate the actual history of the long contest which has divided
that Territory, but he did hold up for the future the brightest hopes
of an honest and equitable adjustment of all the past difficulties. He
selected and commissioned Robert J. Walker, as Governor, for the express
purpose of "pacifying Kansas." Pretending to overlook the past causes
of trouble, he announced that everything would now be set right by new
elections, in which the whole people should have full opportunity
of declaring their will. Mr. Walker went to Kansas with a full
determination to carry out this amiable promise of the President. Both
he and his secretary, Mr. Stanton, labored strenuously to convince
the people of the Territory of his honest purposes, and, by dint of
persuasions, pledges, assurances, and oaths, at length succeeded in
procuring a pretty general exercise of the franchise. The result was a
signal overthrow of the minority which had so long ruled by fraud and
violence; and the sincerity of the President is tested by the fact,
avouched by both Walker and Stanton, that, from the moment of the
success of the Free-State party, he was wroth towards his servants.
Stanton was removed and Walker compelled to resign, though their only
offence was a laborious prosecution of the President's own policy. Ever
since then, he has strained every nerve, and at this moment is straining
every nerve, to defeat the well-known legally demonstrated wish of the
majority. In the face of his own plighted word, and of the emphatic
assurances of his agents, sanctioned by himself, he insists upon
imposing on them officers whom they detest and an instrument of
government which they spurn. These people of Kansas,—who were to
be "pacified,"—to be conciliated,—to be guarantied a just
administration,—are denounced in the most virulent and abusive terms as
refractory, and are threatened with the coercion of a military force,
because they are unwilling to submit to outrage!
The excuse offered by the President for this perfidious course is
the Lecompton Constitution, which he professes to consider a legal
instrument, framed by a legal Convention, and approved by a legal
election of the people,—and which is therefore not to be set aside
except by the same sovereign power by which it was created. It would be
a good excuse, if it were not a transparent and monstrous quibble from
beginning to end. The Lecompton Constitution has no one element of
legality in it; from the Whereas, to the signatures, it is an
imposture;—for neither had the Legislature, that called the Convention
in which it was made, lawful authority to do so,—nor was that
Convention lawfully constituted,—nor was the alleged adoption of it by
the people more than a trick.
A Territory is an inchoate and dependent community, which can be erected
into a State only in two ways: first, formally, by an enabling act of
Congress, giving permission to the inhabitants to set up for themselves;
and second, informally, by a spontaneous and general movement of the
people, which Congress must afterwards legitimate. In either case, the
consent of Congress, first or last, is necessary to the validity of the
proceeding. But a Territorial Legislature, which is the mere creature of
Congress, having no powers but what are strictly conveyed to it in the
Organic Act instituting the Territorial government, cannot originate
a movement to supersede itself, and also to abrogate the authority
of Congress. The attempt to do so, as declared by General Jackson's
cabinet, in the case of Arkansas, would be, not simply null and void,
but unlawful, rebellious; and the President would be obliged to suppress
it, if called upon, by force of arms. The Organic Act is the supreme law
of the Territory, which can be altered or revoked only by the authority
from which it emanated; and every measure commenced or prosecuted with a
design to annul that law, to subvert the Territorial government, or
to put in force in its place a new government, without the consent of
Congress, is a flagrant usurpation.
Now the Lecompton Convention was called not merely without the consent
of Congress, but against its consent; it was called by and under the
arrangements of the Territorial Legislature; it was not the spontaneous
act of the people, a large majority of whom condemned the movement
and refused to participate in it; and thus, in its inception, it was
unlawful. It was neither regularly nor irregularly proper;—the supreme
legislature had not acknowledged it; the masses of society had not
acknowledged it; and the entire project possessed no other character
than that of a factious scheme for perpetuating the power of a few
pro-slavery demagogues.
But, if we grant the right of the Territorial Legislature to originate
such a movement, the manner in which it was carried into effect would
still brand it with the marks of illegality. A census and registry of
voters had been provided for in the law authorizing the Convention, as
the basis of an apportionment of the delegates, and that provision was
not complied with. In nineteen out of the thirty-eight counties no
registry was made, and in the others it was imperfectly made. "In some
of the counties," according to the evidence of Mr. Stanton, then acting
Governor, "the officers were probably deterred and discouraged by the
people from their duty of taking the census," (although he adds that he
does not know that such was the fact,) "while in others the officers
utterly refused to do their duty." "I know," he says, "that the people
of some of those counties ardently desired to be represented in the
Convention, for they afterwards, under the statements of Governor Walker
and myself, that they would probably be admitted, elected delegates and
sent them up to the Convention; but they were not admitted to seats."
In consequence of this failure or refusal to do their duty, only
the geographical half or the numerical fourth of the Territory was
represented in the Convention. Nor is it any excuse for the defaulting
officers, even if it had been true, that some of the people opposed the
execution of their duty. They professed to be acting under law; their
functions were plainly prescribed to them; and they were bound to make
the census and registry, whatever the disposition of the people. In a
land of laws, it is the law, and not any mere prevailing sentiment,
which prescribes and limits official duty. There is, however, no
evidence that the discharge of their task was rendered impossible by the
popular opposition, while there is evidence that they were very willing
to neglect it, and very willing to allow any obstacle, no matter how
trivial, to obstruct their performance of it. They were, in truth, as
everybody knows, the simple tools of the faction which started this
Convention movement, and not at all desirous to secure a fair and
adequate representation of the inhabitants.
