UNCOLLECTED PROSE
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
_The Lord's Supper_
_The Editors to the Reader_
_Thoughts on Modern Literature_
_Two Years before the Mast._ A Personal Narrative of Life at
Sea.
_Social Destiny of Man: or Association and Reorganization of
Industry._
_Michael Angelo, considered as a Philosophic Poet, with
Translations._
_Essays and Poems_. By JONES VERY.
_Walter Savage Landor_
_Transcendentalism_
_The Senses and the Soul_
_Prayers_
_Fourierism and the Socialists_
_Chardon Street and Bible Conventions_
_Agriculture of Massachusetts_
_The Zincali: or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain.
_Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic.
_Tecumseh; a Poem_. By GEORGE H. COLTON.
_Intelligence_
_Harvard University_.
_English Reformers_
_Poems_. By ALFRED TENNYSON.
_A Letter to Rev. Wm. E. Channing, D. D._ By O. A. BROWNSON
_Europe and European Books_
_The Bible in Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures, and
Imprisonments of an Englishman in an attempt to circulate the
Scriptures in the Peninsula_.
_Past and Present_ By Thomas Carlyle.
_Antislavery Poems._ By JOHN PIERPONT. Boston: Oliver Johnson. 1843.
_Sonnets and other Poems._ By WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
_America -- an Ode; and other Poems._ By N. W. COFFIN.
_Poems by_ WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
_A Letter_
_The Huguenots in France and America_
_The Spanish Student. A Play in Three Acts_. By H. W. Longfellow.
_The Dream of a Day, and other Poems_. By JAMES G. PERCIVAL.
_The Tragic_
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_The Lord's Supper_
The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness,
and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. -- ROMANS XIV. 17.
In the history of the Church no subject has been more fruitful
of controversy than the Lord's Supper. There never has been any
unanimity in the understanding of its nature, nor any uniformity in
the mode of celebrating it. Without considering the frivolous
questions which have been lately debated as to the posture in which
men should partake of it; whether mixed or unmixed wine should be
served; whether leavened or unleavened bread should be broken; the
questions have been settled differently in every church, who should
be admitted to the feast, and how often it should be prepared. In
the Catholic Church, infants were at one time permitted and then
forbidden to partake; and, since the ninth century, the laity receive
the bread only, the cup being reserved to the priesthood. So, as to
the time of the solemnity. In the fourth Lateran Council, it was
decreed that any believer should communicate at least once in a year
-- at Easter. Afterwards it was determined that this Sacrament
should be received three times in the year -- at Easter, Whitsuntide,
and Christmas. But more important controversies have arisen
respecting its nature. The famous question of the Real Presence was
the main controversy between the Church of England and the Church of
Rome. The doctrine of the Consubstantiation taught by Luther was
denied by Calvin. In the Church of England, Archbishops Laud and
Wake maintained that the elements were an Eucharist or sacrifice of
Thanksgiving to God; Cudworth and Warburton, that this was not a
sacrifice, but a sacrificial feast; and Bishop Hoadley, that it was
neither a sacrifice nor a feast after sacrifice, but a simple
commemoration. And finally, it is now near two hundred years since
the Society of Quakers denied the authority of the rite altogether,
and gave good reasons for disusing it.
I allude to these facts only to show that, so far from the
supper being a tradition in which men are fully agreed, there always
been the widest room for difference of opinion upon this particular.
Having recently given particular attention to this subject, I
was led to the conclusion that Jesus did not intend to establish an
institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with
his disciples; and, further, to the opinion, that it is not expedient
to celebrate it as we do. I shall now endeavor to state distinctly
my reasons for these two opinions.
I. The authority of the rite.
An account of the last supper of Christ with his disciples is
given by the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
In St. Matthew's Gospel (Matt. XXVI. 26-30) are recorded the
words of Jesus in giving bread and wine on that occasion to his
disciples, but no expression occurs intimating that this feast was
hereafter to be commemorated.
In St. Mark (Mark XIV. 23) the same words are recorded, and
still with no intimation that the occasion was to be remembered.
St. Luke (Luke XXII. 15), after relating the breaking of the
bread, has these words: This do in remembrance of me.
In St. John, although other occurrences of the same evening are
related, this whole transaction is passed over without notice.
Now observe the facts. Two of the Evangelists, namely, Matthew
and John, were of the twelve disciples, and were present on that
occasion. Neither of them drops the slightest intimation of any
intention on the part of Jesus to set up anything permanent. John,
especially, the beloved disciple, who has recorded with minuteness
the conversation and the transactions of that memorable evening, has
quite omitted such a notice. Neither does it appear to have come to
the knowledge of Mark who, though not an eye-witness, relates the
other facts. This material fact, that the occasion was to be
remembered, is found in Luke alone, who was not present. There is no
reason, however, that we know, for rejecting the account of Luke. I
doubt not, the expression was used by Jesus. I shall presently
consider its meaning. I have only brought these accounts together,
that you may judge whether it is likely that a solemn institution, to
be continued to the end of time by all mankind, as they should come,
nation after nation, within the influence of the Christian religion,
would have been established in this slight manner -- in a manner so
slight, that the intention of commemorating it should not appear,
from their narrative, to have caught the ear or dwelt in the mind of
the only two among the twelve who wrote down what happened.
Still we must suppose that the expression, _"This do in
remembrance of me,"_ had come to the ear of Luke from some disciple
who was present. What did it really signify? It is a prophetic and
an affectionate expression. Jesus is a Jew, sitting with his
countrymen, celebrating their national feast. He thinks of his own
impending death, and wishes the minds of his disciples to be prepared
for it. "When hereafter," he says to them, "you shall keep the
Passover, it will have an altered aspect to your eyes. It is now a
historical covenant of God with the Jewish nation. Hereafter, it
will remind you of a new covenant sealed with my blood. In years to
come, as long as your people shall come up to Jerusalem to keep this
feast, the connection which has subsisted between us will give a new
meaning in your eyes to the national festival, as the anniversary of
my death." I see natural feeling and beauty in the use of such
language from Jesus, a friend to his friends; I can readily imagine
that he was willing and desirous, when his disciples met, his memory
should hallow their intercourse; but I cannot bring myself to believe
that in the use of such an expression he looked beyond the living
generation, beyond the abolition of the festival he was celebrating,
and the scattering of the nation, and meant to impose a memorial
feast upon the whole world.
Without presuming to fix precisely the purpose in the mind of
Jesus, you will see that many opinions may be entertained of his
intention, all consistent with the opinion that he did not design a
perpetual ordinance. He may have foreseen that his disciples would
meet to remember him, and that with good effect. It may have crossed
his mind that this would be easily continued a hundred or a thousand
years -- as men more easily transmit a form than a virtue -- and yet
have been altogether out of his purpose to fasten it upon men in all
times and all countries.
But though the words, _Do this in remembrance of me_, do occur
in Matthew, Mark, or John, and although it should be granted us that,
taken alone, they do not necessarily import so much as is usually
thought, yet many persons are apt to imagine that the very striking
and personal manner in which this eating and drinking is described,
indicates a striking and formal purpose to found a festival. And I
admit that this impression might probably be left upon the mind of
one who read only the passages under consideration in the New
Testament. But this impression is removed by reading any narrative
of the mode in which the ancient or the modern Jews have kept the
Passover. It is then perceived that the leading circumstances in the
Gospels are only a faithful account of that ceremony. Jesus did not
celebrate the Passover, and afterwards the Supper, but the Supper
_was_ the Passover. He did with his disciples exactly what every
master of a family in Jerusalem was doing at the same hour with his
household. It appears that the Jews ate the lamb and the unleavened
bread, and drank wine after a prescribed manner. It was the custom
for the master of the feast to break the bread and to bless it, using
this formula, which the Talmudists have preserved to us, "Blessed be
Thou, O Lord our God, the King of the world, who hast produced this
food from the earth," -- and to give it to every one at the table.
It was the custom of the master of the family to take the cup which
contained the wine, and to bless it, saying, "Blessed be Thou, O
Lord, who givest us the fruit of the vine," -- and then to give the
cup to all. Among the modern Jews who in their dispersion retain the
Passover, a hymn is also sung after this ceremony, specifying the
twelve great works done by God for the deliverance of their fathers
out of Egypt.
But still it may be asked, why did Jesus make expressions so
extraordinary and emphatic as these -- "This is my body which is
broken for you. Take; eat. This is my blood which is shed for you.
Drink it." -- I reply they are not extraordinary expressions from
him. They were familiar in his mouth. He always taught by parables
and symbols. It was the national way of teaching and was largely
used by him. Remember the readiness which he always showed to
spiritualize every occurrence. He stooped and wrote on the sand. He
admonished his disciples respecting the leaven of the Pharisees. He
instructed the woman of Samaria respecting living water. He
permitted himself to be anointed, declaring that it was for his
interment. He washed the feet of his disciples. These are admitted
to be symbolical actions and expressions. Here, in like manner, he
calls the bread his body, and bids the disciples eat. He had used
the same expression repeatedly before. The reason why St. John does
not repeat his words on this occasion, seems to be that he had
reported a similar discourse of Jesus to the people of Capernaum more
at length already (John VI. 27). He there tells the Jews, "Except
ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no
life in you." And when the Jews on that occasion complained that they
did not comprehend what he meant, he added for their better
understanding, and as if for our understanding, that we might not
think his body was to be actually eaten, that he only meant, _we
should live by his commandment_. He closed his discourse with these
explanatory expressions: "The flesh profiteth nothing; the _words_
that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life."
Whilst I am upon this topic, I cannot help remarking that it is
not a little singular that we should have preserved this rite and
insisted upon perpetuating one symbolical act of Christ whilst we
have totally neglected all others -- particularly one other which had
at least an equal claim to our observance. Jesus washed the feet of
his disciples and told them that, as he had washed their feet, they
ought to wash one another's feet; for he had given them an example,
that they should do as he had done to them. I ask any person who
believes the Supper to have been designed by Jesus to be commemorated
forever, to go and read the account of it in the other Gospels, and
then compare with it the account of this transaction in St. John, and
tell me if this be not much more explicitly authorized than the
Supper. It only differs in this, that we have found the Supper used
in New England and the washing of the feet not. But if we had found
it an established rite in our churches, on grounds of mere authority,
it would have been impossible to have argued against it. That rite
is used by the Church of Rome, and by the Sandemanians. It has been
very properly dropped by other Christians. Why? For two reasons:
(1) because it was a local custom, and unsuitable in western
countries; and (2) because it was typical, and all understand that
humility is the thing signified. But the Passover was local too, and
does not concern us, and its bread and wine were typical, and do not
help us to understand the redemption which they signified.
These views of the original account of the Lord's Supper lead
me to esteem it an occasion full of solemn and prophetic interest,
but never intended by Jesus to be the foundation of a perpetual
institution.
It appears however in Christian history that the disciples had
very early taken advantage of these impressive words of Christ to
hold religious meetings, where they broke bread and drank wine as
symbols.
I look upon this fact as very natural in the circumstances of
the church. The disciples lived together; they threw all their
property into a common stock; they were bound together by the memory
of Christ, and nothing could be more natural than that this eventful
evening should be affectionately remembered by them; that they, Jews
like Jesus, should adopt his expressions and his types, and
furthermore, that what was done with peculiar propriety by them, his
personal friends, with less propriety should come to be extended to
their companions also. In this way religious feasts grew up among
the early Christians. They were readily adopted by the Jewish
converts who were familiar with religious feasts, and also by the
Pagan converts whose idolatrous worship had been made up of sacred
festivals, and who very readily abused these to gross riot, as
appears from the censures of St. Paul. Many persons consider this
fact, the observance of such a memorial feast by the early disciples,
decisive of the question whether it ought to be observed by us. For
my part I see nothing to wonder at in its originating with them; all
that is surprising is that it should exist among us. There was good
reason for his personal friends to remember their friend and repeat
his words. It was only too probable that among the half converted
Pagans and Jews, any rite, any form, would find favor, whilst yet
unable to comprehend the spiritual character of Christianity.
The circumstance, however, that St. Paul adopts these views,
has seemed to many persons conclusive in favor of the institution. I
am of opinion that it is wholly upon the epistle to the Corinthians,
and not upon the Gospels, that the ordinance stands. Upon this
matter of St. Paul's view of the Supper, a few important
considerations must be stated.
The end which he has in view, in the eleventh chapter of the
first epistle is, not to enjoin upon his friends to observe the
Supper, but to censure their abuse of it. _We_ quote the passage
now-a-days as if it enjoined attendance upon the Supper; but he wrote
it merely to chide them for drunkenness. To make their enormity
plainer he goes back to the origin of this religious feast to show
what sort of feast that was, out of which this riot of theirs came,
and so relates the transactions of the Last Supper. _"I have
received of the Lord,"_ he says, _"that which I delivered to you."_
By this expression it is often thought that a miraculous
communication is implied; but certainly without good reason, if it is
remembered that St. Paul was living in the lifetime of all the
apostles who could give him an account of the transaction; and it is
contrary to all reason to suppose that God should work a miracle to
convey information that could so easily be got by natural means. So
that the import of the expression is that he had received the story
of an eye-witness such as we also possess.
But there is a material circumstance which diminishes our
confidence in the correctness of the Apostle's view; and that is, the
observation that his mind had not escaped the prevalent error of the
primitive church, the belief, namely, that the second coming of
Christ would shortly occur, until which time, he tells them, this
feast was to be kept. Elsewhere he tells them, that, at that time
the world would be burnt up with fire, and a new government
established, in which the Saints would sit on thrones; so slow were
the disciples during the life, and after the ascension of Christ, to
receive the idea which we receive, that his second coming was a
spiritual kingdom, the dominion of his religion in the hearts of men,
to be extended gradually over the whole world.
In this manner we may see clearly enough how this ancient
ordinance got its footing among the early Christians, and this single
expectation of a speedy reappearance of a temporal Messiah, which
kept its influence even over so spiritual a man as St. Paul, would
naturally tend to preserve the use of the rite when once established.
We arrive then at this conclusion, _first_, that it does not
appear, from a careful examination of the account of the Last Supper
in the Evangelists, that it was designed by Jesus to be perpetual;
_secondly_, that it does not appear that the opinion of St. Paul, all
things considered, ought to alter our opinion derived from the
evangelists.
One general remark before quitting this branch of the subject.
We ought to be cautious in taking even the best ascertained opinions
and practices of the primitive church, for our own. If it could be
satisfactorily shown that they esteemed it authorized and to be
transmitted forever, that does not settle the question for us. We
know how inveterately they were attached to their Jewish prejudices,
and how often even the influence of Christ failed to enlarge their
views. On every other subject succeeding times have learned to form
a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than
was the practice of the early ages.
But it is said: "Admit that the rite was not designed to be
perpetual. What harm doth it? Here it stands, generally accepted,
under some form, by the Christian world, the undoubted occasion of
much good; is it not better it should remain?"
II. This is the question of expediency.
I proceed to state a few objections that in my judgment lie
against its use in its present form.
1. If the view which I have taken of the history of the
institution be correct, then the claim of authority should be dropped
in administering it. You say, every time you celebrate the rite,
that Jesus enjoined it; and the whole language you use conveys that
impression. But if you read the New Testament as I do, you do not
believe he did.
2. It has seemed to me that the use of this ordinance tends to
produce confusion in our views of the relation of the soul to God.
It is the old objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, -- that the
true worship was transferred from God to Christ, or that such
confusion was introduced into the soul, that an undivided worship was
given nowhere. Is not that the effect of the Lord's Supper? I
appeal now to the convictions of communicants -- and ask such persons
whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful
confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the
commemoration due to Christ. For, the service does not stand upon
the basis of a voluntary act, but is imposed by authority. It is an
expression of gratitude to Christ, enjoined by Christ. There is an
endeavor to keep Jesus in mind, whilst yet the prayers are addressed
to God. I fear it is the effect of this ordinance to clothe Jesus
with an authority which he never claimed and which distracts the mind
of the worshipper. I know our opinions differ much respecting the
nature and offices of Christ, and the degree of veneration to which
he is entitled. I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the
human mind cannot admit but one God, and that every effort to pay
religious homage to more than one being, goes to take away all right
ideas. I appeal, brethren, to your individual experience. In the
moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a
silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,
-- do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings
from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and
Jesus is no more present to the mind than your brother or your child.
But is not Jesus called in Scripture the Mediator? He is the
mediator in that only sense in which possibly any being can mediate
between God and man -- that is an Instructor of man. He teaches us
how to become like God. And a true disciple of Jesus will receive
the light he gives most thankfully; but the thanks he offers, and
which an exalted being will accept, are not _compliments_ --
commemorations, -- but the use of that instruction.
3. Passing other objections, I come to this, that the _use of
the elements_, however suitable to the people and the modes of
thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to
affect us. Whatever long usage and strong association may have done
in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their
use is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not
accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by symbolical actions.
Most men find the bread and wine no aid to devotion and to some, it
is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the
precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
The statement of this objection leads me to say that I think
this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled to the greatest
weight. It is alone a sufficient objection to the ordinance. It is
my own objection. This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable
to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed
that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that he even
contemplated making permanent this mode of commemoration, every way
agreeable to an eastern mind, and yet, on trial, it was disagreeable
to my own feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other
ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I
choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting,
religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way
of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to
those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving
provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to
awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue,
I call a worthy, a true commemoration.
4. Fourthly, the importance ascribed to this particular
ordinance is not consistent with the spirit of Christianity. The
general object and effect of this ordinance is unexceptionable. It
has been, and is, I doubt not, the occasion of indefinite good; but
an importance is given by Christians to it which never can belong to
any form. My friends, the apostle well assures us that "the kingdom
of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy, in
the Holy Ghost." I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms.
Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to
adhere to one form a moment after it is out-grown, is unreasonable,
and it is alien to the spirit of Christ. If I understand the
distinction of Christianity, the reason why it is to be preferred
over all other systems and is divine is this, that it is a moral
system; that it presents men with truths which are their own reason,
and enjoins practices that are their own justification; that if
miracles may be said to have been its evidence to the first
Christians, they are not its evidence to us, but the doctrines
themselves; that every practice is Christian which praises itself,
and every practice unchristian which condemns itself. I am not
engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is
not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it --
let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and
obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior
life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my
thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its
representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and
courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward. Freedom
is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make
men good and wise. Its institutions, then, should be as flexible as
the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness
have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves
that are falling around us.
And therefore, although for the satisfaction of others, I have
labored to show by the history that this rite was not intended to be
perpetual; although I have gone back to weigh the expressions of
Paul, I feel that here is the true point of view. In the midst of
considerations as to what Paul thought, and why he so thought, I
cannot help feeling that it is time misspent to argue to or from his
convictions, or those of Luke and John, respecting any form. I seem
to lose the substance in seeking the shadow. That for which Paul
lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be
crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who
have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and
teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The
whole world was full of idols and ordinances. The Jewish was a
religion of forms. The Pagan was a religion of forms; it was all
body -- it had no life -- and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify
and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the
heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good;
that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows. This man lived and
died true to this purpose; and now, with his blessed word and life
before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital
importance -- really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain form,
whether that form be agreeable to their understandings or not.
Is not this to make vain the gift of God? Is not this to turn
back the hand on the dial? Is not this to make men -- to make
ourselves -- forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but
righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the eye of God there
is no other measure of the value of any one form than the measure of
its use?
There remain some practical objections to the ordinance into
which I shall not now enter. There is one on which I had intended to
say a few words; I mean the unfavorable relation in which it places
that numerous class of persons who abstain from it merely from
disinclination to the rite.
Influenced by these considerations, I have proposed to the
brethren of the Church to drop the use of the elements and the claim
of authority in the administration of this ordinance, and have
suggested a mode in which a meeting for the same purpose might be
held free of objection.