That many of the people should be careless of the registration, and even
unfriendly to it, is natural, because they disapproved the plan, and
were hostile to the ends of the Convention. They doubted the authority
by which it had been summoned; they doubted both the validity and the
probable fairness of an election under such authority; and, moreover,
they were indifferent as to its proceedings, because they had been
assured that they would be called upon to pronounce pro or con upon
its results. The Convention, as actually constituted when assembled,
consisted of sixty delegates, representing about 1,800 voters, in an
electoral body of 12,000 in all,—or one delegate to thirty voters! A
convention so composed ought to have been ashamed of the very pretence
of acting in the name of the whole people. It would have been ashamed of
it, if it had contained men sincerely anxious to reflect the will of the
great body of the citizens. It would have been as much ashamed of it,
as any honest man would be to pass himself off as the agent of a person
whom he had never known, or who openly derided and despised him. But
this precious body—each man of whom represented thirty men besides
himself, in a voting population of 12,000—was not sensible to such
considerations. By a miserable chicane, it had got into a position to do
mischief, and it proceeded to do it, with as much alacrity and headlong
zeal as rogues are apt to exhibit when the prize is great and the
opportunity short. An election for the Legislature, held subsequently to
that for the Convention, showing a public opinion decidedly adverse to
it, the sole study of its members thenceforth seemed to be, how they
could most adroitly and effectively nullify the ascendency of the
majority. For this end alone they consulted, and caballed, and
calculated, and junketed; and the Lecompton Constitution, with the
Schedule annexed, was the worthy fruit of their labors.
It is monstrous in Mr. Buchanan to assume that a body so contrived and
so acting expressed in any sense the sovereign will of the people. But,
not to dwell upon this point, let us suppose that the Convention had
been summoned by a competent authority, that it had been fairly chosen
by its small constituency, and that its proceedings had been managed
with ordinary decorum,—would the Constitution it framed be valid, in
the face of a clear popular condemnation? We hold that it would not,
because, in our estimation, and in the estimation of every intelligent
American, the very essence of republicanism is "the consent of the
governed." It is the highest function of political sovereignty to devise
and ordain the organic law of society, the vital form of its being; and
the characteristic difference between the despotic or oligarchical and
the republican government is, that in the one case the function is
exercised by a monarch or a class, and in the other by the body of the
citizens. This distinctive feature of our politics, as opposed to
all others, regards the will of the people, directly or indirectly
expressed, as alone giving validity to law; our National Constitution,
and every one of our thirty-one State Constitutions, proceeds upon
that principle; every act of legislation in the Congress and the State
Assemblies supposes it; and every decision of every Court has that for
its basis. Constitutions have been adopted, undoubtedly, without a
distinct submission of them to the ratification of the people; but in
such cases there has been no serious agitation of the public mind, no
important conflict or division of opinion, rendering such ratification
necessary,—and, in the absence of dispute, the general assent of the
community to the action of its delegates might fairly be presumed. But
in no case, in which great and debatable questions were involved, has
any Convention dared to close its labors without providing for their
reference to the popular sanction; much less has there been any instance
in which a Convention has dared to make its own work final, in the
face of a known or apprehended repugnance of the constituency. The
politicians who should have proposed such a thing would have been
overwhelmed with unmeasured indignation and scorn. No sentiment more
livingly pervades our national mind, no sentiment is juster in itself,
than that they who are to live under the laws ought to decide on the
character of the laws,—that they whose persons, property, welfare,
happiness, life, are to be controlled by a Constitution of Government,
ought to participate in the formation of that government.
Conscious of this truth, and of its profound hold on the popular heart,
Mr. Buchanan instructed Governor Walker to see the Kansas Constitution
submitted to the people,—to protect them against fraud and violence in
voting upon it,—and to proclaim, in the event of any interference with
their rights, that the Constitution "would be and ought to be rejected
by Congress." Walker was voluble in proclamations to that end. The
trainers of the Constitution, aware of its invalidity without the
sanction of the people, provided for its submission to "approval"
or "disapproval," to "ratification" or "rejection"; and yet, by the
paltriest juggle in recorded history, devised, in the same breath, a
method of taking the vote, which completely nullified its own terms.
No man was allowed to "disapprove" it, no man was allowed to "reject"
it,—except in regard to a single section,—and before he could vote for
or against that, he was obliged to vote in favor of all the rest. If
there had been a hundred thousand voters in the Territory opposed to
the Constitution, and but one voter in its favor, the hundred thousand
voters could not have voted upon it at all, but the one voter
could,—and the vote of that one would have been construed into a
popular approval, while the will of all the others would have been
practically void. By this pitiful stratagem, it was supposed, the
double exigency of Mr. Buchanan's often repeated sentiments, and of
the pro-slavery cause, which dreaded a popular vote, was completely
satisfied; and the President of the United States, reckless of his
position and his fame, lent himself to the shameless and despicable
palter. He not only lent himself to it, but he has openly argued its
propriety, and is now making the adherence of his friends to such
baseness the test of their party fidelity. In the name of Democracy,—of
that sacred and sublime principle into which we, as a nation, have been
baptized,—which declares the inalienable rights of man,—and which,
as it makes the tour of the earth, hand and hand with Christianity, is
lifting the many from the dust, where for ages they have been trampled,
into political life and dignity,—he converts a paltry swindle into its
standard and creed, and prostitutes its glorious mission, as a redeeming
influence among men, into a ministry of slavery and outrage.
Mr. Buchanan knows—we believe better than any man in the country—that
the Lecompton Constitution is not the act of the people of Kansas. By
the election of the 4th of January—an election which was perfectly
valid, because it was held under the authority of a Territorial
Legislature superior to the Convention—it was solemnly and
unequivocally condemned. This of itself was enough to demonstrate that
fact. But all the Democratic Governors of the Territory—with the single
exception of Shannon, and the recently appointed acting Governor,
Denver, who is prudently silent—testify urgently to the same truth.
Reeder, Geary, and Walker, together with the late acting Governor,
Stanton, asseverate, in the most earnest and emphatic manner, that the
majority in Kansas is for making it a Free State,—that the minority
which has ruled is a factious minority, and that they have obtained and
perpetuated their ascendency by a most unblushing series of crimes and
frauds. Yet, in the teeth of this evidence,—of repeated elections,—of
his own witnesses turning against him,—the President adheres to the
infamous plans of the pro-slavery leaders; and, if not arrested by the
rebukes of the North, he will insist on imposing their odious measures
upon their long-suffering victims.
Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan simply from the point of
view of an enlightened statesmanship, we find nothing in it that is not
contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the
moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt,
indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling
of humiliation and apprehension. Unparalleled as the outrages in Kansas
have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the
deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to
defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,—that, when the
honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he
should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler
style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty
larceny,—and that he should be abetted by more than half the national
representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the
moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they
owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is
certified to by the disagreement of a jury.
These things are the logical consequences of that profound national
demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill
and alone made its execution possible,—a demoralization wilfully
brought about, for selfish ends, in that sad time which saw our greatest
advocates and our acutest politicians spending all their energy of mind
and subtlety of argument to persuade the people that there was no higher
law than that rule of custom and chicane woven of the split hairs of
immemorial sophistry, and whose strongest fibre is at the mercy of an
obstinate traverse juror,—no law higher than the decree of party,
ratified by a popular majority achieved by the waiters on Presidential
providence, through immigrant voters whom the gurgling oratory of
the whiskey-barrel is potent to convince, and whose sole notion of
jurisprudence is based upon experience of the comparative toughness
of Celtic skulls and blackthorn shillalahs. And such arguments were
listened to, such advocates commended for patriotism, in a land from
whose thirty thousand pulpits God and Christ are preached weekly to
hearers who profess belief in the Divine government of the world and the
irreversible verdicts of conscience!
The capacity of the English race for self-government is measured by
their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race
conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all
others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three
times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of
rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to
have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a
cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of
legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend
sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find
them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that
which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of
legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social
disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years' experience
of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against
a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august
a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.
Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud
should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting
vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the
solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for
uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of
their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing
a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it
becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of
sectional rapacity. Have we, then, forgotten that the true prosperity of
a nation is moral, and not material? that its strength depends, not on
the width of its boundaries, nor the bulk of its census, but on its
magnanimity, its honor, its fidelity to conscience? There is a Fate
which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and
the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be
debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers
seem to suppose. The sceptre which dropped successively from the grasp
of Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, Rome, fell from a hand palsied by
the moral degeneracy of the people; and the emasculate usurper or the
foreign barbarian snatched and squandered the heritage of civilization
which escheated for want of legitimate heirs of the old royal race,
whose divine right was the imperial brain, and who found their strength
in a national virtue which individualized itself in every citizen. The
wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through
the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies
than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White
House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press,
ominous of popular decadence.
Do our leading politicians, and the prominent bankers and merchants who
sustain them, know what a dangerous lesson they are setting to a people
whose affairs are controlled by universal suffrage, when they affirm
that to be right which can by any false pretence be voted so? Does not
he who undermines national principle sap the foundations of individual
property also? If burglary may be committed on a commonwealth under
form of law, is there any logic that will protect a bank-vault or a
strong-box? When Mr. Buchanan, with a Jew broker at one elbow and a
Frenchman at the other, (strange representatives of American diplomacy!)
signed his name to the Ostend circular, was he not setting a
writing-lesson for American youth to copy, and one which the pirate hand
of Walker did copy in ungainly letters of fire and blood in Nicaragua?
The vice of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of
personal responsibility. The guilt of every national sin comes back to
the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions.
It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their
constituencies or to the people. The President of the United States,
during his four years of office, is less amenable to public opinion than
the Queen of England through her ministers; senators, with embassies in
prospect, laugh at instructions; representatives think they have made a
good bargain when they exchange the barren approval of constituencies
for the smile of one whom a lucky death, perhaps, has converted into
the Presidential Midas of the moment; and in a nation of adventurers,
success is too easily allowed to sanctify a speculation by which a man
sells his pitiful self for a better price than even a Jew could get for
the Saviour of the world. It cannot be too often repeated, that the only
responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of
every individual man in it to his conscience and his God. As long
as any one of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we
sometimes vaguely boast, a sovereign,—a constituent part of Destiny;
the infinite Future is his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as
his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal
shears;—but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of
circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative's
cowardice, or the venal one's itching palm. Our only safety, then, is
in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the
chances of representative dishonesty, or, at the worst, constitute a
public opinion that shall make the whole country a penitentiary for
such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose
withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of
self-degradation. Let every man remember, that, though he may be a
nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by
ten when it is placed on the right side of whatever unit for the time
represents the cause of truth and justice. What we need is a thorough
awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how
the still and stealthy ashes of political apathy and moral insensibility
are slipping under our feet and hurrying us with them toward the
crater's irrevocable core, it may be that the effort of self-preservation
called forth by the danger will make us love the daring energy and the
dependence on our individual strength, that alone can keep us free and
worthy to be freemen.