My brethren have considered my views with patience and candor,
and have recommended unanimously an adherence to the present form. I
have, therefore, been compelled to consider whether it becomes me to
administer it. I am clearly of opinion I ought not. This discourse
has already been so far extended, that I can only say that the reason
of my determination is shortly this: -- It is my desire, in the
office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with
my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. I have no
hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy
with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other
people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is
the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am
content that it stand to the end of the world, if it please men and
please heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces.
As it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious
community, that it is an indispensable part of the pastoral office to
administer this ordinance, I am about to resign into your hands that
office which you have confided to me. It has many duties for which I
am feebly qualified. It has some which it will always be my delight
to discharge, according to my ability, wherever I exist. And whilst
the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my
unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change
can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its
highest functions.
September 9, 1832.
ESSAYS FROM "THE DIAL"
_The Editors to the Reader_
We invite the attention of our countrymen to a new design.
Probably not quite unexpected or unannounced will our Journal appear,
though small pains have been taken to secure its welcome. Those, who
have immediately acted in editing the present Number, cannot accuse
themselves of any unbecoming forwardness in their undertaking, but
rather of a backwardness, when they remember how often in many
private circles the work was projected, how eagerly desired, and only
postponed because no individual volunteered to combine and
concentrate the free-will offerings of many cooperators. With some
reluctance the present conductors of this work have yielded
themselves to the wishes of their friends, finding something sacred
and not to be withstood in the importunity which urged the production
of a Journal in a new spirit.
As they have not proposed themselves to the work, neither can
they lay any the least claim to an option or determination of the
spirit in which it is conceived, or to what is peculiar in the
design. In that respect, they have obeyed, though with great joy,
the strong current of thought and feeling, which, for a few years
past, has led many sincere persons in New England to make new demands
on literature, and to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of
religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces
hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the
past, which suspects improvement, and holds nothing so much in horror
as new views and the dreams of youth.
With these terrors the conductors of the present Journal have
nothing to do, -- not even so much as a word of reproach to waste.
They know that there is a portion of the youth and of the adult
population of this country, who have not shared them; who have in
secret or in public paid their vows to truth and freedom; who love
reality too well to care for names, and who live by a Faith too
earnest and profound to suffer them to doubt the eternity of its
object, or to shake themselves free from its authority. Under the
fictions and customs which occupied others, these have explored the
Necessary, the Plain, the True, the Human, -- and so gained a vantage
ground, which commands the history of the past and the present.
No one can converse much with different classes of society in
New England, without remarking the progress of a revolution. Those
who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no
name. They do not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do
not know each other's faces or names. They are united only in a
common love of truth, and love of its work. They are of all
conditions and constitutions. Of these acolytes, if some are happily
born and well bred, many are no doubt ill dressed, ill placed, ill
made -- with as many scars of hereditary vice as other men. Without
pomp, without trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, in
servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudging beside the team
in the dusty road, or drudging a hireling in other men's cornfields,
schoolmasters, who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance,
ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in
dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor,
beautiful and hard-favored, without concert or proclamation of any
kind, they have silently given in their several adherence to a new
hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature
and resources of man, than the laws or the popular opinions will well
allow.
This spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some
difference, -- to each one casting its light upon the objects nearest
to his temper and habits of thought; -- to one, coming in the shape
of special reforms in the state; to another, in modifications of the
various callings of men, and the customs of business; to a third,
opening a new scope for literature and art; to a fourth, in
philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the vast solitudes of prayer.
It is in every form a protest against usage, and a search for
principles. In all its movements, it is peaceable, and in the very
lowest marked with a triumphant success. Of course, it rouses the
opposition of all which it judges and condemns, but it is too
confident in its tone to comprehend an objection, and so builds no
outworks for possible defence against contingent enemies. It has the
step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or a river, because it
must.
In literature, this influence appears not yet in new books so
much as in the higher tone of criticism. The antidote to all
narrowness is the comparison of the record with nature, which at once
shames the record and stimulates to new attempts. Whilst we look at
this, we wonder how any book has been thought worthy to be preserved.
There is somewhat in all life untranslatable into language. He who
keeps his eye on that will write better than others, and think less
of his writing, and of all writing. Every thought has a certain
imprisoning as well as uplifting quality, and, in proportion to its
energy on the will, refuses to become an object of intellectual
contemplation. Thus what is great usually slips through our fingers,
and it seems wonderful how a lifelike word ever comes to be written.
If our Journal share the impulses of the time, it cannot now
prescribe its own course. It cannot foretell in orderly propositions
what it shall attempt. All criticism should be poetic;
unpredictable; superseding, as every new thought does, all foregone
thoughts, and making a new light on the whole world. Its brow is not
wrinkled with circumspection, but serene, cheerful, adoring. It has
all things to say, and no less than all the world for its final
audience.
Our plan embraces much more than criticism; were it not so, our
criticism would be naught. Everything noble is directed on life, and
this is. We do not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to
reiterate a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to give
expression to that spirit which lifts men to a higher platform,
restores to them the religious sentiment, brings them worthy aims and
pure pleasures, purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory,
and, through raising man to the level of nature, takes away its
melancholy from the landscape, and reconciles the practical with the
speculative powers.
But perhaps we are telling our little story too gravely. There
are always great arguments at hand for a true action, even for the
writing of a few pages. There is nothing but seems near it and
prompts it, -- the sphere in the ecliptic, the sap in the apple tree,
-- every fact, every appearance seem to persuade to it.
Our means correspond with the ends we have indicated. As we
wish not to multiply books, but to report life, our resources are
therefore not so much the pens of practised writers, as the discourse
of the living, and the portfolios which friendship has opened to us.
From the beautiful recesses of private thought; from the experience
and hope of spirits which are withdrawing from all old forms, and
seeking in all that is new somewhat to meet their inappeasable
longings; from the secret confession of genius afraid to trust itself
to aught but sympathy; from the conversation of fervid and mystical
pietists; from tear-stained diaries of sorrow and passion; from the
manuscripts of young poets; and from the records of youthful taste
commenting on old works of art; we hope to draw thoughts and
feelings, which being alive can impart life.
And so with diligent hands and good intent we set down our Dial
on the earth. We wish it may resemble that instrument in its
celebrated happiness, that of measuring no hours but those of
sunshine. Let it be one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of
mourners and polemics. Or to abide by our chosen image, let it be
such a Dial, not as the dead face of a clock, hardly even such as the
Gnomon in a garden, but rather such a Dial as is the Garden itself,
in whose leaves and flowers and fruits the suddenly awakened sleeper
is instantly apprised not what part of dead time, but what state of
life and growth is now arrived and arriving.
_Thoughts on Modern Literature_
There is no better illustration of the laws by which the world
is governed than Literature. There is no luck in it. It proceeds by
Fate. Every scripture is given by the inspiration of God. Every
composition proceeds out of a greater or less depth of thought, and
this is the measure of its effect. The highest class of books are
those which express the moral element; the next, works of
imagination; and the next, works of science; -- all dealing in
realities, -- what ought to be, what is, and what appears. These, in
proportion to the truth and beauty they involve, remain; the rest
perish. They proceed out of the silent living mind to be heard again
by the living mind. Of the best books it is hardest to write the
history. Those books which are for all time are written
indifferently at any time. For high genius is a day without night, a
Caspian Ocean which hath no tides. And yet is literature in some
sort a creature of time. Always the oracular soul is the source of
thought, but always the occasion is administered by the low
mediations of circumstance. Religion, Love, Ambition, War, some
fierce antagonism, or it may be, some petty annoyance must break the
round of perfect circulation, or no spark, no joy, no event can be.
The poet rambling through the fields or the forest, absorbed in
contemplation to that degree, that his walk is but a pretty dream,
would never awake to precise thought, if the scream of an eagle, the
cries of a crow or curlew near his head did not break the sweet
continuity. Nay the finest lyrics of the poet come of this unequal
parentage; the imps of matter beget such child on the soul, fair
daughter of God. Nature mixes facts with thoughts to yield a poem.
But the gift of immortality is of the mother's side. In the spirit
in which they are written is the date of their duration, and never in
the magnitude of the facts. Everything lasts in proportion to its
beauty. In proportion as it was not polluted by any wilfulness of
the writer, but flowed from his mind after the divine order of cause
and effect, it was not his but nature's, and shared the sublimity of
the sea and sky. That which is truly told, nature herself takes in
charge against the whims and injustice of men. For ages, Herodotus
was reckoned a credulous gossip in his descriptions of Africa, and
now the sublime silent desert testifies through the mouths of Bruce,
Lyons, Caillaud, Burckhardt, Belzoni, to the truth of the calumniated
historian.
And yet men imagine that books are dice, and have no merit in
their fortune; that the trade and the favor of a few critics can get
one book into circulation, and defeat another; and that in the
production of these things the author has chosen and may choose to do
thus and so. Society also wishes to assign subjects and methods to
its writers. But neither reader nor author may intermeddle. You
cannot reason at will in this and that other vein, but only as you
must. You cannot make quaint combinations, and bring to the crucible
and alembic of truth things far fetched or fantastic or popular, but
your method and your subject are foreordained in all your nature, and
in all nature, or ever the earth was, or it has no worth. All that
gives currency still to any book, advertised in the morning's
newspaper in London or Boston, is the remains of faith in the breast
of men that not adroit book makers, but the inextinguishable soul of
the universe reports of itself in articulate discourse to-day as of
old. The ancients strongly expressed their sense of the
unmanageableness of these words of the spirit by saying, that the God
made his priest insane, took him hither and thither as leaves are
whirled by the tempest. But we sing as we are bid. Our inspirations
are very manageable and tame. Death and sin have whispered in the
ear of the wild horse of Heaven, and he has become a dray and a hack.
And step by step with the entrance of this era of ease and
convenience, the belief in the proper Inspiration of man has
departed.
Literary accomplishments, skill in grammar and rhetoric,
knowledge of books, can never atone for the want of things which
demand voice. Literature is a poor trick when it busies itself to
make words pass for things. The most original book in the world is
the Bible. This old collection of the ejaculations of love and
dread, of the supreme desires and contritions of men proceeding out
of the region of the grand and eternal, by whatsoever different
mouths spoken, and through a wide extent of times and countries,
seems, especially if you add to our canon the kindred sacred writings
of the Hindoos, Persians, and Greeks, the alphabet of the nations, --
and all posterior literature either the chronicle of facts under very
inferior ideas, or, when it rises to sentiment, the combinations,
analogies, or degradations of this. The elevation of this book may
be measured by observing, how certainly all elevation of thought
clothes itself in the words and forms of speech of that book. For
the human mind is not now sufficiently erect to judge and correct
that scripture. Whatever is majestically thought in a great moral
element, instantly approaches this old Sanscrit. It is in the nature
of things that the highest originality must be moral. The only
person, who can be entirely independent of this fountain of
literature and equal to it, must be a prophet in his own proper
person. Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the
highest in whom the moral is not the predominating element, leans on
the Bible: his poetry supposes it. If we examine this brilliant
influence -- Shakspeare -- as it lies in our minds, we shall find it
reverent not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame
of society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the
traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the
Prophets, _secondary_. On the other hand, the Prophets do not imply
the existence of Shakspeare or Homer, -- advert to no books or arts,
only to dread ideas and emotions. People imagine that the place,
which the Bible holds in the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it
simply to the fact that it came out of a profounder depth of thought
than any other book, and the effect must be precisely proportionate.
Gibbon fancied that it was combinations of circumstances that gave
Christianity its place in history. But in nature it takes an ounce
to balance an ounce.
All just criticism will not only behold in literature the
action of necessary laws, but must also oversee literature itself.
The erect mind disparages all books. What are books? it saith: they
can have no permanent value. How obviously initial they are to their
authors. The books of the nations, the universal books, are long ago
forgotten by those who wrote them, and one day we shall forget this
primer learning. Literature is made up of a few ideas and a few
fables. It is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or
two. We must learn to judge books by absolute standards. When we
are aroused to a life in ourselves, these traditional splendors of
letters grow very pale and cold. Men seem to forget that all
literature is ephemeral, and unwillingly entertain the supposition of
its utter disappearance. They deem not only letters in general, but
the best books in particular, parts of a preestablished harmony,
fatal, unalterable, and do not go behind Virgil and Dante, much less
behind Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John. But no man can be a good critic
of any book, who does not read it in a wisdom which transcends the
instructions of any book, and treats the whole extant product of the
human intellect as only one age revisable and reversible by him.
In our fidelity to the higher truth, we need not disown our
debt in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience
to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a
better day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we
truly express the privilege of spiritual nature; but, alas, not the
fact and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these
humble Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not
self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. Let us
not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from
a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no
constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points,
the roses brick-colored leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and
wagons creak along the road. We return to the house and take up
Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages, and lo! the
air swarms with life; the front of heaven is full of fiery shapes;
secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand; life is
made up of them. Such is our debt to a book. Observe, moreover,
that we ought to credit literature with much more than the bare word
it gives us. I have just been reading poems which now in my memory
shine with a certain steady, warm, autumnal light. That is not in
their grammatical construction which they give me. If I analyze the
sentences, it eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of the
whole. Over every true poem lingers a certain wild beauty,
immeasurable; a happiness lightsome and delicious fills the heart and
brain, -- as they say, every man walks environed by his proper
atmosphere, extending to some distance around him. This beautiful
result must be credited to literature also in casting its account.
In looking at the library of the Present Age we are first
struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be
characterized by any species of book, for every opinion old and new,
every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ. It prints a
vast carcass of tradition every year, with as much solemnity as a new
revelation. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new
morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for
which men and women peak and pine; books which take the rose out of
the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad,
solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they found him, but
make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on society, and
seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears.
In order to any complete view of the literature of the present
age, an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes, and
what it wishes to write. In our present attempt to enumerate some
traits of the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on
each of these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact
order what we have to say.
In the first place, it has all books. It reprints the wisdom
of the world. How can the age be a bad one, which gives me Plato and
Paul and Plutarch, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our
presses groan every year with new editions of all the select pieces
of the first of mankind, -- meditations, history, classifications,
opinions, epics, lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. If we
should designate favorite studies in which the age delights more than
in the rest of this great mass of the permanent literature of the
human race, one or two instances would be conspicuous. First; the
prodigious growth and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the
last one hundred and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first
importance. It almost alone has called out the genius of the German
nation into an activity, which spreading from the poetic into the
scientific, religious, and philosophical domains, has made theirs now
at last the paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting
with great energy on England and America. And thus, and not by
mechanical diffusion, does an original genius work and spread
himself. Society becomes an immense Shakspeare. Not otherwise could
the poet be admired, nay, not even seen; -- not until his living,
conversing, and writing had diffused his spirit into the young and
acquiring class, so that he had multiplied himself into a thousand
sons, a thousand Shakspeares, and so understands himself.
Secondly; the history of freedom it studies with eagerness in
civil, in religious, in philosophic history. It has explored every
monument of Anglo-Saxon history and law, and mainly every scrap of
printed or written paper remaining from the period of the English
Commonwealth. It has, out of England, devoted much thought and pains
to the history of philosophy. It has groped in all nations where was
any literature for the early poetry not only the dramatic, but the
rudest lyric; for songs and ballads, the Nibelungen Lied, the poems
of Hans Sachs and Henry of Alckmaer in Germany, for the Cid in Spain,
for the rough-cast verse of the interior nations of Europe, and in
Britain for the ballads of Scotland and of Robinhood.
In its own books also, our age celebrates its wants,
achievements, and hopes. A wide superficial cultivation, often a
mere clearing and whitewashing, indicate the new taste in the
hitherto neglected savage, whether of the cities or the fields, to
know the arts and share the spiritual efforts of the refined. The
time is marked by the multitude of writers. Soldiers, sailors,
servants, nobles, princes, women, write books. The progress of trade
and the facilities for locomotion have made the world nomadic again.
Of course it is well informed. All facts are exposed. The age is
not to be trifled with: it wishes to know who is who, and what is
what. Let there be no ghost stories more. Send Humboldt and
Bonpland to explore Mexico, Guiana, and the Cordilleras. Let Captain
Parry learn if there be a northwest passage to America, and Mr.
Lander learn the true course of the Niger. Puckler Muskau will go to
Algiers, and Sir Francis Head to the Pampas, to the Brunnens of
Nassau, and to Canada. Then let us have charts true and Gazeteers
correct. We will know where Babylon stood, and settle the topography
of the Roman Forum. We will know whatever is to be known of
Australasia, of Japan, of Persia, of Egypt, of Timbuctoo, of
Palestine.
Thus Christendom has become a great reading-room; and its books
have the convenient merits of the newspaper, its eminent propriety,
and its superficial exactness of information. The age is well bred,
knows the world, has no nonsense, and herein is well distinguished
from the learned ages that preceded ours. That there is no fool like
your learned fool, is a proverb plentifully illustrated in the
history and writings of the English and European scholars for the
half millenium that preceded the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The best heads of their time build or occupy such card-house theories
of religion, politics, and natural science, as a clever boy would now
blow away. What stuff in Kepler, in Cardan, in Lord Bacon.
Montaigne, with all his French wit and downright sense, is little
better: a sophomore would wind him round his finger. Some of the
Medical Remains of Lord Bacon in the book for his own use, "Of the
Prolongation of Life," will move a smile in the unpoetical
practitioner of the Medical College. They remind us of the drugs and
practice of the leeches and enchanters of Eastern romance. Thus we
find in his whimsical collection of astringents:
"A stomacher of scarlet cloth; whelps or young healthy boys
applied to the stomach; hippocratic wines, so they be made of austere
materials.
"8. To remember masticatories for the mouth.
"9. And orange flower water to be smelled or snuffed up.
"10. In the third hour after the sun is risen to take in air
from some high and open place with a ventilation of _rosae moschatae_
and fresh violets, and to stir the earth with infusion of wine and
mint.
"17. To use once during supper time wine in which gold is
quenched.
"26. Heroic desires.
"28. To provide always an apt breakfast.
"29. To do nothing against a man's genius."
To the substance of some of these specifics we have no
objection. We think we should get no better at the Medical College
to-day: and of all astringents we should reckon the best, "heroic
desires," and "doing nothing against one's genius." Yet the principle
of modern classification is different. In the same place, it is
curious to find a good deal of pretty nonsense concerning the virtues
of the ashes of a hedgehog, the heart of an ape, the moss that
groweth upon the skull of a dead man unburied, and the comfort that
proceeds to the system from wearing beads of amber, coral, and
hartshorn; -- or from rings of sea horse teeth worn for cramp; -- to
find all these masses of moonshine side by side with the gravest and
most valuable observations.
The good Sir Thomas Browne recommends as empirical cures for
the gout:
"To wear shoes made of a lion's skin.
"Try transplantation: Give poultices taken from the part to
dogs.
"Try the magnified amulet of Muffetus, of spiders' legs worn in
a deer's skin, or of tortoises' legs cut off from the living tortoise
and wrapped up in the skin of a kid."
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is an encyclopaedia of authors
and of opinions, where one who should forage for exploded theories
might easily load his panniers. In daemonology, for example; "The
air," he says, "is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all
times of invisible devils. They counterfeit suns and moons, and sit
on ships' masts. They cause whirlwinds on a sudden and tempestuous
storms, which though our meteorologists generally refer to natural
causes, yet I am of Bodine's mind, they are more often caused by
those aerial devils in their several quarters. Cardan gives much
information concerning them. His father had one of them, an aerial
devil, bound to him for eight and twenty years; as Aggrippa's dog had
a devil tied to his collar. Some think that Paracelsus had one
confined in his sword pommel. Others wear them in rings. At Hammel
in Saxony, the devil in the likeness of a pied piper carried away 130
children that were never after seen."
All this sky-full of cobwebs is now forever swept clean away.
Another race is born. Humboldt and Herschel, Davy and Arago, Malthus
and Bentham have arrived. If Robert Burton should be quoted to
represent the army of scholars, who have furnished a contribution to
his moody pages, Horace Walpole, whose letters circulate in the
libraries, might be taken with some fitness to represent the spirit
of much recent literature. He has taste, common sense, love of
facts, impatience of humbug, love of history, love of splendor, love
of justice, and the sentiment of honor among gentlemen; but no life
whatever of the higher faculties, no faith, no hope, no aspiration,
no question touching the secret of nature.
The favorable side of this research and love of facts is the
bold and systematic criticism, which has appeared in every department
of literature. From Wolf's attack upon the authenticity of the
Homeric Poems, dates a new epoch in learning. Ancient history has
been found to be not yet settled. It is to be subjected to common
sense. It is to be cross examined. It is to be seen, whether its
traditions will consist not with universal belief, but with universal
experience. Niebuhr has sifted Roman history by the like methods.
Heeren has made good essays towards ascertaining the necessary facts
in the Grecian, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Carthaginian
nations. English history has been analyzed by Turner, Hallam,
Brodie, Lingard, Palgrave. Goethe has gone the circuit of human
knowledge, as Lord Bacon did before him, writing True or False on
every article. Bentham has attempted the same scrutiny in reference
to Civil Law. Pestalozzi out of a deep love undertook the reform of
education. The ambition of Coleridge in England embraced the whole
problem of philosophy; to find, that is, a foundation in thought for
everything that existed in fact. The German philosophers, Schelling,
Kant, Fichte, have applied their analysis to nature and thought with
an antique boldness. There can be no honest inquiry, which is not
better than acquiescence. Inquiries, which once looked grave and
vital no doubt, change their appearance very fast, and come to look
frivolous beside the later queries to which they gave occasion.
This skeptical activity, at first directed on circumstances and
historical views deemed of great importance, soon penetrated deeper
than Rome or Egypt, than history or institutions, or the vocabulary
of metaphysics, namely, into the thinker himself, and into every
function he exercises. The poetry and the speculation of the age are
marked by a certain philosophic turn, which discriminates them from
the works of earlier times. The poet is not content to see how "fair
hangs the apple from the rock," "what music a sunbeam awoke in the
groves," nor of Hardiknute, how "stately steppes he east the way, and
stately steppes he west," but he now revolves, What is the apple to
me? and what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what
am I? And this is called _subjectiveness_, as the eye is withdrawn
from the object and fixed on the subject or mind.
We can easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort
appears in modern literature. It is the new consciousness of the one
mind which predominates in criticism. It is the uprise of the soul
and not the decline. It is founded on that insatiable demand for
unity -- the need to recognise one nature in all the variety of
objects, -- which always characterizes a genius of the first order.
Accustomed always to behold the presence of the universe in every
part, the soul will not condescend to look at any new part as a
stranger, but saith, -- "I know all already, and what art thou? Show
me thy relations to me, to all, and I will entertain thee also."
There is a pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term
_subjective_. We say, in accordance with the general view I have
stated, that the single soul feels its right to be no longer
confounded with numbers, but itself to sit in judgment on history and
literature, and to summon all facts and parties before its tribunal.
And in this sense the age is subjective.
But, in all ages, and now more, the narrow-minded have no
interest in anything but its relation to their personality. What
will help them to be delivered from some burden, eased in some
circumstance, flattered, or pardoned, or enriched, what will help to
marry or to divorce them, to prolong or to sweeten life, is sure of
their interest, and nothing else. Every form under the whole heaven
they behold in this most partial light or darkness of intense
selfishness, until we hate their being. And this habit of
intellectual selfishness has acquired in our day the fine name of
subjectiveness.
Nor is the distinction between these two habits to be found in
the circumstance of using the first person singular, or reciting
facts and feelings of personal history. A man may say _I_, and never
refer to himself as an individual; and a man may recite passages of
his life with no feeling of egotism. Nor need a man have a vicious
subjectiveness because he deals in abstract propositions.
But the criterion, which discriminates these two habits in the
poet's mind, is the tendency of his composition; namely, whether it
leads us to nature, or to the person of the writer. The great always
introduce us to facts; small men introduce us always to themselves.
The great man, even whilst he relates a private fact personal to him,
is really leading us away from him to an universal experience. His
own affection is in nature, in _What is_, and, of course, all his
communication leads outward to it, starting from whatsoever point.
The great never with their own consent become a load on the minds
they instruct. The more they draw us to them, the farther from them
or more independent of them we are, because they have brought us to
the knowledge of somewhat deeper than both them and us. The great
never hinder us; for, as the Jews had a custom of laying their beds
north and south, founded on an opinion that the path of God was east
and west, and they would not desecrate by the infirmities of sleep
the Divine circuits, so the activity of the good is coincident with
the axle of the world, with the sun and moon, with the course of the
rivers and of the winds, with the stream of laborers in the street,
and with all the activity and well being of the race. The great lead
us to nature, and, in our age, to metaphysical nature, to the
invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which are not less
nature than is a river or a coal mine; nay, they are far more nature,
but its essence and soul.
But the weak and evil, led also to analyze, saw nothing in
thought but luxury. Thought for the selfish became selfish. They
invited us to contemplate nature, and showed us an abominable self.
Would you know the genius of the writer? Do not enumerate his
talents or his feats, but ask thyself, What spirit is he of? Do
gladness and hope and fortitude flow from his page into thy heart?
Has he led thee to nature because his own soul was too happy in
beholding her power and love; or is his passion for the wilderness
only the sensibility of the sick, the exhibition of a talent, which
only shines whilst you praise it; which has no root in the character,
and can thus minister to the vanity but not to the happiness of the
possessor; and which derives all its eclat from our conventional
education, but would not make itself intelligible to the wise man of
another age or country? The water we wash with never speaks of
itself, nor does fire, or wind, or tree. Neither does the noble
natural man: he yields himself to your occasion and use; but his act
expresses a reference to universal good.
Another element of the modern poetry akin to this subjective
tendency, or rather the direction of that same on the question of
resources, is, the Feeling of the Infinite. Of the perception now
fast becoming a conscious fact, -- that there is One Mind, and that
all the powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all; that I as
a man may claim and appropriate whatever of true or fair or good or
strong has anywhere been exhibited; that Moses and Confucius,
Montaigne and Leibnitz are not so much individuals as they are parts
of man and parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my own, --
literature is far the best expression. It is true, this is not the
only nor the obvious lesson it teaches. A selfish commerce and
government have caught the eye and usurped the hand of the masses.
It is not to be contested that selfishness and the senses write the
laws under which we live, and that the street seems to be built, and
the men and women in it moving not in reference to pure and grand
ends, but rather to very short and sordid ones. Perhaps no
considerable minority, perhaps no one man leads a quite clean and
lofty life. What then? We concede in sadness the fact. But we say
that these low customary ways are not all that survives in human
beings. There is that in us which mutters, and that which groans,
and that which triumphs, and that which aspires. There are facts on
which men of the world superciliously smile, which are worth all
their trade and politics, the impulses, namely, which drive young men
into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant gestures,
starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate exclamations;
sentiments, which find no aliment or language for themselves on the
wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed by silence, by
darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of nature. All over
the modern world the educated and susceptible have betrayed their
discontent with the limits of our municipal life, and with the
poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They betray this
impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with nature --
which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit, as if they
anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world than has been
known in recent ages. Those who cannot tell what they desire or
expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast
wishes. The very child in the nursery prattles mysticism, and doubts
and philosophizes. A wild striving to express a more inward and
infinite sense characterizes the works of every art. The music of
Beethoven is said by those who understand it, to labor with vaster
conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before. This
Feeling of the Infinite has deeply colored the poetry of the period.
This new love of the vast, always native in Germany, was imported
into France by De Stael, appeared in England in Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and finds a most genial
climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed
themselves on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is
objective. In Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in
Byron it is blind, it sees not its true end -- an infinite good,
alive and beautiful, a life nourished on absolute beatitudes,
descending into nature to behold itself reflected there. His will is
perverted, he worships the accidents of society, and his praise of
nature is thieving and selfish.
Nothing certifies the prevalence of this taste in the people
more than the circulation of the poems, -- one would say, most
incongruously united by some bookseller, -- of Coleridge, Shelley,
and Keats. The only unity is in the subjectiveness and the
aspiration common to the three writers. Shelley, though a poetic
mind, is never a poet. His muse is uniformly imitative; all his
poems composite. A good English scholar he is, with ear, taste, and
memory, much more, he is a character full of noble and prophetic
traits; but imagination, the original, authentic fire of the bard, he
has not. He is clearly modern, and shares with Richter,
Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Wordsworth, the feeling of the infinite,
which so labors for expression in their different genius. But all
his lines are arbitrary, not necessary. When we read poetry, the
mind asks, -- Was this verse one of twenty which the author might
have written as well; or is this what that man was created to say?
But, whilst every line of the true poet will be genuine, he is in a
boundless power and freedom to say a million things. And the reason
why he can say one thing well, is because his vision extends to the
sight of all things, and so he describes each as one who knows many
and all.
The fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature,
when it is considered how hostile his genius at first seemed to the
reigning taste, and with what feeble poetic talents his great and
steadily growing dominion has been established. More than any other
poet his success has been not his own, but that of the idea which he
shared with his coevals, and which he has rarely succeeded in
adequately expressing. The Excursion awakened in every lover of
nature the right feeling. We saw stars shine, we felt the awe of
mountains, we heard the rustle of the wind in the grass, and knew
again the ineffable secret of solitude. It was a great joy. It was
nearer to nature than anything we had before. But the interest of
the poem ended almost with the narrative of the influences of nature
on the mind of the Boy, in the first book. Obviously for that
passage the poem was written, and with the exception of this and of a
few strains of the like character in the sequel, the whole poem was
dull. Here was no poem, but here was poetry, and a sure index where
the subtle muse was about to pitch her tent and find the argument of
her song. It was the human soul in these last ages striving for a
just publication of itself. Add to this, however, the great praise
of Wordsworth, that more than any other contemporary bard he is
pervaded with a reverence of somewhat higher than (conscious)
thought. There is in him that property common to all great poets, a
wisdom of humanity, which is superior to any talents which they
exert. It is the wisest part of Shakspeare and of Milton. For they
are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul,
which through their eyes beholdeth again and blesseth the things
which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser
than any of its works.
With the name of Wordsworth rises to our recollection the name
of his contemporary and friend, Walter Savage Landor -- a man working
in a very different and peculiar spirit, yet one whose genius and
accomplishments deserve a wiser criticism than we have yet seen
applied to them, and the rather that his name does not readily
associate itself with any school of writers. Of Thomas Carlyle, also
we shall say nothing at this time, since the quality and the energy
of his influence on the youth of this country will require at our
hands ere long a distinct and faithful acknowledgment.
But of all men he, who has united in himself and that in the
most extraordinary degree the tendencies of the era, is the German
poet, naturalist, and philosopher, Goethe. Whatever the age
inherited or invented, he made his own. He has owed to Commerce and
to the victories of the Understanding, all their spoils. Such was
his capacity, that the magazines of the world's ancient or modern
wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command -- he
wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it
as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical,
painter, composer, -- all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed
to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men
breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at
home in it as he. He was not afraid to live. And in him this
encyclopaedia of facts, which it has been the boast of the age to
compile, wrought an equal effect. He was knowing; he was brave; he
was clean from all narrowness; he has a perfect propriety and taste,
-- a quality by no means common to the German writers. Nay, since
the earth, as we said, had become a reading-room, the new
opportunities seem to have aided him to be that resolute realist he
is, and seconded his sturdy determination to see things for what they
are. To look at him, one would say, there was never an observer
before. What sagacity, what industry of observation! to read his
record is a frugality of time, for you shall find no word that does
not stand for a thing, and he is of that comprehension, which can see
the value of truth. His love of nature has seemed to give a new
meaning to that word. There was never man more domesticated in this
world than he. And he is an apology for the analytic spirit of the
period, because, of his analysis, always wholes were the result. All
conventions, all traditions he rejected. And yet he felt his entire
right and duty to stand before and try and judge every fact in
nature. He thought it necessary to dot round with his own pen the
entire sphere of knowables; and for many of his stories, this seems
the only reason: Here is a piece of humanity I had hitherto omitted
to sketch; -- take this. He does not say so in syllables, -- yet a
sort of conscientious feeling he had to be _up_ to the universe, is
the best account and apology for many of them. He shared also the
subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the senses I have
discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color, botany,
engraving, medals, persons, and manners, he never stopped at surface,
but pierced the purpose of a thing, and studied to reconcile that
purpose with his own being. What he could so reconcile was good;
what he could not, was false. Hence a certain greatness encircles
every fact he treats; for to him it has a soul, an eternal reason why
it was so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that deep
realism, which went about among all objects he beheld, to find the
cause why they must be what they are. It was with him a favorite
task to find a theory of every institution, custom, art, work of art,
which he observes. Witness his explanation of the Italian mode of
reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the Italian
climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common natural
fracture in the granite parallelopiped in Upper Egypt; of the Doric
architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier
originating in the habit of the fishers' wives of the Lido singing to
their husbands on the sea; of the Amphitheatre, which is the
enclosure of the natural cup of heads that arranges itself round
every spectacle in the street; of the coloring of Titian and Paul
Veronese, which one may verify in the common daylight in Venice every
afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome; of the domestic rural
architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.
But also that other vicious subjectiveness, that vice of the
time, infected him also. We are provoked with his Olympian
self-complacency, the patronizing air with which he vouchsafes to
tolerate the genius and performances of other mortals, "the good
Hiller," "our excellent Kant," "the friendly Wieland," &c. &c. There
is a good letter from Wieland to Merck, in which Wieland relates that
Goethe read to a select party his journal of a tour in Switzerland
with the Grand Duke, and their passage through Valois and over the
St. Gothard. "It was," says Wieland, "as good as Xenophon's
Anabasis. The piece is one of his most masterly productions, and is
thought and written with the greatness peculiar to him. The fair
hearers were enthusiastic at the nature in this piece; I liked the
sly art in the composition, whereof they saw nothing, still better.
It is a true poem, so concealed is the art too. But what most
remarkably in this as in all his other works distinguishes him from
Homer and Shakspeare, is, that the Me, the _Ille ego_, everywhere
glimmers through, although without any boasting and with an infinite
fineness." This subtle element of egotism in Goethe certainly does
not seem to deform his compositions, but to lower the moral influence
of the man. He differs from all the great in the total want of
frankness. Whoso saw Milton, whoso saw Shakspeare, saw them do their
best, and utter their whole heart manlike among their brethren. No
man was permitted to call Goethe brother. He hid himself, and worked
always to astonish, which is an egotism, and therefore little.
If we try Goethe by the ordinary canons of criticism, we should
say that his thinking is of great altitude, and all level; -- not a
succession of summits, but a high Asiatic table land. Dramatic
power, the rarest talent in literature, he has very little. He has
an eye constant to the fact of life, and that never pauses in its
advance. But the great felicities, the miracles of poetry, he has
never. It is all design with him, just thought and instructed
expression, analogies, allusion, illustration, which knowledge and
correct thinking supply; but of Shakspeare and the transcendant muse,
no syllable. Yet in the court and law to which we ordinarily speak,
and without adverting to absolute standards, we claim for him the
praise of truth, of fidelity to his intellectual nature. He is the
king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the
scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after
dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands of
young men as the letters of Goethe, which attest the incessant
activity of this man to eighty years, in an endless variety of
studies with uniform cheerfulness and greatness of mind. They cannot
be read without shaming us into an emulating industry. Let him have
the praise of the love of truth. We think, when we contemplate the
stupendous glory of the world, that it were life enough for one man
merely to lift his hands and cry with St. Augustine, "Wrangle who
pleases, I will wonder." Well, this he did. Here was a man, who, in
the feeling that the thing itself was so admirable as to leave all
comment behind, went up and down from object to object, lifting the
veil from everyone, and did no more. What he said of Lavater, may
trulier be said of him, that "it was fearful to stand in the presence
of one, before whom all the boundaries within which nature has
circumscribed our being were laid flat." His are the bright and
terrible eyes, which meet the modern student in every sacred chapel
of thought, in every public enclosure.
But now, that we may not seem to dodge the question which all
men ask, nor pay a great man so ill a compliment as to praise him
only in the conventional and comparative speech, let us honestly
record our thought upon the total worth and influence of this genius.
Does he represent not only the achievement of that age in which he
lived, but that which it would be and is now becoming? And what
shall we think of that absence of the moral sentiment, that singular
equivalence to him of good and evil in action, which discredits his
compositions to the pure? The spirit of his biography, of his poems,
of his tales, is identical, and we may here set down by way of
comment on his genius the impressions recently awakened in us by the
story of Wilhelm Meister.
All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain. They
knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank
them. So did Dante, so did Machiavel. Goethe has done this in
Meister. We can fancy him saying to himself; -- There are poets
enough of the ideal; let me paint the Actual, as, after years of
dreams, it will still appear and reappear to wise men. That all
shall right itself in the long Morrow, I may well allow, and my novel
may easily wait for the same regeneration. The age, that can damn it
as false and falsifying, will see that it is deeply one with the
genius and history of all the centuries. I have given my characters
a bias to error. Men have the same. I have let mischances befall
instead of good fortune. They do so daily. And out of many vices
and misfortunes, I have let a great success grow, as I had known in
my own and many other examples. Fierce churchmen and effeminate
aspirants will chide and hate my name, but every keen beholder of
life will justify my truth, and will acquit me of prejudging the
cause of humanity by painting it with this morose fidelity. To a
profound soul is not austere truth the sweetest flattery?
Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is
ephemeral, but this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral,
that mind only can see, in which the same order entirely obtains. An
interchangeable Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, each wholly interfused
in the other, must make the humors of that eye, which would see
causes reaching to their last effect and reproducing the world
forever. The least inequality of mixture, the excess of one element
over the other, in that degree diminishes the transparency of things,
makes the world opaque to the observer, and destroys so far the value
of his experience. No particular gifts can countervail this defect.
In reading Meister, I am charmed with the insight; to use a phrase of
Ben Jonson's, "it is rammed with life." I find there actual men and
women even too faithfully painted. I am, moreover, instructed in the
possibility of a highly accomplished society, and taught to look for
great talent and culture under a grey coat. But this is all. The
limits of artificial society are never quite out of sight. The
vicious conventions, which hem us in like prison walls, and which the
poet should explode at his touch, stand for all they are worth in the
newspaper. I am never lifted above myself. I am not transported out
of the dominion of the senses, or cheered with an infinite
tenderness, or armed with a grand trust.
Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not
of the Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this
world, and not of religion and hope; in short, if I may say so, the
poet of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of
Fate, and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban.
He is like a banker or a weaver with a passion for the country, he
steals out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after sunset, or on
a rare holiday, to get a draught of sweet air, and a gaze at the
magnificence of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead
a man's life in a man's relation to nature. In that which should be
his own place, he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently
to his task and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the
gilding of the chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the muse never
essays those thunder-tones, which cause to vibrate the sun and the
moon, which dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of
circumstance, and abolish the old heavens and the old earth before
the free-will or Godhead of man. That Goethe had not a moral
perception proportionate to his other powers, is not then merely a
circumstance, as we might relate of a man that he had or had not the
sense of tune or an eye for colors; but it is the cardinal fact of
health or disease; since, lacking this, he failed in the high sense
to be a creator, and with divine endowments drops by irreversible
decree into the common history of genius. He was content to fall
into the track of vulgar poets, and spend on common aims his splendid
endowments, and has declined the office proffered to now and then a
man in many centuries in the power of his genius -- of a Redeemer of
the human mind. He has written better than other poets, only as his
talent was subtler, but the ambition of creation he refused. Life
for him is prettier, easier, wiser, decenter, has a gem or two more
on its robe, but its old eternal burden is not relieved; no drop of
healthier blood flows yet in its veins. Let him pass. Humanity must
wait for its physician still at the side of the road, and confess as
this man goes out that they have served it better, who assured it out
of the innocent hope in their hearts that a Physician will come, than
this majestic Artist, with all the treasuries of wit, of science, and
of power at his command.