While we hold the moral aspect of the great question now before the
country to be cardinal, there are also some practical ones which the
Republican party ought never to lose sight of. To move a people among
whom the Anglo-Saxon element is predominant, we will not say, with Lord
Bacon, that we must convince their pockets, but we do believe that moral
must always go hand in hand with common sense. They will take up arms
for a principle, but they must have confidence in each other and in
their leaders. Conscience is a good tutor to tell a man on which side to
act, but she leaves the question of How to act to every man's prudence
and judgment. An over-nice conscience has before now turned the stomach
of a great cause on the eve of action. Cromwell knew when to split hairs
and when skulls. The North has too generally allowed its strength to be
divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost
seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold
its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the
Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun,
which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the
power which springs from concentration and the success which is sure
to follow concert of action. We have spent our strength in quarrelling
about the character of men, when we should have been watchful only of
the character of measures. A scruple of conscience has no right to
outweigh a pound of duty, though it ought to make a ton of private
interest kick the beam. The great aim of the Republican party should
be to gain one victory for the Free States. One victory will make us a
unit, and is equal to a reinforcement of fifty thousand men. The genius
of success in politics or war is to know Opportunity at first sight.
There is no mistress so easily tired as Fortune. We must waste no more
time in investigating the motives of our recruits. Have we not faith
enough in our cause to believe that it will lift all to its own level of
patriotism and devotion? Let us, then, welcome all allies, from whatever
quarter, and not inquire into their past history as minutely as if we
were the assignees of the Recording Angel and could search his books at
pleasure. When Soult was operating in the South of France, the defection
of two German regiments crippled all his combinations and gave the
advantage to Wellington. Ought Wellington to have refused their aid? For
our own part, if Mr. Douglas be the best tactician, the best master of
political combination, we are willing to forget all past differences and
serve under him cheerfully, rather than lose the battle under a general
who has agreed with us all his life. When we remember, that, of the two
great cathedrals of Europe, one is dedicated to Saint Peter who denied
his Lord under temptation, and the other to Saint Paul who spent his
early manhood in persecuting true believers, and that both these patrons
of the Church, differing as they did in many points of doctrine, were
united in martyrdom for their belief, we cannot but think that there is
room even for repentant renegades in the camp of the faithful.
While we insist that Morals should govern the motives of political
action, and that no party can be permanently strong which has not the
reserve of a great principle behind it, we affirm with no less strength
of conviction that the details of our National Housekeeping should be
managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states
moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial
guide-posts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. The
advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp
practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our
voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind
of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses
of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like
a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before
the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have
been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after
parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. A
siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in
capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be
terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of
Disunion,—a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as
harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as
the spoiled child's refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a
dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We
will not allow it; we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion
to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system
of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by
the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis;
the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in
Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with
it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the
sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force.
We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the
Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it
and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in
their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the
insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the
vindication of an elder doom;—it is for us to assert and to secure the
claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the
sentence, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread." We are
to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which Nature
and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of
man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues
it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least
includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man's
political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy
under the imputation.
But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under
the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which
we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional
one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern
white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration
of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern
States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry;
that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger
of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted
closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our
polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh
seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change,—as if the fair hair
and skin of those ancestral non Angli sed angeli should crisp into
wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can
hold any office under the national government, however petty, without an
open recantation of those principles which he drew in with his mother's
milk,—those principles which, in the better days of the republic,
even a slaveholder could write down in the great charter of our
liberties,—those principles which now only the bells and cannon
are allowed to utter on the Fourth of July or the Seventeenth of
June,—bells that may next call out the citizen-soldiery to aid in the
rendition of a slave,—cannon whose brazen lips may next rebuke the
freedom whose praises they but yesterday so emptily thundered.
When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared
this continent for the experiment of Democracy,—when we think of those
forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august
breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best
blood in the day of her trial,—when we remember the first two acts of
our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that
third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a
new Hero to mankind,—we cannot believe it possible that this great
scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty
only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of
juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that
the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that
this unhistoried continent,—this virgin leaf in the great diary of
man's conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of
epic grandeur,—Plymouth and Bunker Hill,—is to bear for its colophon
the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,—a
republic, and made it anarchy,—freedom, and were content as serfs,—of
men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies
the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold.
The change is sad 'twixt Now and Then: the Great Republic is without
influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is
to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men
and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn,
and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely
content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column
of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing
monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as
provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain?
Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs,
because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the
newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the
country to fill it?
We of the Free States are confessedly without our fair share of
influence in the administration of national affairs. Its foreign and
domestic policy are both directed by principles often hostile to our
interests, sometimes abhorrent to our sense of right and honor. Under
loud professions of Democracy, the powers of the central government and
of the Executive have increased till they have scarcely a match among
the despotisms of Europe, and more than justify the prophetic fears of
practical statesmen like Samuel Adams and foresighted politicians like
Jefferson. Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal
preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily
lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it.
Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an
Aristocracy over a Democracy? to any mental inferiority, to lack of
courage, of political ability, of continuity of purpose, on our own
part? We should be slow to find the cause in reasons like these; but we
do find it in that moral disintegration, the necessary result of that
falsehood to our own sense of right forced upon us by the slave-system,
and which, beginning with our public men, has gradually spread to the
Press, the Pulpit, nay, worse than all, the Home, till it is hard to
find a private conscience that is not tainted with the contagious mange.
For what have we not seen within the last few years? We have seen the
nomination to office made dependent, not on the candidate's being large
enough to fill, but small enough to take it. Holding the purity of
elections as a first article of our creed, we have seen one-third of
the population of a Territory control the other two-thirds by false or
illegal votes; hereditary foes of a standing army, we have seen four
thousand troops stationed in Kansas to make forged ballots good by real
bullets; lovers of fair play, we have seen a cowardly rabble from the
Slave States protected by Federal bayonets while they committed robbery,
arson, and Sepoy atrocities against women, and the Democratic party
forced to swallow this nauseous mixture of force, fraud, and Executive
usurpation, under the name of Popular Sovereignty. We have seen Freedom
pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the
republic. We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts
for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade. We have seen the
attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded
by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies. We have
seen a pirate, for the hanging of whom the conscious Earth would have
produced a tree, had none before existed, threaten the successor of
Washington with the exposure of his complicity, if he did not publicly
violate the faith he had publicly pledged.—But enough, and more than
enough.