The criticism, which is not so much spoken as felt in reference
to Goethe, instructs us directly in the hope of literature. We feel
that a man gifted like him should not leave the world as he found it.
It is true, though somewhat sad, that every fine genius teaches us
how to blame himself. Being so much, we cannot forgive him for not
being more. When one of these grand monads is incarnated, whom
nature seems to design for eternal men and draw to her bosom, we
think that the old wearinesses of Europe and Asia, the trivial forms
of daily life will now end, and a new morning break on us all. What
is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated and petrified
social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet redeem us
from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before the
fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart? All that in our
sovereign moments each of us has divined of the powers of thought,
all the hints of omnipresence and energy which we have caught, this
man should unfold and constitute facts.
And this is the insatiable craving which alternately saddens
and gladdens men at this day. The Doctrine of the Life of Man
established after the truth through all his faculties; -- this is the
thought which the literature of this hour meditates and labors to
say. This is that which tunes the tongue and fires the eye and sits
in the silence of the youth. Verily it will not long want articulate
and melodious expression. There is nothing in the heart but comes
presently to the lips. The very depth of the sentiment, which is the
author of all the cutaneous life we see, is guarantee for the riches
of science and of song in the age to come. He, who doubts whether
this age or this country can yield any contribution to the literature
of the world, only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of
the human soul. Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have
the eyes ceased to see that which they would have, and which they
have not? Have they ceased to see other eyes? Are there no lonely,
anxious, wondering children, who must tell their tale? Are we not
evermore whipped by thoughts;
"In sorrow steeped and steeped in love
Of thoughts not yet incarnated?"
The heart beats in this age as of old, and the passions are
busy as ever. Nature has not lost one ringlet of her beauty, one
impulse of resistance and valor. From the necessity of loving none
are exempt, and he that loves must utter his desires. A charm as
radiant as beauty ever beamed, a love that fainteth at the sight of
its object, is new to-day.
"The world does not run smoother than of old,
There are sad haps that must be told."
Man is not so far lost but that he suffers ever the great
Discontent, which is the elegy of his loss and the prediction of his
recovery. In the gay saloon he laments that these figures are not
what Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he stand and
trifler though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out from
his eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his
thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the
Genius of the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent,
if it would. It will write in a higher spirit, and a wider
knowledge, and with a grander practical aim, than ever yet guided the
pen of poet. It will write the annals of a changed world, and record
the descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of
love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the
now unbelieved possibility of simple living and of clean and noble
relations with men. Religion will bind again these that were
sometime frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics, self-seekers, into
a joyful reverence for the circumambient Whole, and that which was
ecstasy shall become daily bread.
_New Poetry_
The tendencies of the times are so democratical, that we shall
soon have not so much as a pulpit or raised platform in any church or
townhouse, but each person, who is moved to address any public
assembly, will speak from the floor. The like revolution in
literature is now giving importance to the portfolio over the book.
Only one man in the thousand may print a book, but one in ten or one
in five may inscribe his thoughts, or at least with short commentary
his favorite readings in a private journal. The philosophy of the
day has long since broached a more liberal doctrine of the poetic
faculty than our fathers held, and reckons poetry the right and power
of every man to whose culture justice is done. We own that, though
we were trained in a stricter school of literary faith, and were in
all our youth inclined to the enforcement of the straitest
restrictions on the admission of candidates to the Parnassian
fraternity, and denied the name of poetry to every composition in
which the workmanship and the material were not equally excellent, in
our middle age we have grown lax, and have learned to find pleasure
in verses of a ruder strain, -- to enjoy _verses of society_, or
those effusions which in persons of a happy nature are the easy and
unpremeditated translation of their thoughts and feelings into rhyme.
This new taste for a certain private and household poetry, for
somewhat less pretending than the festal and solemn verses which are
written for the nations, really indicates, we suppose, that a new
style of poetry exists. The number of writers has increased. Every
child has been taught the tongues. The universal communication of
the arts of reading and writing has brought the works of the great
poets into every house, and made all ears familiar with the poetic
forms. The progress of popular institutions has favored
self-respect, and broken down that terror of the great, which once
imposed awe and hesitation on the talent of the masses of society. A
wider epistolary intercourse ministers to the ends of sentiment and
reflection than ever existed before; the practice of writing diaries
is becoming almost general; and every day witnesses new attempts to
throw into verse the experiences of private life.
What better omen of true progress can we ask than an increasing
intellectual and moral interest of men in each other? What can be
better for the republic than that the Capitol, the White House, and
the Court House are becoming of less importance than the farm-house
and the book-closet? If we are losing our interest in public men,
and finding that their spell lay in number and size only, and
acquiring instead a taste for the depths of thought and emotion as
they may be sounded in the soul of the citizen or the countryman,
does it not replace man for the state, and character for official
power? Men should be treated with solemnity; and when they come to
chant their private griefs and doubts and joys, they have a new scale
by which to compute magnitude and relation. Art is the noblest
consolation of calamity. The poet is compensated for his defects in
the street and in society, if in his chamber he has turned his
mischance into noble numbers.
Is there not room then for a new department in poetry, namely,
_Verses of the Portfolio_? We have fancied that we drew greater
pleasure from some manuscript verses than from printed ones of equal
talent. For there was herein the charm of character; they were
confessions; and the faults, the imperfect parts, the fragmentary
verses, the halting rhymes, had a worth beyond that of a high finish;
for they testified that the writer was more man than artist, more
earnest than vain; that the thought was too sweet and sacred to him,
than that he should suffer his ears to hear or his eyes to see a
superficial defect in the expression.
The characteristic of such verses is, that being not written
for publication, they lack that finish which the conventions of
literature require of authors. But if poetry of this kind has merit,
we conceive that the prescription which demands a rhythmical polish
may be easily set aside; and when a writer has outgrown the state of
thought which produced the poem, the interest of letters is served by
publishing it imperfect, as we preserve studies, torsos, and blocked
statues of the great masters. For though we should be loath to see
the wholesome conventions, to which we have alluded, broken down by a
general incontinence of publication, and every man's and woman's
diary flying into the bookstores, yet it is to be considered, on the
other hand, that men of genius are often more incapable than others
of that elaborate execution which criticism exacts. Men of genius in
general are, more than others, incapable of any perfect exhibition,
because however agreeable it may be to them to act on the public, it
is always a secondary aim. They are humble, self-accusing, moody
men, whose worship is toward the Ideal Beauty, which chooses to be
courted not so often in perfect hymns, as in wild ear-piercing
ejaculations, or in silent musings. Their face is forward, and their
heart is in this heaven. By so much are they disqualified for a
perfect success in any particular performance to which they can give
only a divided affection. But the man of talents has every advantage
in the competition. He can give that cool and commanding attention
to the thing to be done, that shall secure its just performance. Yet
are the failures of genius better than the victories of talent; and
we are sure that some crude manuscript poems have yielded us a more
sustaining and a more stimulating diet, than many elaborated and
classic productions.
We have been led to these thoughts by reading some verses,
which were lately put into our hands by a friend with the remark,
that they were the production of a youth, who had long passed out of
the mood in which he wrote them, so that they had become quite dead
to him. Our first feeling on reading them was a lively joy. So then
the Muse is neither dead nor dumb, but has found a voice in these
cold Cisatlantic States. Here is poetry which asks no aid of
magnitude or number, of blood or crime, but finds theatre enough in
the first field or brookside, breadth and depth enough in the flow of
its own thought. Here is self-repose, which to our mind is stabler
than the Pyramids; here is self-respect which leads a man to date
from his heart more proudly than from Rome. Here is love which sees
through surface, and adores the gentle nature and not the costume.
Here is religion, which is not of the Church of England, nor of the
Church of Boston. Here is the good wise heart, which sees that the
end of culture is strength and cheerfulness. In an age too which
tends with so strong an inclination to the philosophical muse, here
is poetry more purely intellectual than any American verses we have
yet seen, distinguished from all competition by two merits; the
fineness of perception; and the poet's trust in his own genius to
that degree, that there is an absence of all conventional imagery,
and a bold use of that which the moment's mood had made sacred to
him, quite careless that it might be sacred to no other, and might
even be slightly ludicrous to the first reader.
We proceed to give our readers some selections, taken without
much order from this rich pile of manuscript. We first find the poet
in his boat.
BOAT SONG
THE RIVER calmly flows,
Through shining banks, through lonely glen,
Where the owl shrieks, though ne'er the cheer of men
Has stirred its mute repose,
Still if you should walk there, you would go there again.
The stream is well alive;
Another passive world you see,
Where downward grows the form of every tree;
Like soft light clouds they thrive:
Like them let us in our pure loves reflected be.
A yellow gleam is thrown
Into the secrets of that maze
Of tangled trees, which late shut out our gaze,
Refusing to be known;
It must its privacy unclose, -- its glories blaze.
Sweet falls the summer air
Over her frame who sails with me:
Her way like that is beautifully free,
Her nature far more rare,
And is her constant heart of virgin purity.
A quivering star is seen
Keeping his watch above the hill,
Though from the sun's retreat small light is still
Poured on earth's saddening mien: --
We all are tranquilly obeying Evening's will.
Thus ever love the POWER;
To simplest thoughts dispose the mind;
In each obscure event a worship find
Like that of this dim hour, --
In lights, and airs, and trees, and in all human kind.
We smoothly glide below
The faintly glimmering worlds of light:
Day has a charm, and this deceptive night
Brings a mysterious show; --
He shadows our dear earth, -- but his cool stars are white.
_Two Years before the Mast._ A Personal Narrative of Life at
Sea.
New York: Harper and Brothers. 12mo. pp. 483.
This is a voice from the forecastle. Though a narrative of
literal, prosaic truth, it possesses something of the romantic charm
of Robinson Crusoe. Few more interesting chapters of the literature
of the sea have ever fallen under our notice. The author left the
halls of the University for the deck of a merchant vessel, exchanging
"the tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves of an undergraduate
at Cambridge, for the loose entofDocumentsduck trowsers, checked
shirt, and tarpaulin hat of a sailor," and here presents us the
fruits of his voyage. His book will have a wide circulation; it will
be praised in the public prints; we shall be told that it does honor
to his head and heart; but we trust that it will do much more than
this; that it will open the eyes of many to the condition of the
sailor, to the fearful waste of man, by which the luxuries of foreign
climes are made to increase the amount of commercial wealth. This
simple narrative, stamped with deep sincerity, and often displaying
an unstudied, pathetic eloquence, may lead to reflections, which mere
argument and sentimental appeals do not call forth. It will serve to
hasten the day of reckoning between society and the sailor, which,
though late, will not fail to come.
_Social Destiny of Man: or Association and Reorganization of
Industry._
By ALBERT BRISBANE. Philadelphia. 12mo. pp. 480.
This work is designed to give a condensed view of the system of
M. Fourier, for the improvement and elevation of productive industry.
It will be read with deep interest by a large class of our
population. The name of Fourier may be placed at the head of modern
thinkers, whose attention has been given to the practical evils of
society and the means of their removal. His general principles
should be cautiously separated from the details which accompany their
exposition, many of which are so exclusively adapted to the French
character, as to prejudice their reception with persons of opposite
habits and associations. The great question, which he brings up for
discussion, concerns the union of labor and capital in the same
individuals, by a system of combined and organized industry. This
question, it is more than probable, will not be set aside at once,
whenever its importance is fully perceived, and those who are
interested in its decision will find materials of no small value in
the writings of M. Fourier. They may be regarded, in some sense, as
the scientific analysis of the cooperative principle, which has,
within a few years past, engaged the public attention in England, and
in certain cases, received a successful, practical application.
_Michael Angelo, considered as a Philosophic Poet, with
Translations._
By JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR. London: Saunders & Otley, Conduit
Street. 1840.
We welcome this little book with joy, and a hope that it may be
republished in Boston. It would find, probably, but a small circle
of readers, but that circle would be more ready to receive and prize
it than the English public for whom it was intended, if we may judge
by the way in which Mr. Taylor, all through his prefatory essay, has
considered it necessary to apologize for, or, at least, explain views
very commonly received among ourselves.
The essay is interesting from the degree of acquaintance it
exhibits with some of those great ones, who have held up the highest
aims to the soul, and from the degree of insight which reverence and
delicacy of mind have given to the author. From every line comes the
soft breath of green pastures where "walk the good shepherds."
Of the sonnets, we doubt the possibility of making good
translations into English. No gift of the Muse is more injured by
change of form than the Italian sonnet. As those of Petrarch will
not bear it, from their infinite grace, those of Dante from their
mystic and subtle majesty; so these of Angelo, from the rugged
naivete with which they are struck off from the mind, as huge
splinters of stone might be from some vast block, can never be "done
into English," as the old translators, with an intelligent modesty,
were wont to write of their work. The grand thought is not quite
evaporated in the process, but the image of the stern and stately
writer is lost. We do not know again such words as "concetto,"
"superna" in their English representatives.
But since a knowledge of the Italian language is not so common
an attainment as could be wished, we ought to be grateful for this
attempt to extend the benefit of these noble expressions of the faith
which inspired one of the most full and noble lives that has ever
redeemed and encouraged man.
Fidelity must be the highest merit of these translations; for
not even an Angelo could translate his peer. This, so far as we have
looked at them, they seem to possess. And even in the English dress,
we think none, to whom they are new, can read the sonnets, --
"Veggio nel volto tuo col pensier mie."
"S'un casto amor, s'una pieta superna."
"La vita del mio amor non e cuor mio."
and others of the same pure religion, without a delight which
shall
"Cast a light upon the day,
A light which will not go away,
A sweet forewarning."
We hope they may have the opportunity. It is a very little
book with a great deal in it, and five hundred copies will sell in
two years.
We add Mr. Taylor's little preface, which happily expresses his
design.
"The remarks on the poetry and philosophy of Michael Angelo,
which are prefixed to these translations have been collected and are
now published in the hope that they may invite the student of
literature to trace the relation which unites the efforts of the pure
intelligence and the desires of the heart to their highest earthly
accomplishment under the complete forms of Art. For the example of
so eminent a mind, watched and judged not only by its finished works,
but, as it were, in its growth and from its inner source of Love and
Knowledge cannot but enlarge the range of our sympathy for the best
powers and productions of man. And if these pages should meet with
any readers inclined, like their writer, to seek and to admire the
veiled truth and solemn beauty of the eldertime, they will add their
humble testimony to the fact, that whatever be the purpose and
tendencies of the time we live in, we are not all unmindful of the
better part of our inheritance in this world."
_Essays and Poems_. By JONES VERY. Boston: C. C. Little and
James Brown.
This little volume would have received an earlier notice, if we
had been at all careful to proclaim our favorite books. The genius
of this book is religious, and reaches an extraordinary depth of
sentiment. The author, plainly a man of a pure and kindly temper,
casts himself into the state of the high and transcendental obedience
to the inward Spirit. He has apparently made up his mind to follow
all its leadings, though he should be taxed with absurdity or even
with insanity. In this enthusiasm he writes most of these verses,
which rather flow through him than from him. There is no
_composition_, no elaboration, no artifice in the structure of the
rhyme, no variety in the imagery; in short, no pretension to literary
merit, for this would be departure from his singleness, and followed
by loss of insight. He is not at liberty even to correct these
unpremeditated poems for the press; but if another will publish them,
he offers no objection. In this way they have come into the world,
and as yet have hardly begun to be known. With the exception of the
few first poems, which appear to be of an earlier date, all these
verses bear the unquestionable stamp of grandeur. They are the
breathings of a certain entranced devotion, which one would say,
should be received with affectionate and sympathizing curiosity by
all men, as if no recent writer had so much to show them of what is
most their own. They are as sincere a litany as the Hebrew songs of
David or Isaiah, and only less than they, because indebted to the
Hebrew muse for their tone and genius. This makes the singularity of
the book, namely, that so pure an utterance of the most domestic and
primitive of all sentiments should in this age of revolt and
experiment use once more the popular religious language, and so show
itself secondary and morbid. These sonnets have little range of
topics, no extent of observation, no playfulness; there is even a
certain torpidity in the concluding lines of some of them, which
reminds one of church hymns; but, whilst they flow with great
sweetness, they have the sublime unity of the Decalogue or the Code
of Menu, and if as monotonous, yet are they almost as pure as the
sounds of Surrounding Nature. We gladly insert from a newspaper the
following sonnet, which appeared since the volume was printed.
THE BARBERRY BUSH.
The bush that has most briers and bitter fruit,
Wait till the frost has turned its green leaves red,
Its sweetened berries will thy palate suit,
And thou may'st find e'en there a homely bread.
Upon the hills of Salem scattered wide,
Their yellow blossoms gain the eye in Spring;
And straggling e'en upon the turnpike's side,
Their ripened branches to your hand they bring,
I 've plucked them oft in boyhood's early hour,
That then I gave such name, and thought it true;
But now I know that other fruit as sour
Grows on what now thou callest _Me_ and _You_;
Yet, wilt thou wait the autumn that I see,
Will sweeter taste than these red berries be.
_Walter Savage Landor_
We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect
muscular man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous
speech instantly betrays the English traveller; -- a man nowise
cautious to conceal his name or that of his native country, or his
very slight esteem for the persons and the country that surround him.
When Mr. Bull rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong,
he is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him,
persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the
Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in
the roadside, and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last
a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after
it has been told him; he wonders they do not make elder-wine and
cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed
with elder bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a
good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water, and
plenty of them, -- that he is free to allow, -- to all others gifts
of nature or man, his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for
the precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add
to this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in
speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and,
moreover, the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that
his virtues do not come out until he quarrels. Transfer these traits
to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and we shall have no bad
picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand as a favorable
impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the present day. A
sharp dogmatic man with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of
worth, and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all
that he does not understand, a master of all elegant learning and
capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge
a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. His
partialities and dislikes are by no means calculable, but are often
whimsical and amusing; yet they are quite sincere, and, like those of
Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the man. What he
says of Wordsworth, is true of himself, that he delights to throw a
clod of dirt on the table, and cry, "Gentlemen, there is a better man
than all of you." Bolivar, Mina, and General Jackson will never be
greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr. Landor think as
he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and Xenophon, out of
our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or "Lucas on Happiness," or "Lucas
on Holiness," or even Barrow's Sermons. Yet a man may love a
paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty. A less
pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion of
licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of
bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech,
that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies,
and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight.
In Mr. Landor's coarseness there is a certain air of defiance; and
the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness and
over-refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his
fingers in a sess-pool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands
and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he
washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A
sort of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too
decided not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough
to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written
no good book.
But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings
are open to harsher censure; but we love the man from sympathy, as
well as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were
able, to put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty
years we have still found the "Imaginary Conversations" a sure
resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as
in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page,
wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen
and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with
all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of
life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for
every just and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the
Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private, we feel how
dignified is this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish
to thank a benefactor of the reading world.
Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make
good in the nineteenth-century the claims of pure literature. In
these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little
disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial
intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar receiving from past
ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own love, is a
friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of Homer
and Aeschylus, -- Horace, Ovid, and Plutarch, -- Erasmus, Scaliger,
and Montaigne, -- Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton, -- Dryden and Pope, --
we pass at once out of trivial associations, and enter into a region
of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted
all beneath the moon, and entered that crystal sphere in which
everything in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and
immortal. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for
the wrongs of his condition. The existence of the poorest
play-wright and the humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm
attaches to the most inferior names which have in any manner got
themselves enrolled in the registers of the House of Fame, even as
porters and grooms in the courts, to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and
Dennis, Aubrey and Spence. From the moment of entering a library and
opening a desired book, we cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors,
housekeepers, and men of care and fear. What boundless leisure! what
original jurisdiction! the old constellations have set, new and
brighter have arisen; an elysian light tinges all objects.
"In the afternoon we came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon."
And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to
have the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so
decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow
every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined as
ours. There are vast spaces in a thought; a slave, to whom the
religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master's
freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for
the renovation of society and nature, as to disesteem or deny the
literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command
this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it
a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a
species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and
all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means,
organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence in
the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason for its
being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If rhyme
rejoices us, there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers us, we
should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes place for
its hour, and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your actions,
as if they were better than Homer's verses or Raphael's pictures.
Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside their
enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of them;
but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their task.
Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with
ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class, and among these, few men
of the present age, have a better claim to be numbered than Mr.
Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and
justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which
genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love of
beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and
contemptuous expressions.
But beyond his delight in genius, and his love of individual
and civil liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more
rare, the appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable
considered with his intense nationality, to which we have already
alluded. He is buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates
the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish.
He has the common prejudices of the English landholder; values his
pedigree, his acres, and the syllables of his name; loves all his
advantages, is not insensible to the beauty of his watchseal, or the
Turk's head on his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride,
there is a noble nature within him, which instructs him that he is so
rich that he can well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others
the painting of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating
character. He draws his own portrait in the costume of a village
schoolmaster, and a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature
over fortune. Not only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the
whimsical selection of his heads prove this taste. He draws with
evident pleasure the portrait of a man, who never said anything
right, and never did anything wrong. But in the character of
Pericles, he has found full play for beauty and greatness of
behavior, where the circumstances are in harmony with the man. These
portraits, though mere sketches, must be valued as attempts in the
very highest kind of narrative, which not only has very few examples
to exhibit of any success, but very few competitors in the attempt.
The word Character is in all mouths; it is a force which we all feel;
yet who has analyzed it? What is the nature of that subtle, and
majestic principle which attaches us to a few persons, not so much by
personal as by the most spiritual ties? What is the quality of the
persons who, without being public men, or literary men, or rich men,
or active men, or (in the popular sense) religious men, have a
certain salutary omnipresence in all our life's history, almost
giving their own quality to the atmosphere and the landscape? A
moral force, yet wholly unmindful of creed and catechism,
intellectual, but scornful of books, it works directly and without
means, and though it may be resisted at any time, yet resistance to
it is a suicide. For the person who stands in this lofty relation to
his fellow men is always the impersonation to them of their
conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the extreme delicacy of this
element, evanescing before any but the most sympathetic vision, that
it has so seldom been employed in the drama and in novels. Mr.
Landor, almost alone among living English writers, has indicated his
perception of it.
These merits make Mr. Landor's position in the republic of
letters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur
of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and
unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more
complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no
friendships, that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce
Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet he discriminates his faults
with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides,
Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position
is by no means the highest in literature; he is not a poet or a
philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge,
a man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First
Philosophy can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed
many valuable ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor's definitions
are only enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized.
But as it is not from the highest Alps or Andes, but from less
elevated summits, that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so
is Mr. Landor the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has
commented on a wide variety of writers, with a closeness and an
extent of view, which has enhanced the value of those authors to his
readers. His Dialogue on the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the
genius of Epicurus. The Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the
best of all criticisms on the Essays of Bacon. His picture of
Demosthenes in three several Dialogues is new and adequate. He has
illustrated the genius of Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Euripides,
Thucydides. Then he has examined before he expatiated, and the
minuteness of his verbal criticism gives a confidence in his
fidelity, when he speaks the language of meditation or of passion.
His acquaintance with the English tongue is unsurpassed. He "hates
false words, and seeks with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those
that fit the thing." He knows the value of his own words. "They are
not," he says, "written on slate." He never stoops to explanation,
nor uses seven words where one will do. He is a master of
condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar way. He knows
the wide difference between compression and an obscure elliptical
style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of phrase, and
even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There is no
inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any more than
in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is found
room for every possible variety of expression.
Yet it is not as an artist, that Mr. Landor commends himself to
us. He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering
method, by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of
many parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his
genius. His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology,
allegory, sentiment, and personal history, and what skill of
transition he may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit
must rest at last, not on the spirit of the dialogue, or the symmetry
of any of his historical portraits, but on the value of his
sentences. Many of these will secure their own immortality in
English literature; and this, rightly considered, is no mean merit.
These are not plants and animals, but the genetical atoms, of which
both are composed. All our great debt to the oriental world is of
this kind, not utensils and statues of the precious metal, but
bullion and gold dust. Of many of Mr. Landor's sentences we are fain
to remember what was said of those of Socrates, that they are cubes,
which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.
We will enrich our pages with a few paragraphs, which we
hastily select from such of Mr. Landor's volumes as lie on our table.
___________
"The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to
hope from another. It is he, who while he demonstrates the iniquity
of the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It
is he who looks on the ambitious, both as weak and fraudulent. It is
he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no
reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is
he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him.
.. . . . . . . . . Him I would call the powerful man who controls the
storms of his mind, and turns to good account the worst accidents of
his fortune. The great man, I was going on to show thee, is somewhat
more. He must be able to do this, and he must have that intellect
which puts into motion the intellect of others."
"All titulars else must be produced by others; a knight by a
knight, a peer by a King, while a gentleman is self-existent."
"Critics talk most about the _visible_ in sublimity . . the
Jupiter, the Neptune. Magnitude and power are sublime, but in the
second degree, managed as they may be. Where the heart is not
shaken, the gods thunder and stride in vain. True sublimity is the
perfection of the pathetic, which has other sources than pity;
generosity, for instance, and self-devotion. When the generous and
self-devoted man suffers, there comes Pity; the basis of the sublime
is then above the water, and the poet, with or without the gods, can
elevate it above the skies. Terror is but the relic of a childish
feeling; pity is not given to children. So said he; I know not
whether rightly, for the wisest differ on poetry, the knowledge of
which, like other most important truths, seems to be reserved for a
purer state of sensation and existence."
"O Cyrus, I have observed that the authors of good make men
very bad as often as they talk much about them."
"The habit of haranguing is in itself pernicious; I have known
even the conscientious and pious, the humane and liberal dried up by
it into egoism and vanity, and have watched the mind, growing black
and rancid in its own smoke."
GLORY.
"Glory is a light which shines from us on others, not from
others on us."
"If thou lovest Glory, thou must trust her truth. She
followeth him who doth not turn and gaze after her."
RICHARD I.
"Let me now tell my story . . to confession another time. I
sailed along the realms of my family; on the right was England, on
the left was France; little else could I discover than sterile
eminences and extensive shoals. They fled behind me; so pass away
generations; so shift, and sink, and die away affections. In the
wide ocean I was little of a monarch; old men guided me, boys
instructed me; these taught me the names of my towns and harbors,
those showed me the extent of my dominions; one cloud, that dissolved
in one hour, half covered them.
"I debark in Sicily. I place my hand upon the throne of
Tancred, and fix it. I sail again, and within a day or two I behold,
as the sun is setting, the solitary majesty of Crete, mother of a
religion, it is said, that lived two thousand years. Onward, and
many specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of
which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the
monument of a greater man than I am. I leave them afar off . . . .
and for whom? O, abbot, to join creatures of less import than the
sea-mews on their cliffs; men praying to be heard, and fearing to be
understood, ambitious of another's power in the midst of penitence,
avaricious of another's wealth under vows of poverty, and jealous of
another's glory in the service of their God. Is this Christianity?
and is Saladin to be damned if he despises it?"
DEMOSTHENES.
"While I remember what I have been, I never can be less.
External power can affect those only who have none intrinsically. I
have seen the day, Eubulides, when the most august of cities had but
one voice within her walls; and when the stranger, on entering them,
stopped at the silence of the gateway, and said, `Demosthenes is
speaking in the assembly of the people.'"
"There are few who form their opinions of greatness from the
individual. Ovid says, `the girl is the least part of herself.' Of
himself, certainly, the man is."
"No men are so facetious as those whose minds are somewhat
perverted. Truth enjoys good air and clear light, but no
playground."
"I found that the principal means (of gratifying the universal
desire of happiness) lay in the avoidance of those very things, which
had hitherto been taken up as the instruments of enjoyment and
content; such as military commands, political offices, clients,
adventures in commerce, and extensive landed property."
"Abstinence from low pleasures is the only means of meriting or
of obtaining the higher."
"Praise keeps good men good."
"The highest price we can pay for a thing is to ask for it."
"There is a gloom in deep love as in deep water; there is a
silence in it which suspends the foot; and the folded arms, and the
dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its
surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid
step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song."
"Anaxagoras is the true, firm, constant friend of Pericles; the
golden lamp that shines perpetually on the image I adore."
[The Letter of Pericles to Aspasia in reply to her request to
be permitted to visit Xeniades.]
"Do what your heart tells you; yes, Aspasia, do _all_ it tells
you. Remember how august it is. It contains the temple, not only of
Love, but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of
one to the extremity of the other.
"Bend in pensiveness, even in sorrow, on the flowery bank of
youth, whereunder runs the stream that passes irreversibly! let the
garland drop into it, let the hand be refreshed by it -- but -- may
the beautiful feet of Aspasia stand firm."
E.
_The Senses and the Soul_
What we know is a point to what we do not know." The first
questions are still to be asked. Let any man bestow a thought on
himself, how he came hither, and whither he tends, and he will find
that all the literature, all the philosophy that is on record, have
done little to dull the edge of inquiry. The globe that swims so
silently with us through the sea of space, has never a port, but with
its little convoy of friendly orbs pursues its voyage through the
signs of heaven, to renew its navigation again forever. The
wonderful tidings our glasses and calendars give us concerning the
hospitable lights that hang around us in the deep, do not appease but
inflame our curiosity; and in like manner, our culture does not lead
to any goal, but its richest results of thought and action are only
new preparation.
Here on the surface of our swimming earth we come out of
silence into society already formed, into language, customs, and
traditions, ready made, and the multitude of our associates
discountenance us from expressing any surprise at the somewhat
agreeable novelty of Being, and frown down any intimation on our part
of a disposition to assume our own vows, to preserve our
independence, and to institute any inquiry into the sweet and sublime
vision which surrounds us.
And yet there seems no need that any should fear we should grow
too wise. The path of truth has obstacles enough of its own. We
dwell on the surface of nature. We dwell amidst surfaces; and
surface laps so closely on surface, that we cannot easily pierce to
see the interior organism. Then the subtlety of things! Under every
cause, another cause. Truth soars too high or dives too deep, for
the most resolute inquirer. See of how much we know nothing. See
the strange position of man. Our science neither comprehends him as
a whole, nor any one of its particulars. See the action and reaction
of Will and Necessity. See his passions, and their origin in the
deeps of nature and circumstance. See the Fear that rides even the
brave. See the omnipresent Hope, whose fountains in our
consciousness no metaphysician can find. Consider the phenomenon of
Laughter, and explore the elements of the Comic. What do we know of
the mystery of Music? and what of Form? why this stroke, this outline
should express beauty, and that other not? See the occult region of
Demonology, with coincidence, foresight, dreams, and omens. Consider
the appearance of Death, the formidable secret of our destiny,
looming up as the barrier of nature.
Our ignorance is great enough, and yet the fact most surprising
is not our ignorance, but the aversation of men from knowledge. That
which, one would say, would unite all minds and join all hands, the
ambition to push as far as fate would permit, the planted garden of
man on every hand into the kingdom of Night, really fires the heart
of few and solitary men. Tell men to study themselves, and for the
most part, they find nothing less interesting. Whilst we walk
environed before and behind with Will, Fate, Hope, Fear, Love, and
Death, these phantoms or angels, whom we catch at but cannot embrace,
it is droll to see the contentment and incuriosity of man. All take
for granted, -- the learned as well as the unlearned, -- that a great
deal, nay, almost all, is known and forever settled. But in truth
all is now to be begun, and every new mind ought to take the attitude
of Columbus, launch out from the gaping loiterers on the shore, and
sail west for a new world.
This profound ignorance, this deep sleep of the higher
faculties of man, coexists with a great abundance of what are called
the means of learning, great activity of book-making, and of formal
teaching. Go into one of our public libraries, when a new box of
books and journals has arrived with the usual importation of the
periodical literature of England. The best names of Britain are on
the covers. What a mass of literary production for a single week or
month! We speculate upon it before we read. We say, what an
invention is the press and the journal, by which a hundred pale
students, each a hive of distilled flowers of learning, of thought,
-- each a poet, -- each an accomplished man whom the selectest
influences have joined to breed and enrich, are made to unite their
manifold streams for the information and delight of everybody who can
read! How lame is speech, how imperfect the communication of the
ancient Harper, wandering from castle to hamlet, to sing to a vagrant
audience his melodious thoughts! These unopened books contain the
chosen verses of a hundred minstrels, born, living, and singing in
distant countries and different languages; for, the intellectual
wealth of the world, like its commercial, rolls to London, and
through that great heart is hurled again to the extremities. And
here, too, is the result, not poetic, of how much thought, how much
experience, and how much suffering of wise and cultivated men! How
can we in America expect books of our own, whilst this bale of wisdom
arrives once or twice in a month at our ports?
In this mind we open the books, and begin to read. We find
they are books about books; and then perhaps the book criticized was
itself a compilation or digest of others; so that the page we read is
at third or fourth hand from the event or sentiment which it
describes. Then we find that much the largest proportion of the
pages relates exclusively to matter of fact -- to the superficial
fact, and, as if systematically, shuns any reference to a thought or
law which the fact indicated. A large part again, both of the prose
and verse, is gleanings from old compositions, and the oft repeated
praise of such is repeated in the phrase of the present day. We have
even the mortification to find one more deduction still from our
anticipated prize, namely, that a large portion of ostentatious
criticism is merely a hired advertisement of the great booksellers.
In the course of our turning of leaves, we fall at last on an
extraordinary passage -- a record of thought and virtue, or a clarion
strain of poetry, or perchance a traveller makes us acquainted with
strange modes of life and some relic of primeval religion, or, rarer
yet, a profound sentence is here printed -- shines here new but
eternal on these linen pages, -- we wonder whence it came, -- or
perhaps trace it instantly home -- _aut Erasmus aut Diabolus_ -- to
the only head it could come from.
A few thoughts are all we glean from the best inspection of the
paper pile; all the rest is combination and confectionary. A little
part abides in our memory, and goes to exalt the sense of duty, and
make us happier. For the rest, our heated expectation is chilled and
disappointed. Some indirect benefit will no doubt accrue. If we
read with braced and active mind, we learn this negative fact, itself
a piece of human life. We contrast this mountain of dross with the
grains of gold, -- we oversee the writer, and learn somewhat of the
laws of writing. But a lesson as good we might be learning
elsewhere.
Now what is true of a month's or a year's issue of new books,
seems to me with a little qualification true of the age. The
_stock-writers_, (for the honesty of the literary class has given
this population a name,) vastly out-number the thinking men. One
man, two men, -- possibly, three or four, -- have cast behind them
the long-descended costume of the academy, and the expectations of
fashion, and have said, This world is too fair, this world comes home
too near to me than that I should walk a stranger in it, and live at
second-hand, fed by other men's doctrines, or treading only in their
steps; I feel a higher right herein, and will hearken to the Oracle
myself. Such have perceived the extreme poverty of literature, have
seen that there was not and could not be help for the fervent soul,
except through its own energy. But the great number of those who
have voluminously ministered to the popular tastes were men of
talents, who had some feat which each could do with words, but who
have not added to wisdom or to virtue. Talent amuses; Wisdom
instructs. Talent shows me what another man can do; Genius acquaints
me with the spacious circuits of the common nature. One is
carpentry; the other is growth. To make a step into the world of
thought is now given to but few men; to make a second step beyond the
first, only one in a country can do; but to carry the thought on to
three steps, marks a great teacher. Aladdin's palace with its one
unfinished window, which all the gems in the royal treasury cannot
finish in the style of the meanest of the profusion of jewelled
windows that were built by the Genie in a night, is but too true an
image of the efforts of talent to add one verse to the copious text
which inspiration writes by one or another scribe from age to age.
It is not that the literary class or those for whom they write,
are not lovers of truth, and amenable to principles. All are so.
The hunger of men for truth is immense; but they are not erect on
their feet; the senses are too strong for the soul. Our senses
barbarize us. When the ideal world recedes before the senses, we are
on a retrograde march. The savage surrenders to his senses; he is
subject to paroxysms of joy and fear; he is lewd, and a drunkard.
The Esquimaux in the exhilaration of the morning sun, when he is
invigorated by sleep, will sell his bed. He is the fool of the
moment's sensations to the degree of losing sight of the whole amount
of his sensations in so many years. And there is an Esquimaux in
every man which makes us believe in the permanence of this moment's
state of our game more than our own experience will warrant. In the
fine day we despise the house. At sea, the passengers always judge
from the weather of the present moment of the probable length of the
voyage. In a fresh breeze, they are sure of a good run; becalmed,
they are equally sure of a long passage. In trade, the momentary
state of the markets betrays continually the experienced and
long-sighted. In politics, and in our opinion of the prospects of
society, we are in like manner the slaves of the hour. Meet one or
two malignant declaimers, and we are weary of life, and distrust the
permanence of good institutions. A single man in a ragged coat at an
election looks revolutionary. But ride in a stage-coach with one or
two benevolent persons in good spirits, and the Republic seems to us
safe.
It is but an extension of the despotism of sense, -- shall I
say, only a calculated sensuality, -- a little more comprehensive
devotion which subjugates the eminent and the reputed wise, and
hinders an ideal culture. In the great stakes which the leaders of
society esteem not at all fanciful but solid, in the best reputed
professions and operations, what is there which will bear the
scrutiny of reason? The most active lives have so much routine as to
preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive. We defer to
the noted merchants whose influence is felt not only in their native
cities, but in most parts of the globe; but our respect does them and
ourselves great injustice, for their trade is without system, their
affairs unfold themselves after no law of the mind; but are bubble
built on bubble without end; a work of arithmetic, not of commerce,
much less of considerate humanity. They add voyage to voyage, and
buy stocks that they may buy stocks, and no ulterior purpose is
thought of. When you see their dexterity in particulars, you cannot
overestimate the resources of good sense, and when you find how empty
they are of all remote aims, you cannot underestimate their
philosophy.
The men of letters and the professions we have charged with the
like surrender to routine. It is no otherwise with the men of
office. Statesmen are solitary. At no time do they form a class.
Governments, for the most part, are carried on by political merchants
quite without principle, and according to the maxims of trade and
huckster; so that what is true of merchants is true of public
officers. Why should we suffer ourselves to be cheated by sounding
names and fair shows? The titles, the property, the notoriety, the
brief consequence of our fellows are only the decoration of the
sacrifice, and add to the melancholy of the observer.
"The earth goes on the earth glittering with gold,
The earth goes to the earth sooner than it should,
The earth builds on the earth castles and towers,
The earth says to the earth, all this is ours."
All this is covered up by the speedy succession of the
particulars, which tread so close on each other's heel, as to allow
no space for the man to question the whole thing. There is somewhat
terrific in this mask of routine. Captain Franklin, after six weeks
travelling on the ice to the North Pole, found himself two hundred
miles south of the spot he had set out from. The ice had floated;
and we sometimes start to think we are spelling out the same
sentences, saying the same words, repeating the same acts as in
former years. Our ice may float also.