It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue
themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and
there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward
which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them. But the
reform must be wide and deep, and its political objects must be attained
by household means. Our sense of private honor and integrity must be
quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the
success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the
destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and
exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage
lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of
delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a
stain upon his own personal integrity; we must become convinced that
a government without conscience is the necessary result of a people
careless of their duties, and therefore unworthy of their rights.
Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered
that History does not concern herself about material wealth,—that the
life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in
the arteries of Trade,—that its true revenues are religion, justice,
sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,—that it is only
by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting
conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the
North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that
America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which
she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose
morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no
longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie
to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of
these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from
their invincible wings.
* * * * *
Library of Old Authors. London: John Russell Smith, 1856-7.
Many of our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they
looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young's excellent
series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they
carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate
livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first introduction to the
highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed
scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer,
More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton. What a sense of
security in an old book which Time has criticized for us! What a
precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries
between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature! How
limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that
has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and
Falernian amphorae of the Past! No other writers speak to us with the
authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation
of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible
which was natural to a period when yet reviews were not; and no later
style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the
metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet
of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh
privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these
old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved
thoroughfares of thought.
Even the "Retrospective Review" continues to be good reading, in virtue
of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its bouquet by age) which
pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission
to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary,
honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our
fancy chooses. The years during which this Review was published were
altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old English
literature. Books were prized for their imaginative, and not their
antiquarian value, by young writers who sat at the feet of Lamb and
Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy were sought, rather
than the barren scarcities of typography. But another race of men seems
to have sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector
predominates, who substitute archaeologic perversity for aesthetic
scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for
the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their
fanaticism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is
impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books
absorb tone-mellowness from age, and that a baptismal register which
proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make
mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining.
There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering
experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and
ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that
have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;—these
quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson
fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this
purpling bloom, of Lamb;—in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens
of Alcinoüs and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which
can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins,
which have outlived their half dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen
and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years
ago.
We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our
eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a
book"; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in
which "Bible, large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their
alphabetic individuality and were the sole _B_s in our little hive, we
have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill
up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that
Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book-case, would have no
tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room
for choicer newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present
incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we
live over again the author's lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see
him, on his first appearance after parturition, "as well as could be
expected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed
umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the
Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button,
blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must
needs know him for the author of the "Modest Enquiry into the Present
State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the "Unities briefly considered by
Philomusus," of which they have never heard and never will hear so much
as the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving
to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete
without; we see the spend-thrift heir, whose horses and hounds and
Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to
the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks
of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original
foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct
baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial flowers of
some passion which the church-yard smothered while the Stuarts were yet
unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there
with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and
weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of
Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and
the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more
choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its
battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.
It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making
the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be a
florilegium, and not a botanist's hortus siccus, to which grasses
are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly
genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of
the "Library." We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be
reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were
especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should
be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes
already published are: Increase Mather's "Remarkable Providences"; the
poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the "Visions" of Piers Ploughman; the
works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the "Hymns and Songs"
and the "Hallelujah" of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden's
"Table-talk"; the "Enchiridion" of Quarles; the dramatic works of
Marston and Webster; and Chapman's translation of Homer. The volume of
Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same
shelf with the "Magnalia" of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham's
comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long
time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is
as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters" are
interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of
footnotes to the works of better men,—but, with the exception of "The
Fair and Happy Milkmaid," they are dull enough to have pleased James the
First; his "Wife" is a cento of far-fetched conceits,—here a tomtit,
and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a
cockney's game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in his having
been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower,
not without suspicion of royal complicity. The "Piers Ploughman" is
a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of
Mr. Wright's former edition. It would have been very well to have
republished the "Fair Virtue," and "Shepherd's Hunting" of George
Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can
imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his "Hymns
and Songs," whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal
reading for incorrigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not
bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take
this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:—
"Rottenness my bones possest;
Trembling fear possessed me;
I that troublous day might rest:
For, when his approaches be
Onward to the people made,
His strong troops will them invade."
Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David and puts into his
mouth such punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint
Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the
Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the
distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality
are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is
hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost
match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his
own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which
poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from
that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that
an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the
religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious
poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun
and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of
that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited
metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep
country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics;
but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes
to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their
company,—to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the
Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of
forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs,—nay, to set
them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper
chambers of the soul that open toward the sun's rising, is to confound
piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake
from the apothecary's drawer. The "Enchiridion" of Quarles is
hardly worthy of the author of the "Emblems," and is by no means an
unattainable book in other editions,—nor a matter of heartbreak, if it
were so. Of the dramatic works of Marston it is enough to say that they
are truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor worth the
paper they blot. He seems to have been deemed worthy of republication
because he was the contemporary of true poets; and if all the Tuppers
of the nineteenth century will buy his plays on the same principle, the
sale will be a remunerative one. The Homer of Chapman is so precious
a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith's shortcomings in
consideration of it. It is a vast placer, full of nuggets for the
philologist and the lover of poetry.
Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith's reprints, we
come to the closer question of How are they edited? Whatever the merit
of the original works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by
the publisher, should be accurate and scholarly. The editing of the
Homer we can heartily commend; and Dr. Rimbault, who carried the works
of Overbury through the press, has done his work well; but the
other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English
scholarship nor to English typography. The Introductions to some of
them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity
of reprinting our old authors because the art of writing correct and
graceful English has been lost. William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln's
Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction to
Southwell: "There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill,
in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which]
Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious
instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close
confinement for a purer atmosphere." (pp. xxii.-xxiii.) Again, (p.
xxii.,) "He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great
success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated
by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592." We should
like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how the objects of a mission could
be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission
itself. From the many similar flowers in the Introduction to Mather's
"Providences," by Mr. George Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize
a countryman,) we select the following: "It was at this period when,
[that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our pilgrim
fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but
trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost
unknown ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of men called savages,
who proved more beneficent than national Christians." To whom or what
our pilgrim fathers did succumb, and what "national Christians" are,
we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of the
"Providences," Mr. Offor says, that "they faithfully delineate the state
of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being
an implicit faith in the power of the [in-]visible world to hold visible
intercourse with man:—not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but
of demons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and
destroy,"—a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he
were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid.
On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that "he was one of the first
divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were
considered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by
deceitful juggling; that the Devil could not speak English, nor prevail
with Protestants; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil; that medicine
drives out Satan!" We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of
exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but we do confess
our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered
it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question,
we find, on referring to Mather's text, that he was never guilty of the
absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than
in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a
certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could
not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot
prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor
that medicine drives him out.
Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic,—not sparing, as we
have seen, even Priscian's head among the rest; but, en revanche, Mr.
Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the Civiltà Cattolica.
He allows himself to say, that, "after Southwell's death, one of his
sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blameably simulating
heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on
persons afflicted with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled
the skill of all physicians." Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent
convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a
lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints
than even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to Protestants)
for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame
was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But whatever the merits of the
Jesuit himself, and however it may gratify Mr. Turnbull's catechumenical
enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his,
even at the expense of Jesuits' bark, we cannot but think that he has
shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his
hero's life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is
possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a neck-tie only to
heretical readers.
Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offor's preliminary
dissertation on Witchcraft we never read; but we could hardly expect
much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show
that he had either not read or not understood it.
We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull and Offor for
special animadversion because they are on the whole the worst, both of
them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular
gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the others are not
without grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation,
especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to
weary the reader and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to
Wither's "Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that "nearly
all the best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century—for that
was the period when the Reformation was fully established—and the whole
of the seventeenth century were sacred poets," and that "even Shakspeare
and the contemporary dramatists of his age sometimes attuned their
well-strung harps to the songs of Zion." Comment on statements like
these would be as useless as the assertions themselves are absurd.
We have quoted these examples only to justify us in saying, that Mr.
Smith must select his editors with more care, if he wishes that his
"Library of Old Authors" should deserve the confidence and thereby gain
the good word of intelligent readers,—without which such a series can
neither win nor keep the patronage of the public. It is impossible that
men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who do not
know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle
the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old
author's meaning; and it is more than doubtful whether they who assert
carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature
disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake to do. If it were
unreasonable to demand of every one who assumes to edit one of our early
poets the critical acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading,
the philological scholarship, which in combination would alone make
the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to expect some one of these
qualifications singly, and we have the right to insist upon patience and
accuracy, which are within the reach of every one, and without which all
the others are wellnigh vain. Now to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor
specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable sentences: "We are
bound to admire," he says, "the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of
typography. Following in the path of my late friend William Pickering,
our publisher rivals the Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so
universally admired." We should think that it was the product of those
presses which had been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a still
worthier object of admiration when he contrives to follow a path and
rival a press at the same time. But let that pass;—it is the claim to
accuracy which we dispute; and we deliberately affirm, that, as far as
we are able to judge by the volumes we have examined, no claim more
unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as we shall show presently,
the blunders of the original work have been followed with painful
accuracy in the reprint; but many others have been added by the
carelessness of Mr. Smith's printers or editors. In the thirteen
pages of Mr. Offor's own Introduction we have found as many as seven
typographical errors,—unless some of them are to be excused on the
ground that Mr. Offor's studies have not yet led him into those arcana
where we are taught such recondite mysteries of language as that verbs
agree with their nominatives. In Mr. Farr's Introduction to the "Hymns
and Songs" nine short extracts from other poems of Wither are quoted,
and in these we have found no less than seven misprints or false
readings which materially affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a
grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not
only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blundering
misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical
reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the
last dozen years among literary sciolists, he says,—"The language used
by Wither in all his various works—whether secular or sacred—is pure
Saxon." Taken literally, this assertion is manifestly ridiculous, and,
allowing it every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither,
but of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The translators of our
Bible made use of the German version, and a poet versifying the English
Scriptures would therefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic
origin than in his original compositions. But no English poet can write
English poetry except in English,—that is, in that compound of Teutonic
and Romanic which derives its heartiness and strength from the one and
its canorous elegance from the other. The Saxon language does not sing,
and, though its tough mortar serve to hold together the less compact
Latin words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that our verse owes
majesty, harmony, variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of
six lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on which Mr. Parr
lays down his extraordinary dictum, and we will let this answer him,
Italicizing the words of Romanic derivation:—
"Her true beauty leaves behind
Apprehensions in the mind,
Of more sweetness than all art
Or inventions can impart;
Thoughts too deep to be expressed,
And too strong to be suppressed."
But space fails us, and we shall take up the editions of Marston and
Webster in a future article.
Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, etc. By DR. WAAGEN.
Forming a Supplemental Volume to the "Treasures of Art in Great
Britain." 8vo. London. 1857.
The Manchester Exhibition, although containing a vast number of works
of Art, displayed but a small portion of the treasures of painting and
sculpture scattered through Great Britain, in the city and country
houses of the upper classes. Every year is adding greatly to the number
and value of both private and public galleries in England. It is but
three years since Dr. Waagen published his three ponderous volumes on
the "Treasures of Art in Great Britain," and he has already found new
material for a fourth, not less cumbrous than its predecessors. The
larger part of this last volume is, indeed, composed of descriptions of
galleries existing at the time of the publication of his first work, but
the most interesting portion of it relates to the acquisitions that have
been made within the last three years.
A better taste, and a truer appreciation of the relative merits of works
of Art, prevails in England now than at any previous time, and the
recent acquisitions are distinguished not more by their number than by
their intrinsic value. The National Gallery has at last begun to make
its purchases upon a systematic plan, and is endeavoring to form such a
collection as shall exhibit the historic progress of the various schools
of painting. The late additions to it have been of peculiar interest in
this view; including some very admirable pictures by masters whose works
are rare and of real importance. Among them are very noble works of
some of the chief earlier Florentine, Umbrian, and Venetian masters;
especially a beautiful picture by Benozzo Gozzoli, (the Virgin enthroned
with the infant Saviour in her arms and surrounded by Saints,)—a
thoroughly characteristic specimen of Giovanni Bellini, (also a Virgin
holding the Child,) in which the deep, fervent, and tender spirit, the
manly feeling, and the unsurpassed purity of color of this great master
are well shown,—and one of the finest existing pictures of Perugino,
the three lower and principal compartments of an altarpiece painted for
the Certosa at Pavia. We know, indeed, no work by the master of Raphael
to be set above this. Two of the best pictures of Paul Veronese have
also just been added to the National Gallery.
Still more important are the recent private purchases. The Duke of
Northumberland procured in Rome, in 1850, the whole of Camuccini's
famous collection. It contained seventy-four pictures, and many of
them of great value. Among them was a small, but precious picture
by Giotto,—a beautiful little Raphael,—three undoubted works of
Titian,—and, most precious of all, a picture, formerly in the Ludovisi
collection, painted jointly by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. It is the
Descent of the Gods to taste the Fruits of the Earth, half-comic in
conception, but remarkable for the grace of some of its figures; the
landscape is by Titian, and Dr. Waagen says, justly, that "it is,
without comparison, the finest that up to that period had ever been
painted,"—and we would add, few finer have been painted since.
Meanwhile Sir Charles Eastlake has obtained a picture by Mantegna, and
another by Bellini, both of which rank very high among the works of
these masters, and both in excellent condition. And Mr. Alexander
Barker, whose collection is becoming one of the best selected and most
interesting in England, has purchased several pictures of great value,
especially one by Verocchio, the master of Leonardo da Vinci, which Dr.
Waagen speaks of as "the most important picture I know by this rare
master." Mr. Barker has also made an addition to his collection so
recent as not to be described even in this last volume of the "Art
Treasures," but which is of unsurpassed interest. He has purchased from
the Manfrini Gallery at Venice, a gallery which has long been famous as
containing some of the best works of the Venetian school, eighteen of
its best pictures, and was lately in treaty for a still larger number.
He has already secured Titian's portrait of Ariosto, Giorgione's
portrait of a woman with a guitar, and other works by these masters, by
Palma Vecchio, Giovanni Bellini, and other chief Venetian painters. We
trust that he may bring to England (if it must leave Venice) Bellini's
St. Jerome, a picture of the most precious character.
This catalogue, long as it already is, by no means completes the list of
the last three years' gains of pictures for England. Such a record shows
how compact with treasures the little island is becoming. And meanwhile,
what is America doing in this way? The overestimate of the importance
and value of Mr. Belmont's collection in New York shows how far the
American public yet is from knowing its own ignorance and poverty in
respect to Art.
No praise can be given to the execution of Dr. Waagen's book. His
descriptions of pictures are rarely characteristic; his tone and
standard of judgment are worthless; his style of writing is poor; his
inaccuracies frequent; and his flunkeyism intolerable. It would be an
excellent undertaking for a competent person, using Dr. Waagen's book
as a basis, to compress the account of the principal private galleries,
those which really contain pictures of value, into one small and
portable volume,—to serve as a handbook for travellers in England, as
well as for a guide to the present place of pictures interesting in the
history of artists and of Art. Such a volume, if well done, would be of
vastly more value than these heavy four. The usual delightful liberality
of English collectors in opening their galleries to the public on
certain days would make such a volume something more than a mere
tantalizing exposition of treasures that could not be seen, and would
render it, to all lovers of Art, an indispensable companion in England.
We may add that this liberality might be imitated with advantage by the
directors of some collections in which the public have a greater claim.
We tried once in vain to get sight of the portraits of Alleyn and
Burbage at Bulwich College, and were prevented from seeing the Hogarths
in the Sloane Museum by the length of time required for the preliminary
ceremonies.
The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General
Knowledge. Edited by GEORGE RIPLEY and CHAS. A. DANA. Vol. I.
A—ARAGUAY. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.
The design of this work is to furnish the American public with a
Cyclopaedia which shall be readable as well as valuable,—possessing
all the advantages of a dictionary of knowledge for the purposes of
reference, and all the interest which results from a scholarly treatment
of the subjects. Judging from the first volume, it will occupy a middle
ground between the great Encyclopaedias and the numerous special
Dictionaries of Art and Science; and if its plan be carried out with the
vigor and skill which mark its commencement, it will, when completed, be
the best and most condensed Cyclopaedia for popular use in any language.
The guaranty for its successful completion is to be found in the
character and abilities of the editors, and the resources at their
command. Mr. Ripley is an accomplished man of letters, familiar with the
whole field of literature and philosophy, gifted with a mental aptitude
equally for facts and ideas, a fanatic for no particular branch of
knowledge, but with a genial appreciation of each, and endowed with a
largeness and catholicity of mind which eminently fit him to mould the
multitudinous materials of a work like the present into the form of a
prescribed plan. Mr. Dana is well known as one of the chief editors
of the most influential journal in the country, as combining vigorous
intellect with indefatigable industry, and as capable, both in the
domain of facts and in the domain of principles, of "toiling terribly."