This preponderance of the senses can we balance and redress?
Can we give permanence to the lightnings of thought which lick up in
a moment these combustible mountains of sensation and custom, and
reveal the moral order after which the earth is to be rebuilt anew?
Grave questions truly, but such as to leave us no option. To know
the facts is already a choosing of sides, ranges us on the party of
Light and Reason, sounds the signal for the strife, and prophesies an
end to the insanity and a restoration of the balance and rectitude of
man.
_Transcendentalism_
The more liberal thought of intelligent persons acquires a new
name in each period or community; and in ours, by no very good luck,
as it sometimes appears to us, has been designated as
Transcendentalism. We have every day occasion to remark its perfect
identity, under whatever new phraseology or application to new facts,
with the liberal thought of all men of a religious and contemplative
habit in other times and countries. We were lately so much struck
with two independent testimonies to this fact, proceeding from
persons, one in sympathy with the Quakers, and the other with the
Calvinistic Church, that we have begged the privilege to transcribe
an extract from two private letters, in order that we might bring
them together.
The Calvinist writes to his Correspondent after this manner.
"All the peculiarities of the theology, denominated
Trinitarian, are directly or indirectly transcendental. The
sinfulness of man involves the supposition of a nature in man, which
transcends all limits of animal life and of social moralities. The
reality of spirit, in the highest sense of that holy word, as the
essence of God and the inward ground and law of man's being and
doing, is supposed both in the fact of sin, and the possibility of
redemption of sin. The mystery of the Father revealed only in the
Son as the Word of Life, the Light which illumines every man,
outwardly in the incarnation and offering for sin, inwardly as the
Christ in us, energetic and quickening in the inspirations of the
Holy Spirit, -- the great mystery wherein we find redemption, this,
like the rest, is transcendental. So throughout, as might be shown
by the same induction suggested in relation to another aspect of the
matter. Now here is my point. Trinitarians, whose whole system from
beginning to end is transcendental, ideal, -- an idea is the highest
truth, -- war against the very foundations of whatever is
transcendental, ideal; all must be empiric, sensuous, inductive. A
system, which used to create and sustain the most fervid enthusiasm,
as is its nature, for it makes God all in all, leads in crusade
against all even the purest and gentlest enthusiasm. It fights for
the letter of Orthodoxy, for usage, for custom, for tradition,
against the Spirit as it breathes like healing air through the damps
and unwholesome swamps, or like strong wind throwing down rotten
trees and rotten frameworks of men. It builds up with one hand the
Temple of Truth on the outside; and with the other works as in a
frenzy to tear up its very foundations. So has it seemed to me. The
transcendentalists do not err in excess but in defect, if I
understand the case. They do not hold wild dreams for realities; the
vision is deeper, broader, more spiritual than they have seen. They
do not believe with too strong faith; their faith is too dim of
sight, too feeble of grasp, too wanting in certainty. I regret that
they should ever seem to undervalue the Scriptures. For those
scriptures have flowed out of the same spirit which is in every pure
heart; and I would have the one spirit recognise and respond to
itself under all the multiform shapes of word, of deed, of faith, of
love, of thought, of affection, in which it is enrobed; just as that
spirit in us recognises and responds to itself now in the gloom of
winter, now in the cheer of summer, now in the bloom of spring, now
in the maturity of autumn; and in all the endless varieties of each."
The Friend writes thus.
"Hold fast, I beseech you, to the resolution to wait for light
from the Lord. Go not to men for a creed, faint not, but be of good
courage. The darkness is only for a season. We must be willing to
tarry the Lord's time in the wilderness, if we would enter the
Promised Land. The purest saints that I have ever known were long,
very long, in darkness and in doubt. Even when they had firm faith,
they were long without _feeling_ what they _believed in_. One told
me he was two years in chaotic darkness, without an inch of firm
ground to stand upon, watching for the dayspring from on high, and
after this long probation it shone upon his path, and he has walked
by its light for years. Do not fear or regret your isolation from
men, your difference from all around you. It is often necessary to
the enlargement of the soul that it should thus dwell alone for a
season, and when the mystical union of God and man shall be
completely developed, and you feel yourself newly born a child of
light, one of the sons of God, you will also feel new ties to your
fellow men; you will love them all in God, and each will be to you
whatever their state will permit them to be.
"It is very interesting to me to see, as I do, all around me
here, the essential doctrines of the Quakers revived, modified,
stript of all that puritanism and sectarianism had heaped upon them,
and made the foundation of an intellectual philosophy, that is
illuminating the finest minds and reaches the wants of the least
cultivated. The more I reflect upon the Quakers, the more I admire
the early ones, and am surprised at their being so far in advance of
their age, but they have educated the world till it is now able to go
beyond those teachers.
"Spiritual growth, which they considered at variance with
intellectual culture, is now wedded to it, and man's whole nature is
advanced. The intellectual had so lorded it over the moral, that
much onesided cultivation was requisite to make things even. I
remember when your intellect was all in all, and the growth of the
moral sense came after. It has now taken its proper place in your
mind, and the intellect appears for a time prostrate, but in due
season both will go on harmoniously, and you will be a perfect man.
If you suffer more than many before coming into the light, it is
because your character is deeper and your happy enlargement will be
proportioned to it."
The identity, which the writer of this letter finds between the
speculative opinions of serious persons at the present moment, and
those entertained by the first Quakers, is indeed so striking as to
have drawn a very general attention of late years to the history of
that sect. Of course, in proportion to the depth of the experience,
will be its independence on time and circumstances, yet one can
hardly read George Fox's Journal, or Sewel's History of the Quakers,
without many a rising of joyful surprise at the correspondence of
facts and expressions to states of thought and feeling, with which we
are very familiar. The writer justly remarks the equal adaptation of
the philosophy in question "to the finest minds, and to the least
cultivated." And so we add in regard to these works, that quite apart
from the pleasure of reading modern history in old books, the reader
will find another reward in the abundant illustration they furnish to
the fact, that wherever the religious enthusiasm makes its
appearance, it supplies the place of poetry and philosophy and of
learned discipline, and inspires by itself the same vastness of
thinking; so that in learning the religious experiences of a strong
but untaught mind, you seem to have suggested in turn all the sects
of the philosophers.
We seize the occasion to adorn our pages with the dying speech
of James Naylor, one of the companions of Fox, who had previously
been for eight years a common soldier in the army. Its least service
will be to show how far the religious sentiment could exalt the
thinking and purify the language of the most uneducated men.
"There is a spirit which I feel," said James Naylor a few hours
before his death, "that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any
wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in
the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to
weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature
contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it
bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any
other. If it be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is
the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life
is everlasting love unfeigned, and it takes its kingdom with
entreaty, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can
rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is
conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor
doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but
through sufferings; for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found
it alone being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who
lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death
obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life."
_Prayers_
Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,
Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor,
As fancy values them: but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven, and enter there
Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal.
SHAKSPEARE.
Pythagoras said that the time when men are honestest, is when
they present themselves before the gods. If we can overhear the
prayer, we shall know the man. But prayers are not made to be
overheard, or to be printed, so that we seldom have the prayer
otherwise than it can be inferred from the man and his fortunes,
which are the answer to the prayer, and always accord with it. Yet
there are scattered about in the earth a few records of these devout
hours which it would edify us to read, could they be collected in a
more catholic spirit than the wretched and repulsive volumes which
usurp that name. Let us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the
Christian Church, but of men in all ages and religions, who have
prayed well. The prayer of Jesus is, as it deserves, become a form
for the human race. Many men have contributed a single expression, a
single word to the language of devotion, which is immediately caught
and stereotyped in the prayers of their church and nation. Among the
remains of Euripides, we have this prayer; "Thou God of all! infuse
light into the souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what
is the root from whence all their evils spring, and by what means
they may avoid them." In the Phaedrus of Plato, we find this petition
in the mouth of Socrates; "O gracious Pan! and ye other gods who
preside over this place! grant that I may be beautiful within; and
that those external things, which I have, may be such as may best
agree with a right internal disposition of mind; and that I may
account him to be rich, who is wise and just." Wacic the Caliph, who
died A. D. 845, ended his life, the Arabian historians tell us, with
these words; "O thou whose kingdom never passes away, pity one whose
dignity is so transient." But what led us to these remembrances was
the happy accident which in this undevoutage lately brought us
acquainted with two or three diaries which attest, if there be need
of attestation, the eternity of the sentiment and its equality to
itself through all the variety of expression. The first is the
prayer of a deaf and dumb boy.
"When my long-attached friend comes to me, I have pleasure to
converse with him, and I rejoice to pass my eyes over his
countenance; but soon I am weary of spending my time causelessly and
unimproved and I desire to leave him, (_but not in rudeness_,)
because I wish to be engaged in my business. But thou, O my Father,
knowest I always delight to commune with thee in my lone and silent
heart; I am never full of thee; I am never weary of thee; I am always
desiring thee. I hunger with strong hope and affection for thee, and
I thirst for thy grace and spirit.
"When I go to visit my friends, I must put on my best garments,
and I must think of my manner to please them. I am tired to stay
long, because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip
with me. But, Oh my Father, thou visitest me in my work, and I can
lift up my desires to thee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with
thy presence, and I am always alone with thee, _and thou dost not
steal my time by foolishness_. I always ask in my heart, where can I
find thee?"
The next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as
that in which nature had isolated this eloquent mute.
"My Father, when I cannot be cheerful or happy, I can be true
and obedient, and I will not forget that joy has been, and may still
be. If there is no hour of solitude granted me, still I will commune
with thee. If I may not search out and pierce my thought, so much
the more may my living praise thee. At whatever price, I must be
alone with thee; this must be the demand I make. These _duties_ are
not the life, but the means which enable us to show forth the life.
So must I take up this cross, and bear it willingly. Why should I
feel reproved when a busy one enters the room? I am not idle though
I sit with folded hands; but instantly I must seek some cover. For
that shame I reprove myself. Are they only the valuable members of
society who labor to dress and feed it? Shall we never ask the aim
of all this hurry and foam, of this aimless activity? Let the
purpose for which I live be always before me; let every thought and
word go to confirm and illuminate that end; namely, that I must
become near and dear to thee; that now I am beyond the reach of all
but thee.
"How can we not be reconciled to thy will? I will know the joy
of giving to my friend the dearest treasure I have. I know that
sorrow comes not at once only. We cannot meet it, and say, now it is
overcome, but again, and yet again its flood pours over us, and as
full as at first.
"If but this tedious battle could be fought,
Like Sparta's heroes at one rocky pass,
`One day be spent in dying,' men had sought
The spot and been cut down like mower's grass."
The next is in a metrical form. It is the aspiration of a
different mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they
all accord at last.
"Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high,
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which they kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou 'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practise more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs."
The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm
and healthful spirit, and contains this petition.
"My Father! I now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for
the continuance of our love, the one for the other. I feel that
without thy love in me, I should be alone here in the flesh. I
cannot express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to
be to me. But thou knowest what my feelings are. When nought on
earth seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and
teach me that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on.
I know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth,
amidst its toils and troubles, and the follies of those around me,
and told me to be like thyself, when I see so little of thee here to
profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me to myself, a
poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou art my
Father, and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me, and
lovest me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou give
me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption. Wilt thou
show me the true means of accomplishing it. . . . I thank thee for
the knowledge that I have attained of thee by thy sons who have been
before me, and especially for him who brought me so perfect a type of
thy goodness and love to men. . . . . I know that thou wilt deal with
me as I deserve. I place myself therefore in thy hand, knowing that
thou wilt keep me from all harm so long as I consent to live under
thy protecting care."
Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance, (as men say,
but which to us shall be holy,) brought under our eye nearly at the
same moment, stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions
which no mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times.
Might they be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret
experiences which are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary
on which we have strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl
of great price from that book of prayer, the "Confessions of Saint
Augustine."
"And being admonished to reflect upon myself, I entered into
the very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I was able to
do it, because now thou wert become my helper. I entered and
discerned with the eye of my soul, (such as it was,) even beyond my
soul and mind itself the Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light
which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same
kind, as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and
with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but
other, yea, far other from all these. Neither was it so above my
understanding, as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above
the earth. But it is above me, because it made me; and I am under
it, because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity, knows
what that Light is, and he that knows it knows eternity, and it is
known by charity. O eternal Verity! and true Charity! and dear
Eternity! thou art my God, to thee do I sigh day and night. Thee
when I first knew, thou liftedst me up that I might see there was
what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And thou
didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams upon me
after a vehement manner, and I even trembled between love and horror,
and I found myself to be far off, and even in the very region of
dissimilitude from thee."
_Fourierism and the Socialists_
The increasing zeal and numbers of the disciples of Fourier, in
America and in Europe, entitle them to an attention which their
theory and practical projects will justify and reward. In London, a
good weekly newspaper (lately changed into a monthly journal) called
"The Phalanx," devoted to the social doctrines of Charles Fourier and
bearing for its motto, "Association and Colonization," is edited by
Hugh Doherty. Mr. Etzler's inventions, as described in the Phalanx,
promise to cultivate twenty thousand acres with the aid of four men
only and cheap machinery. Thus the laborers are threatened with
starvation if they do not organize themselves into corporations, so
that machinery may labor _for_ instead of working _against_ them. It
appears that Mr. Young, an Englishman of large property, has
purchased the Benedictine Abbey of Citeaux, in the Mont d'Or, in
France, with its ample domains, for the purpose of establishing a
colony there. We also learn that some members of the sect have
bought an estate at Santa Catharina, fifty miles from Rio Janeiro, in
a good situation for an agricultural experiment, and one hundred
laborers have sailed from Havre to that port, and nineteen hundred
more are to follow. On the anniversary of the birthday of Fourier,
which occurred in April, public festivals were kept by the Socialists
in London, in Paris, and in New York. In the city of New York, the
disciples of Fourier have bought a column in the Daily Tribune,
Horace Greeley's excellent newspaper, whose daily and weekly
circulation exceeds twenty thousand copies, and through that organ
are now diffusing their opinions.
We had lately an opportunity of learning something of these
Socialists and their theory from the indefatigable apostle of the
sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushes his doctrine
with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and importunacy.
As we listened to his exposition, it appeared to us the sublime of
mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of
arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no
farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it
had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most
popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a
wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or
remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant's step,
and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and
epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity.
Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One
could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and
Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere
trifler. It must now set itself to raise the social condition of
man, and to redress the disorders of the planet he inhabits. The
Desert of Sahara, the Campagna di Roma, the frozen polar circles,
which by their pestilential or hot or cold airs poison the temperate
regions, accuse man. Society, concert, cooperation, is the secret of
the coming Paradise. By reason of the isolation of men at the
present day, all work is drudgery. By concert, and the allowing each
laborer to choose his own work, it becomes pleasure. "Attractive
Industry" would speedily subdue, by adventurous, scientific, and
persistent tillage, the pestilential tracts; would equalize
temperature; give health to the globe, and cause the earth to yield
`healthy imponderable fluids' to the solar system, as now it yields
noxious fluids. The hyaena, the jackal, the gnat, the bug, the flea,
were all beneficent parts of the system; the good Fourier knew what
those creatures should have been, had not the mould slipped, through
the bad state of the atmosphere, caused, no doubt, by these same
vicious imponderable fluids. All these shall be redressed by human
culture, and the useful goat, and dog, and innocent poetical moth, or
the wood-tick to consume decomposing wood, shall take their place.
It takes 1680 men to make one Man, complete in all the faculties;
that is, to be sure that you have got a good joiner, a good cook, a
barber, a poet, a judge, an umbrella-maker, a mayor and aldermen, and
so on. Your community should consist of 2000 persons, to prevent
accidents of omission; and each community should take up 6000 acres
of land. Now fancy the earth planted with fifties and hundreds of
these phalanxes side by side, -- what tillage, what architecture,
what refectories, what dormitories, what reading rooms, what
concerts, what lectures, what gardens, what baths! What is not in
one, will be in another, and many will be within easy distance. Then
know you and all, that Constantinople is the natural capital of the
globe. There, in the Golden Horn, will be the Arch-Phalanx
established, there will the Omniarch reside. Aladdin and his
magician, or the beautiful Scheherzarade, can alone in these prosaic
times, before the sight, describe the material splendors collected
there. Poverty shall be abolished; deformity, stupidity, and crime
shall be no more. Genius, grace, art, shall abound, and it is not to
be doubted but that, in the reign of "Attractive Industry," all men
will speak in blank verse.
Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and
magnificent pictures. The ability and earnestness of the advocate
and his friends, the comprehensiveness of their theory, its apparent
directness of proceeding to the end they would secure, the
indignation they felt and uttered at all other speculation in the
presence of so much social misery, commanded our attention and
respect. It contained so much truth, and promised in the attempts
that shall be made to realize it so much valuable instruction, that
we are engaged to observe every step of its progress. Yet in spite
of the assurances of its friends, that it was new and widely
discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society,
we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many
projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our
feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life.
He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or
down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or
fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a
vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can
by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of
life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes
all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and
New-Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a
sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the
strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding
world. The value of Fourier's system is that it is a statement of
such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence
in facts. The mistake is, that this particular order and series is
to be imposed by force of preaching and votes on all men, and carried
into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be
begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. Could
not the conceiver of this design have also believed that a similar
model lay in every mind, and that the method of each associate might
be trusted, as well as that of his particular Committee and General
Office, No. 200 Broadway? nay, that it would be better to say, let
us be lovers and servants of that which is just; and straightway
every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which
he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of
Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or
Christized or humanized, and in the obedience to his most private
being, he finds himself, according to his presentiment, though
against all sensuous probability, acting in strict concert with all
others who followed their private light.
Yet in a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is
admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of
such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage
and strength in it, which is superior and commanding: it certifies
the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is
destined to be fact.
But now, whilst we write these sentences, comes to us a paper
from Mr. Brisbane himself. We are glad of the opportunity of letting
him speak for himself. He has much more to say than we have hinted,
and here has treated a general topic. We have not room for quite all
the matter which he has sent us, but persuade ourselves that we have
retained every material statement, in spite of the omissions which we
find it necessary to make, to contract his paper to so much room as
we offered him.
Mr. Brisbane, in a prefatory note to his article, announces
himself as an advocate of the Social Laws discovered by CHARLES
FOURIER, and intimates that he wishes to connect whatever value
attaches to any statement of his, with the work in which he is
exclusively engaged, that of Social Reform. He adds the following
broad and generous declaration.
"It seems to me that, with the spectacle of the present misery
and degradation of the human race before us, all scientific
researches and speculations, to be of any real value, should have a
bearing upon the means of their social elevation and happiness. The
mass of scientific speculations, which are every day offered to the
world by men, who are not animated by a deep interest in the
elevation of their race, and who exercise their talents merely to
build up systems, or to satisfy a spirit of controversy, or personal
ambition, are perfectly valueless. What is more futile than barren
philosophical speculation, that leads to no great practical results?"
_Chardon Street and Bible Conventions_
In the month of November, 1840, a Convention of Friends of
Universal Reform assembled in the Chardon Street Chapel, in Boston,
in obedience to a call in the newspapers signed by a few individuals,
inviting all persons to a public discussion of the institutions of
the Sabbath, the Church and the Ministry. The Convention organized
itself by the choice of Edmund Quincy, as Moderator, spent three days
in the consideration of the Sabbath, and adjourned to a day in March,
of the following year, for the discussion of the second topic. In
March, accordingly, a three-days' session was holden, in the same
place, on the subject of the Church, and a third meeting fixed for
the following November, which was accordingly holden, and the
Convention, debated, for three days again, the remaining subject of
the Priesthood. This Convention never printed any report of its
deliberations, nor pretended to arrive at any _Result_, by the
expression of its sense in formal resolutions, -- the professed
object of those persons who felt the greatest interest in its
meetings being simply the elucidation of truth through free
discussion. The daily newspapers reported, at the time, brief
sketches of the course of proceedings, and the remarks of the
principal speakers. These meetings attracted a good deal of public
attention, and were spoken of in different circles in every note of
hope, of sympathy, of joy, of alarm, of abhorrence, and of merriment.