The resources of the editors are, literally, almost too numerous
to mention. They include the different Encyclopaedias and popular
Conversations-Lexicons in various languages,—recent biographies,
histories, books of travel, and scientific treatises,—the opportunities
of research afforded by the best private and public libraries,—and a
body of contributors, scattered over different portions of the United
States and Europe, of whom nearly a hundred have written for the present
volume, and, in some cases, have contributed the results of personal
observation, research, and discovery. These contributors are selected
with a view to their proficiency and celebrity in their several
departments. The scientific articles are written by scientific men;
those on technology and machinery, by practical machinists and
engineers; those on military and naval affairs, by officers of the army
and navy; and those which relate to the history and doctrines of the
various Christian churches and denominations, by men who have both the
knowledge of their subjects which comes from study and the knowledge
which comes from sympathy.
The plan of the editors implies a perfect neutrality in regard to all
controverted points in politics, science, philosophy, and religion;
and though they cannot avoid controversy as a fact in the history of
opinion, it is their purpose to have the Cyclopaedia give an impartial
statement of various opinions without an intrusion of their own or those
of their contributors. In considering how far, in the first volume, they
have succeeded in their general design, it must be remembered that a
Cyclopaedia which shall be satisfactory to all readers alike is an ideal
which the human imagination may contemplate, but which seems to be
beyond the reach of human wit practically to attain. Besides, each
reader is apt to have a pet interest in certain persons, events, topics,
beliefs, which stand in his own mind for universal knowledge, and he is
naturally vexed to find how their importance dwindles when they appear
in relation to the whole of nature and human life. In respect to
Biography, especially in a Cyclopaedia which admits lives of the living
as well as the dead, and to whose biographical department a great
variety of authors contribute, there is an inherent difficulty of
preserving the proper gradation of reputations. Doubtless, many an
American gentleman will find that this Cyclopaedia gives him an
importance, in comparison with the rest of the world, which time will
not sanction; and doubtless, some of the dead _A_s, if rapped into
utterance by the modern process of spiritual communication, would
complain of the curt statement which coffined their souls in a space
more limited than that now occupied by their bodies. The biographies,
however, of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Addison, Aeschylus, Mark
Anthony, Alfieri, Akenside, Allston, Agassiz, and a number of others,
are evidently by "eminent hands," and, as compared with the rest, are
treated with more fulness and richness of detail, with an easier and
more genial mastery of the subjects, and with less fear of being
redundant in good things. Still, most of the biographies serve the
primary purpose of the work as a book of reference, and contain as large
an amount of information as could well be crammed into so limited a
space.
Such a variety of minds have been engaged on the present volume, that
among its twenty-five hundred articles will be found every kind of
style, from austere scientific statement, to brilliant wit and fancy.
Two subjects, never before included in a Cyclopaedia in the English
language, namely, Aesthetics and Absolute, are ably, though far too
briefly treated. Entertainment is not overlooked in the plan of the
editors, and there are some articles, like those on Almacks, Actors, and
Adventures, which contain information at once curious and amusing.
The article "Americanism" might have been made much more valuable and
pleasing, had the subject been treated at greater length, with more
insight into the reasons which led to the establishment of an American
verbal mint, and with a more complete list of the felicities of its
coinage. The articles which refer to bodily health, such as those on
Appetite, Age, Aliment, Total Abstinence, contain important facts and
admirable suggestions in condensed statements. Agriculture, Agricultural
Schools, and Agricultural Chemistry are evidently the work of writers
who appreciate the practical wants of the farmer, as well as understand
the aids which science can furnish him. Two divisions of the globe,
Africa and America, come within the scope of the present volume, and,
though the special reader will notice in the articles devoted to them
some omissions, and some statements which may require modification, they
bear the general marks of industry, vigilance, and research. The paper
on Anaesthetics is evidently by a writer who meant to be impartial, but
still injustice is done to the claims of Dr. Jackson, and we trust that
in the next edition some of the statements will be corrected, even if
the whole question of the discovery is not more thoroughly argued. It
seems curious that a discovery which destroys pain should be a constant
cause of pain to every person in any way connected with it. It may not
be within the province of a Cyclopaedia to undertake the decision of a
question still so vehemently controverted; but we think it might be so
stated as to include all the facts, harmonize portions at least of
the conflicting evidence, and put some people "out of pain." We must
attribute it to a careless reading of the proof-sheets that the editors
have allowed the concluding paragraph in the article "Adams" to intrude
village gossip into a work which should be an example to American
scholarship, and not a receptacle of newspaper scandal.
In conclusion, we think that the impression which an examination of the
present volume, considered as a whole, leaves on the mind is, that the
editors have generally succeeded in making it both comprehensive and
compact,—comprehensive without being superficial, and compact without
being dry and dull. As a book for the desultory reader, it will be found
full of interest and attractiveness, while it is abundantly capable of
bearing severer tests than any to which the desultory reader will be
likely to subject it. Minor faults can easily be detected, but we think
its great merits are much more obvious than its little defects. The
probability is, that, when completed, it will be found to contain
articles by almost every person of literary and scientific note in the
United States; for the wide and friendly relations which the editors
hold with American authors and savans, of all sects, parties, and
sections, will enable them to obtain valuable contributions, even if
the general interest in the success of an American Cyclopaedia were not
sufficient of itself to draw the intellect of the country to its pages.
As a work which promises to be so honorable to the literature of the
country, we trust that it will meet with a public patronage commensurate
with its deserts.