The composition of the assembly was rich and various. The
singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts
of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every shade
of opinion, from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and
many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great
variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of
confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque.
Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians,
Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers,
Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, -- all came
successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their
_hour_, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. The faces
were a study. The most daring innovators, and the
champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by side. The still
living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet, after
several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh
merit, emerging, and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and
lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The assembly was
characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength
and earnestness, whilst many of the most intellectual and cultivated
persons attended its councils. Dr. Channing, Edward Taylor, Bronson
Alcott, Mr. Garrison, Mr. May, Theodore Parker, H. C. Wright, Dr.
Osgood, William Adams, Edward Palmer, Jones Very, Maria W. Chapman,
and many other persons of a mystical, or sectarian, or philanthropic
renown, were present, and some of them participant. And there was no
want of female speakers; Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a
pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and that flea of
Conventions, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her
interminable scroll. If there was not parliamentary order, there was
life, and the assurance of that constitutional love for religion and
religious liberty, which, in all periods, characterizes the
inhabitants of this part of America.
There was a great deal of wearisome speaking in each of those
three days' sessions, but relieved by signal passages of pure
eloquence, by much vigor of thought, and especially by the exhibition
of character, and by the victories of character. These men and women
were in search of something better and more satisfying than a vote or
a definition, and they found what they sought, or the pledge of it,
in the attitude taken by individuals of their number, of resistance
to the insane routine of parliamentary usage, in the lofty reliance
on principles, and the prophetic dignity and transfiguration which
accompanies, even amidst opposition and ridicule, a man whose mind is
made up to obey the great inward Commander, and who does not
anticipate his own action, but awaits confidently the new emergency
for the new counsel. By no means the least value of this Convention,
in our eye, was the scope it gave to the genius of Mr. Alcott, and
not its least instructive lesson was the gradual but sure ascendency
of his spirit, in spite of the incredulity and derision with which he
is at first received, and in spite, we might add, of his own
failures. Moreover, although no decision was had, and no action
taken on all the great points mooted in the discussion, yet the
Convention brought together many remarkable persons, face to face,
and gave occasion to memorable interviews and conversations, in the
hall, in the lobbies, or around the doors.
Before this body broke up in November last, a short adjournment
was carried, for the purpose of appointing a Committee to summon a
new Convention, to be styled `the Bible Convention,' for the
discussion of the credibility and authority of the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments. A Committee was agreed upon, and, by their
invitation, the new Association met in the Masonic Temple, in Boston,
on the 29th of March, of the present year. This meeting was less
numerously attended, and did not exhibit at its birth the same vigor
as its predecessors. Many persons who had been conspicuous in the
former meetings were either out of the country, or hindered from
early attendance. Several who wished to be present at its
deliberations deferred their journey until the second day, believing
that, like the former Convention, it would sit three days. Possibly
from the greater unpopularity of its object, out of doors, some
faintness or coldness surprised the members. At all events, it was
hurried to a conclusion on the first day to the great disappointment
of many. Mr. Brownson, Mr. Alcott, Mr. West, and among others a
Mormon preacher took part in the conversation. But according to the
general testimony of those present, as far as we can collect it, the
best speech made on that occasion was that of Nathaniel H. Whiting,
of South Marshfield. Mr. Whiting had already distinguished himself
in the Chardon Street meetings. Himself a plain unlettered man,
leaving for the day a mechanical employment to address his fellows,
he possesses eminent gifts for success in assemblies so constituted.
He has fluency, self-command, an easy, natural method, and very
considerable power of statement. No one had more entirely the ear of
this audience, for it is not to be forgotten that, though, as we have
said there were scholars and highly intellectual persons in this
company, the bulk of the assemblage was made up of quite other
materials, namely, of those whom religion and solitary thought have
educated, and not books or society, -- young farmers and mechanics
from the country, whose best training has been in the Anti-slavery,
and Temperance, and Non-resistance Clubs.
_Agriculture of Massachusetts_
In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an
orchard where two boys were grafting apple trees, and found the
Farmer in his corn field. He was holding the plough, and his son
driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he is
so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all
appearances, excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and
blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field, so honest withal,
that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I
still remember with some shame, that in some dealing we had together
a long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in
the affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had
looked to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst
of his own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest
respect. Here is the Caesar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering
and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer's day
and winter's day, not like Napoleon hero of sixty battles only, but
of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor; and here he
stands, with Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These
slight and useless city-limbs of ours will come to shame before this
strong soldier, for his have done their own work and ours too. What
good this man has, or has had, he has earned. No rich father or
father-in-law left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed
the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large
family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every
way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord,
for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero
of the Robinhood ballad,
"Much, the miller's son,
There was no inch of his body
But it was worth a groom."
Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow.
Toil has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness
and hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual
taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent
spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape.
I walked up and down, the field, as he ploughed his furrow, and we
talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the season
and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the
Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things in
it; but it was easy to see that he felt towards the author much as
soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more
good nature than reverence for the gownsman.
The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I
observe the first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every
man has one thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes
out at first. But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no
pains are taken to send it to them; it was by accident that this copy
came into my hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They
could not afford to follow such advice as is given here; they have
sterner teachers; their own business teaches them better. No; this
was written for the literary men. But in that case, the State should
not be taxed to pay for it. Let us see. The account of the maple
sugar, -- that is very good and entertaining, and, I suppose, true.
The story of the farmer's daughter, whom education had spoiled for
everything useful on a farm, -- that is good too, and we have much
that is like it in Thomas's Almanack. But why this recommendation of
stone houses? They are not so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for
us. Our roads are always changing their direction, and after a man
has built at great cost a stone house, a new road is opened, and he
finds himself a mile or two from the highway. Then our people are
not stationary, like those of old countries, but always alert to
better themselves, and will remove from town to town as a new market
opens, or a better farm is to be had, and do not wish to spend too
much on their buildings.
The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and
their hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers
always know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have
no choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below,
where manure is cheap, and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in
November; but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall,
would be to sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop
in the spring. And thus Necessity farms it, necessity finds out when
to go to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr.
Colman can tell us.
But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of
the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and
Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good Commissioner
takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts the value of
"his feeble praise," and repeats his compliments as often as their
names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D. with all his
knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any one of
fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a farmer
manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and spends on
it every year from other resources; other-wise his farm had ruined
him long since; -- and as for the Major he never got rich by his
skill in making land produce, but by his skill in making men produce.
The truth is, a farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do
not know of a single instance, in which a man has honestly got rich
by farming alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have
farms grow rich, is either by other resources; or by trade; or by
getting their labor for nothing; or by other methods of which I could
tell you many sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor
know of all this? What can he know? He is the victim of the
"Reports," that are sent him of particular farms. He cannot go
behind the estimates to know how the contracts were made, and how the
sales were effected. The true men of skill, the poor farmers who by
the sweat of their face, without an inheritance, and without offence
to their conscience, have reared a family of valuable citizens and
matrons to the state, reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm,
although their buildings are many of them shabby, are the only right
subjects of this Report; yet these make no figure in it. These
should be holden up to imitation, and their methods detailed; yet
their houses are very uninviting and unconspicuous to State
Commissioners. So with these premiums to Farms, and premiums to
Cattle Shows. The class that I describe, must pay the premium which
is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium obviously ought to be given
for the good management of a poor farm.
In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special
criticisms. He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him
of any blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism
concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture
of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and
inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to
be heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under his statement, that
it deserved a record.
_The Zincali: or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain; with an
Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry_. By GEORGE BORROW.
Two Volumes in one. New York: Wiley & Putnam.
Our list of tribes in America indigenous and imported wants the
Gypsies, as the Flora of the western hemisphere wants the race of
heaths. But as it is all one to the urchin of six years, whether the
fine toys are to be found in his father's house or across the road at
his grandfather's, so we have always domesticated the Gypsy in
school-boy literature from the English tales and traditions. This
reprinted London book is equally sure of being read here as in
England, and is a most acceptable gift to the lovers of the wild and
wonderful. There are twenty or thirty pages in it of fascinating
romantic attraction, and the whole book, though somewhat rudely and
miscellaneously put together, is animated, and tells us what we wish
to know. Mr. Borrow visited the Gypsies in Spain and elsewhere, as
an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and seems to have
been commended to this employment by the rare accomplishment of a
good acquaintance with the language of this singular people. How he
acquired his knowledge of their speech, which seems to have opened
their hearts to him, he does not inform us; and he appears to have
prospered very indifferently in the religious objects of his mission;
but to have really had that in his nature or education which gave him
access to the gypsy gang, so that he has seen them, talked
confidentially with them, and brought away something distinct enough
from them.
He has given us sketches of their past and present manner of
life and employments, in the different European states, collected a
strange little magazine of their poetry, and added a vocabulary of
their language. He has interspersed some anecdotes of life and
manners, which are told with great spirit.
This book is very entertaining, and yet, out of mere love and
respect to human nature, we must add that this account of the Gypsy
race must be imperfect and very partial, and that the author never
sees his object quite near enough. For, on the whole, the impression
made by the book is dismal; the poverty, the employments,
conversations, mutual behavior of the Gypsies, are dismal; the poetry
is dismal. Men do not love to be dismal, and always have their own
reliefs. If we take Mr. Borrow's story as final, here is a great
people subsisting for centuries unmixed with the surrounding
population, like a bare and blasted heath in the midst of smiling
plenty, yet cherishing their wretchedness, by rigorous usage and
tradition, as if they loved it. It is an aristocracy of rags, and
suffering, and vice, yet as exclusive as the patricians of wealth and
power. We infer that the picture is false; that resources and
compensation exist, which are not shown us. If Gypsies are pricked,
we believe they will bleed; if wretched, they will jump at the first
opportunity of bettering their condition. What unmakes man is
essentially incredible. The air may be loaded with fogs or with
fetid gases, and continue respirable; but if it be decomposed, it can
no longer sustain life. The condition of the Gypsy may be bad
enough, tried by the scale of English comfort, and yet appear
tolerable and pleasant to the Gypsy, who finds attractions in his
out-door way of living, his freedom, and sociability, which the Agent
of the Bible Society does not reckon. And we think that a traveler
of another way of thinking would not find the Gypsy so void of
conscience as Mr. Borrow paints him, as the differences in that
particular are universally exaggerated in daily conversation. And
lastly, we suspect the walls of separation between the Gypsy and the
surrounding population are less firm than we are here given to
understand.
_Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic. Translated,
with Notes_. By J. G. LOCKHART. New York: Wiley & Putnam.
The enterprising publishers, Messrs. Wiley & Putnam, who have
reprinted, in a plain but very neat form, Mr. Lockhart's gorgeously
illustrated work, have judiciously prefixed to it, by way of
introduction, a critique on the book from the Edinburgh Review, and
have added at the end of the volume an analytical account, with
specimens of the Romance of the Cid, from the Penny Magazine. This
is done with the greatest propriety, for the Cid seems to be the
proper centre of Spanish legendary poetry. The Iliad, the
Nibelungen, the Cid, the Robin Hood Ballads, Frithiof's Saga, (for
the last also depends for its merit on its fidelity to the legend,)
are five admirable collections of early popular poetry of so many
nations; and with whatever difference of form, they possess strong
mutual resemblances, chiefly apparent in the spirit which they
communicate to the reader, of health, vigor, cheerfulness, and good
hope. In this day of reprinting and of restoration, we hope that
Southey's Chronicle of the Cid, which is a kind of "Harmony of the
Gospels" of the Spanish Romance, may be republished in a volume of
convenient size. That is a strong book, and makes lovers and
admirers of "My Cid, the Perfect one, who was born in a fortunate
hour." Its traits of heroism and bursts of simple emotion, once read,
can never be forgotten; "I am not a man to be besieged;" and "God!
What a glad man was the Cid on that day," and many the like words
still ring in our ears. The Cortes at Toledo, where judgment was
given between the Cid and his sons-in-law, is one of the strongest
dramatic scenes in literature. Several of the best ballads in Mr.
Lockhart's collection recite incidents of the Cid's history. The
best ballad in the book is the "Count Alarcos and the Infanta
Solisa," which is a meet companion for Chaucer's Griselda. The
"Count Garci Perez de Vargas" is one of our favorites; and there is
one called the "Bridal of Andalla," which we have long lost all power
to read as a poem, since we have heard it sung by a voice so rich,
and sweet, and penetrating, as to make the ballad the inalienable
property of the singer.
_Tecumseh; a Poem_. By GEORGE H. COLTON. New York: Wiley &
Putnam.
This pleasing summer-day story is the work of a well read,
cultivated writer, with a skillful ear, and an evident admirer of
Scott and Campbell. There is a metrical sweetness and calm
perception of beauty spread over the poem, which declare that the
poet enjoyed his own work; and the smoothness and literary finish of
the cantos seem to indicate more years than it appears our author has
numbered. Yet the perusal suggested that the author had written this
poem in the feeling, that the delight he has experienced from Scott's
effective lists of names might be reproduced in America by the
enumeration of the sweet and sonorous Indian names of our waters.
The success is exactly correspondent. The verses are tuneful, but
are secondary; and remind the ear so much of the model, as to show
that the noble aboriginal names were not suffered to make their own
measures in the poet's ear, but must modulate their wild beauty to a
foreign metre. They deserved better at the author's hands. We felt,
also, the objection that is apt to lie against poems on new subjects
by persons versed in old books, that the costume is exaggerated at
the expense of the man. The most Indian thing about the Indian is
surely not his moccasins, or his calumet, his wampum, or his stone
hatchet, but traits of character and sagacity, skill or passion;
which would be intelligible at Paris or at Pekin, and which Scipio or
Sidney, Lord Clive or Colonel Crockett would be as likely to exhibit
as Osceola and Black Hawk.
_Intelligence_
Exploring Expedition. The United States Corvette Vincennes,
Captain Charles Wilkes, the flag ship of the Exploring Expedition,
arrived at New York on Friday, June 10th, from a cruise of nearly
four years. The Brigs Porpoise and Oregon may shortly be expected.
The Expedition has executed every part of the duties confided to it
by the Government. A long list of ports, harbors, islands, reefs,
and shoals, named in the list, have been visited and examined or
surveyed. The positions assigned on the charts to several vigias,
reefs, shoals, and islands, have been carefully looked for, run over,
and found to have no existence in or near the places assigned them.
Several of the principal groups and islands in the Pacific Ocean have
been visited, examined, and surveyed; and friendly intercourse, and
protective commercial regulations, established with the chiefs and
natives. The discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean (Antarctic
continent, -- Observations for fixing the Southern Magnetic pole,
&c.) _preceded_ those of the French and English expeditions. The
Expedition, during its absence, has also examined and surveyed a
large portion of the Oregon Territory, a part of Upper California,
including the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers, with their various
tributaries. Several exploring parties from the Squadron have
explored, examined, and fixed those portions of the Oregon Territory
least known. A map of the Territory, embracing its Rivers, Sounds,
Harbors, Coasts, Forts, &c., has been prepared, which will furnish
the information relative to our possessions on the Northwest Coast,
and the whole of Oregon. Experiments have been made with the
pendulum, magnetic apparatus, and various other instruments, on all
occasions, -- the temperature of the ocean, at various depths
ascertained in the different seas traversed, and full meteorological
and other observations kept up during the cruise. Charts of all the
surveys have been made, with views and sketches of headlands, towns
or villages, &c., with descriptions of all that appertains to the
localities, productions, language, customs, and manners. At some of
the islands, this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure,
and risk of life, -- the treacherous character of the natives
rendering it absolutely necessary that the officers and men should be
armed, while on duty, and at all times prepared against their
murderous attacks. On several occasions, boats have been absent from
the different vessels of the Squadron on surveying duty, (the greater
part of which has been performed in boats,) among islands, reefs,
&c., for a period of ten, twenty, and thirty days at one time. On
one of these occasions, two of the officers were killed at the Fiji
group, while defending their boat's crew from an attack by the
Natives.
_Harvard University_.
On the subject of the University we cannot help wishing that a
change will one day be adopted which will put an end to the foolish
bickering between the government and the students, which almost every
year breaks out into those uncomfortable fracases which are called
`Rebellions.' Cambridge is so well endowed, and offers such large
means of education, that it can easily assume the position of an
University, and leave to the numerous younger Colleges the charge of
pupils too young to be trusted from home. This is instantly effected
by the Faculty's confining itself to the office of Instruction, and
omitting to assume the office of Parietal Government. Let the
College provide the best teachers in each department, and for a
stipulated price receive the pupil to its lecture-rooms and
libraries; but in the matter of morals and manners, leave the student
to his own conscience, and if he is a bad subject to the ordinary
police. This course would have the effect of keeping back pupils
from College, a year or two, or, in some cases, of bringing the
parents or guardians of the pupil to reside in Cambridge; but it
would instantly destroy the root of endless grievances between the
student and teacher, put both parties on the best footing, --
indispensable one would say, to good teaching, -- and relieve the
professors of an odious guardianship, always degenerating into
espionage, which must naturally indispose men of genius and honorable
mind from accepting the professor's chair.
_English Reformers_
Whilst Mr. Sparks visits England to explore the manuscripts of
the Colonial Office, and Dr. Waagen on a mission of Art, Mr. Alcott,
whose genius and efforts in the great art of Education have been more
appreciated in England than in America, has now been spending some
months in that country, with the aim to confer with the most eminent
Educators and philanthropists, in the hope to exchange intelligence,
and import into this country whatever hints have been struck out
there, on the subject of literature and the First Philosophy. The
design was worthy, and its first results have already reached us.
Mr. Alcott was received with great cordiality of joy and respect by
his friends in London, and presently found himself domesticated at an
institution, managed on his own methods and called after his name,
the School of Mr. Wright at Alcott House, Ham, Surrey. He was
introduced to many men of literary and philanthropic distinction, and
his arrival was made the occasion of meetings for public conversation
on the great ethical questions of the day.
Mr. Alcott's mission, beside making us acquainted with the
character and labors of some excellent persons, has loaded our table
with a pile of English books, pamphlets, periodicals, flying
prospectuses, and advertisements, proceeding from a class very little
known in this country, and on many accounts important, the party,
namely, who represent Social Reform. Here are Educational Circulars,
and Communist Apostles; Alists; Plans for Syncretic Associations, and
Pestalozzian Societies, Self-supporting Institutions, Experimental
Normal Schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health
Unions and Phalansterian Gazettes, Paradises within the reach of all
men, Appeals of Man to Woman, and Necessities of Internal Marriage
illustrated by Phrenological Diagrams. These papers have many sins
to answer for. There is an abundance of superficialness, of
pedantry, of inflation, and of want of thought. It seems as if these
sanguine schemers rushed to the press with every notion that danced
before their brain, and clothed it in the most clumsily compounded
and terminated words, for want of time to find the right one. But
although these men sometimes use a swollen and vicious diction, yet
they write to ends which raise them out of the jurisdiction of
ordinary criticism. They speak to the conscience, and have that
superiority over the crowd of their contemporaries, which belongs to
men who entertain a good hope. Moreover, these pamphlets may well
engage the attention of the politician, as straws of no mean
significance to show the tendencies of the time.
Mr. Alcott's visit has brought us nearer to a class of
Englishmen, with whom we had already some slight but friendly
correspondence, who possess points of so much attraction for us, that
we shall proceed to give a short account both of what we already
knew, and what we have lately learned, concerning them. The central
figure in the group is a very remarkable person, who for many years,
though living in great retirement, has made himself felt by many of
the best and ablest men in England and in Europe, we mean James
Pierrepont Greaves, who died at Alcott-House in the month of March of
this year. Mr. Greaves was formerly a wealthy merchant in the city
of London, but was deprived of his property by French spoliations in
Napoleon's time. Quitting business, he travelled and resided for
some time in Germany. His leisure was given to books of the deepest
character; and in Switzerland he found a brother in Pestalozzi. With
him he remained ten years, living abstemiously, almost on biscuit and
water; and though they never learned each the other's language, their
daily intercourse appears to have been of the deepest and happiest
kind. Mr. Greaves there made himself useful in a variety of ways.
Pestalozzi declared that Mr. Greaves understood his aim and methods
better than any other observer. And he there became acquainted with
some eminent persons. Mr. Greaves on his return to England
introduced as much as he could of the method and life, whose
beautiful and successful operations he had witnessed; and although
almost all that he did was misunderstood, or dragged downwards, he
has been a chief instrument in the regeneration in the British
schools. For a single and unknown individual his influence has been
extensive. He set on foot Infant Schools, and was for many years
Secretary to the Infant School Society, which office brought him in
contact with many parties, and he has connected himself with almost
every effort for human emancipation. In this work he was engaged up
to the time of his death. His long and active career developed his
own faculties and powers in a wonderful manner. At his house, No. 49
Burton Street, London, he was surrounded by men of open and
accomplished minds, and his doors were thrown open weekly for
meetings for the discussion of universal subjects. In the last years
he has resided at Cheltenham, and visited Stockport for the sake of
acquainting himself with the Socialists and their methods.
His active and happy career continued nearly to the seventieth
year, with heart and head unimpaired and undaunted, his eyes and
other faculties sound, except his lower limbs, which suffered from
his sedentary occupation of writing. For nearly thirty-six years he
abstained from all fermented drinks, and all animal food. In the
last years he dieted almost wholly on fruit. The private
correspondent, from whose account, written two years ago, we have
derived our sketch, proceeds in these words. "Through evil reports,
revilings, seductions, and temptations many and severe, the Spirit
has not let him go, but has strongly and securely held him, in a
manner not often witnessed. New consciousness opens to him every
day. His literary abilities would not be by critics entitled to
praise, nor does he speak with what is called eloquence; but as he is
so much the `lived word,' I have described, there is found a potency
in all he writes and all he says, which belongs not to beings less
devoted to the Spirit. Supplies of money have come to him as fast,
or nearly as fast as required, and at all events his serenity was
never disturbed on this account, unless when it has happened that,
having more than his expenses required, he has volunteered extraneous
expenditures. He has been, I consider, a great apostle of the
Newness to many, even when neither he nor they knew very clearly what
was going forward. Thus inwardly married, he has remained outwardly
a bachelor."
Mr. Greaves is described to us by another correspondent as
being "the soul of his circle, a prophet of whom the world heard
nothing, but who has quickened much of the thought now current in the
most intellectual circles of the kingdom. He was acquainted with
every man of deep character in England, and many both in Germany and
Switzerland; and Strauss, the author of the `Life of Christ,' was a
pupil of Mr. Greaves, when he held conversations in one of the
Colleges of Germany, after leaving Pestalozzi. A most remarkable
man; nobody remained the same after leaving him. He was the prophet
of the deepest affirmative truths, and no man ever sounded his
depths. The best of the thought in the London Monthly Magazine was
the transcript of his Idea. He read and wrote much, chiefly in the
manner of Coleridge, with pen in hand, in the form of notes on the
text of his author. But, like Boehmen and Swedenborg, neither his
thoughts nor his writings were for the popular mind. His favorites
were the chosen illuminated minds of all time, and with them he was
familiar. His library is the most select and rare which I have seen,
including most of the books which we have sought with so ill success
on our side of the water." (* 1)
(* 1) The following notice of Mr. Greaves occurs in Mr.
Morgan's "Hampden in the Nineteenth Century." "The gentleman whom he
met at the school was Mr. J. P. Greaves, at that time Honorary
Secretary to the Infant School Society, and a most active and
disinterested promoter of the system. He had resided for three (?)
years with Pestalozzi, who set greater value upon right feelings and
rectitude of conduct, than upon the acquisition of languages. A
collection of highly interesting letters, addressed to this gentleman
by Pestalozzi on the subject of education, has been published. Among
the numerous advocates for various improvements, there was not one
who exceeded him in personal sacrifices to what he esteemed a duty.
At the same time he had some peculiar opinions, resembling the German
mystical and metaphysical speculations, hard to be understood, and to
which few in general are willing to listen, and still fewer to
subscribe; but his sincerity, and the kindness of his disposition
always secured for him a patient hearing." -- Vol. II. p. 22.
His favorite dogma was the superiority of Being to all knowing
and doing. Association on a high basis was his ideal for the present
conjuncture. "I hear every one crying out for association," said he;
"I join in the cry; but then I say, associate first with the Spirit,
-- educate for this spirit-association, and far more will follow than
we have as yet any idea of. Nothing good can be done without
association; but then we must associate with goodness; and this
goodness is the spirit-nature, without which all our societarian
efforts will be turned to corruption. Education has hitherto been
all outward; it must now be inward. The educator must keep in view
that which elevates man, and not the visible exterior world." We
have the promise of some extracts from the writings of this great
man, which we hope shortly to offer to the readers of this Journal.
His friend, Mr. Lane, is engaged in arranging and editing his
manuscript remains.
Mr. Heraud, a poet and journalist, chiefly known in this
country as the editor for two years of the (London) Monthly Magazine,
a disciple, in earlier years, of Coleridge, and by nature and taste
contemplative and inclined to a mystical philosophy, was a friend and
associate of Mr. Greaves; and for the last years has been more
conspicuous than any other writer in that connexion of opinion. The
Monthly Magazine, during his editorship, really was conducted in a
bolder and more creative spirit than any other British Journal; and
though papers on the highest transcendental themes were found in odd
vicinity with the lowest class of flash and so-called comic tales,
yet a necessity, we suppose, of British taste made these strange
bed-fellows acquainted, and Mr. Heraud had done what he could. His
papers called "Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence," were of signal
merit, especially the papers on Boehmen and Swedenborg. The last is,
we think, the very first adequate attempt to do justice to this
mystic, by an analysis of his total works; and, though avowedly
imperfect, is, as far as it goes, a faithful piece of criticism. We
hope that Mr. Heraud, who announces a work in three volumes, called
"Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence, designed for an Historical
Introduction to the Study of Ontological Science, preparatory to a
Critique of Pure Being," as now in preparation for the press, and of
which, we understand, the Essays in the Monthly Magazine were a part,
will be enabled to fulfil his design. Mr. Heraud is described by his
friends as the most amiable of men, and a fluent and popular lecturer
on the affirmative philosophy. He has recently intimated a wish to
cross the Atlantic, and read in Boston, a course of six lectures on
the subject of Christism as distinct from Christianity.
One of the best contributors to Mr. Heraud's Magazine was Mr.
J. Westland Marston. The papers marked with his initials are the
most eloquent in the book. We have greatly regretted their
discontinuance, and have hailed him again in his new appearance as a
dramatic author. Mr. Marston is a writer of singular purity of
taste, with a heart very open to the moral impulses, and in his
settled conviction, like all persons of a high poetic nature, the
friend of a universal reform, beginning in education. His thought on
that subject is, that "it is only by teachers becoming men of genius,
that a nobler position can be secured to them." At the same time he
seems to share that disgust, which men of fine taste so quickly
entertain in regard to the language and methods of that class with
which their theory throws them into correspondence, and to be
continually attracted through his taste to the manners and persons of
the aristocracy, whose selfishness and frivolity displease and repel
him again. Mr. Marston has lately written a Tragedy, called "The
Patrician's Daughter," which we have read with great pleasure,
barring always the fatal prescription, which in England seems to
mislead every fine poet to attempt the drama. It must be the reading
of tragedies that fills them with this superstition for the buskin
and the pall, and not a sympathy with existing nature and the spirit
of the age. The Patrician's Daughter is modern in its plot and
characters, perfectly simple in its style; the dialogue is full of
spirit, and the story extremely well told. We confess, as we drew
out this bright pamphlet from amid the heap of crude declamation on
Marriage and Education, on Dietetics and Hydropathy, on Chartism and
Socialism, grim tracts on flesh-eating and dram-drinking, we felt the
glad refreshment of its sense and melody, and thanked the fine office
which speaks to the imagination, and paints with electric pencil a
new form,-- new forms on the lurid cloud. Although the vengeance of
Mordaunt strikes us as overstrained, yet his character, and the
growth of his fortunes is very natural, and is familiar to English
experience in the Thurlows, Burkes, Foxes, and Cannings. The Lady
Mabel is finely drawn. Pity that the catastrophe should be wrought
by the deliberate lie of Lady Lydia; for beside that lovers, as they
of all men speak the most direct speech, easily pierce the cobwebs of
fraud, it is a weak way of making a play, to hinge the crisis on a
lie, instead of letting it grow, as in life, out of the faults and
conditions of the parties, as, for example, in Goethe's Tasso. On
all accounts but one, namely, the lapse of five years between two
acts, the play seems to be eminently fit for representation. Mr.
Marston is also the author of two tracts on Poetry and Poetic
Culture.
Another member of this circle is Francis Barham, the dramatic
poet, author of "The Death of Socrates," a tragedy, and other pieces;
also a contributor to the Monthly Magazine. To this gentleman we are
under special obligations, as he has sent us, with other pamphlets, a
manuscript paper "On American Literature," written with such flowing
good will, and with an aim so high, that we must submit some portion
of it to our readers.
Intensely sympathizing, as I have ever done, with the great
community of truth-seekers, I glory in the rapid progress of that
Alistic, (* 2) or divine literature, which they develop and
cultivate. To me this Alistic literature is so catholic and
universal, that it has spread its energies and influences through
every age and nation, in brighter or obscurer manifestations. It
forms the intellectual patrimony of the universe, delivered down from
kindling sire to kindling son, through all nations, peoples, and
languages. Like the God from whom it springs, on whom it lives, and
to whom it returns, this divine literature is ever young, ever old,
ever present, ever remote. Like heaven's own sunshine, it adorns all
it touches, and it touches all. It is a perfect cosmopolite in
essence and in action; it has nothing local or limitary in its
nature; it participates the character of the soul from which it
emanated. It subsists whole in itself, it is its own place, its own
time, nor seeks abroad the life it grants at home; aye, it is an
eternal now, an eternal present, at once beginning, middle, and end
of every past and every future.
(* 2) In explanation of this term, we quote a few sentences
from a printed prospectus issued by Mr. Barham. "_The Alist_; _a
Monthly Magazine of Divinity and Universal Literature_. I have
adopted the title of `the Alist, or Divine,' for this periodical,
because the extension of Divinity and divine truth is its main
object. It appears to me, that by a firm adherence to the {to
Theion}, or divine principle of things, a Magazine may assume a
specific character, far more elevated, catholic, and attractive, than
the majority of periodicals attain. This Magazine is therefore
specially written for those persons who may, without impropriety, be
termed Alists, or Divines; those who endeavor to develop Divinity as
the grand primary essence of all existence, -- the element which
forms the all in all, -- the element in which we live, and move, and
have our being. Such Alists, (deriving their name from Alah -- the
Hebrew title of God,) are Divines in the highest sense of the word;
for they cultivate Alism, or the Divinity of Divinities, as exhibited
in all Scripture and nature, and they extend religious and
philanthropical influences through all churches, states, and systems
of education. This doctrine of Alism, or the life of God in the soul
of man, affords the only prothetic point of union, sufficiently
intense and authoritative to unite men in absolute catholicity. In
proportion as they cultivate one and the same God in their minds,
will their minds necessarily unite and harmonize; but without this is
done, permanent harmony is impossible."
It is, I conceive, salutary for us to take this enlarged view
of literature. We should seek after literary perfection in this
cosmopolite spirit, and embrace it wherever we find it, as a divine
gift; for, in the words of Pope,
"both precepts and example tell
That nature's masterpiece is writing well."
So was it with the august and prophetic Milton. To him
literature was a universal presence. He regarded it as the common
delight and glory of gods and men. He felt that its _moral beauty_
lived and flourished in the large heart of humanity itself, and could
never be monopolized by times or places. Most deeply do I think and
feel with Milton, when he utters the following words. "What God may
have determined for me, I know not; but this I know, that if ever he
instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man,
he has instilled it into mine. Hence wherever I find a man despising
the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire in sentiment
and language and conduct to what the highest wisdom through every age
has taught us, as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a kind of
necessary attachment. And if I am so influenced by nature, or
destiny, that by no exertions or labors of my own I may exalt myself
to this summit of worth and honor, yet no power in heaven or earth
will hinder me from looking with reverence and affection upon those,
who have thoroughly attained this glory, or appeared engaged in the
successful pursuit of it."
Mr. Barham proceeds to apply this sentiment as analogous to his
own sentiment, in respect to the literatures of other nations, but
specially to that of America.
The unity of language unites the literature of Britain and
America, in an essential and imperishable marriage, which no Atlantic
Ocean can divide. Yes; I as an Englishman say this, and maintain it.
United in language, in literature, in interest, and in blood, I
regard the English in England and the English in America as one and
the same people, the same magnificent brotherhood. The fact is owned
in the common names by which they are noted; John and Jonathan,
Angles and Yankees, all reecho the fact.
Mr. Barham proceeds to exhibit the manifold reasons that enjoin
union on the two countries, deprecates the divisions that have
sometimes suspended the peace, and continues;
Let us rather maintain the generous policy of Milton, and with
full acclamation of concord recite his inspiring words;
"Go on both hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited. Be
the praise and the heroic song of all posterity. Merit this, but
seek only virtue, not the extension of your limits. For what needs
to win a fading triumphal laurel out of the tears of wretched men,
but to settle the true worship of God and justice in the
commonwealth. Then shall the hardest difficulties smooth themselves
out before you, envy shall sink to hell, and craft and malice shall
be confounded, whether it be homebred mischief or outlandish cunning.
Yea, other nations will then covet to serve you; for lordship and
victory are but the pages of justice and virtue. Commit securely to
true wisdom the vanquishing and uncaging of craft and subtlety, which
are but her two runagates. Join your invincible might to do worthy
and godlike deeds, and then he that seeks to break your union, a
cleaving curse be his inheritance throughout all generations."
Mr. Barham then proceeds to express his conviction, that the
specific character, which the literature of these countries should
aim at, is the Alistic or Divine. It is only by an aim so high, that
an author can reach any excellence.
"He builds too low who builds beneath the skies."
But our limits forbid any more extracts from this friendly
manuscript at present.
Another eminent member of this circle is Mr. Charles Lane, for
many years manager of the London Mercantile Price Current; a man of a
fine intellectual nature, inspired and hallowed by a profounder
faith. Mr. Lane is the author of some pieces marked with his
initials, in the Monthly Magazine, and of some remarkable tracts.
Those which we have seen are, "The Old, the New-Old, and the New;"
"Tone in Speech;" some papers in a Journal of Health; and last and
best, a piece called "The Third Dispensation," prefixed by way of
preface to an English translation of Mme. Gatti de Gamond's
"Phalansterian," a French book of the Fourier School. In this Essay
Mr. Lane considers that History has exhibited two dispensations,
namely, _first_, the Family Union, or connexion by tribes, which soon
appeared to be a disunion or a dispersive principle; _second_, the
National Union. Both these, though better than the barbarism which
they displaced, are themselves barbarism, in contrast with the
_third_, or Universal Union.
"As man is the uniter in all arrangements which stand _below_
him, and in which the objects could not unite themselves, so man
needs a uniter _above_ him, to whom he submits, in the certain
incapability of self-union. This uniter, unity, or One, is the
premonitor whence exists the premonition Unity, which so recurrently
becomes conscious in man. By a neglect of interior submission, man
fails of this antecedent, Unity; and as a consequence his attempts at
union by exterior mastery have no success." Certain conditions are
necessary to this, namely, the external arrangements indispensable
_for_ the evolution of the Uniting Spirit can alone be provided _by_
the Uniting Spirit.
"We seem to be in an endless circle, of which both halves have
lost their centre connexion; for it is an operation no less difficult
than the junction of two such discs that is requisite to unity.
These segments also being in motion, each upon a false centre of its
own, the obstacles to union are incalculably multiplied.
"The spiritual or theoretic world in man revolves upon one set
of principles, and the practical or actual world upon another. In
ideality man recognizes the purest truths, the highest notions of
justice; in actuality he departs from all these, and his entire
career is confessedly a life of self-falseness and clever injustice.
This barren ideality, and this actuality replete with bitter fruits,
are the two hemispheres to be united for their mutual completion, and
their common central point is the reality antecedent to them both.
This point is not to be discovered by the rubbing of these two half
globes together, by their curved sides, nor even as a school boy
would attempt to unite his severed marble by the flat sides. The
circle must be drawn anew from reality as a central point, the new
radius embracing equally the new ideality and the new actuality.
"With this newness of love in men there would resplendently
shine forth in them a newness of light, and a newness of life,
charming the steadiest beholder."_--Introduction_, p. 4.
The remedy, which Mr. Lane proposes for the existing evils, is
his "True Harmonic Association." But he more justly confides in
"ceasing from doing" than in exhausting efforts at inadequate
remedies. "From medicine to medicine is a change from disease to
disease; and man must cease from self-activity, ere the spirit can
fill him with truth in mind or health in body. The Civilization is
become intensely false, and thrusts the human being into false
predicaments. The antagonism of business to all that is high and
good and generic is hourly declared by the successful, as well as by
the failing. The mercantile system, based on individual
aggrandizement, draws men from unity; its swelling columns of figures
describe, in pounds, shillings, and pence, the degrees of man's
departure from love, from wisdom, from power. The idle are as
unhappy as the busy. Whether the dread factory-bell, or the
fox-hunter's horn calls to a pursuit more fatal to man's best
interests, is an inquiry which appears more likely to terminate in
the cessation of both, than in a preference of either."
Mr. Lane does not confound society with sociableness. "On the
contrary, it is when the sympathy with man is the stronger and the
truer, that the sympathy with men grows weaker, and the sympathy with
their actions weakest."
We must content ourselves with these few sentences from Mr.
Lane's book, but we shall shortly hear from him again. This is no
man of letters, but a man of ideas. Deep opens below deep in his
thought, and for the solution of each new problem he recurs, with new
success, to the highest truth, to that which is most generous, most
simple, and most powerful; to that which cannot be comprehended, or
overseen, or exhausted. His words come to us like the voices of home
out of a far country.
With Mr. Lane is associated in the editorship of a monthly
tract, called "The Healthian," and in other kindred enterprises, Mr.
Henry G. Wright, who is the teacher of the School at Ham Common, near
Richmond, and the author of several tracts on moral and social
topics.
This school is founded on a faith in the presence of the Divine
Spirit in man. The teachers say, "that in their first experiments
they found they had to deal with a higher nature than the mere
mechanical. They found themselves in contact with an essence
indefinably delicate. The great difficulty with relation to the
children, with which they were first called to wrestle, was an
unwillingness to admit access to their spiritual natures. The
teachers felt this keenly. They sought for the cause. They found it
in their own hearts. Pure spirit would not, could not hold communion
with their corrupted modes. These must be surrendered, and love
substituted in lieu of them. The experience was soon made that the
primal duty of the educator is entire self-surrender to love. Not
partial, not of the individual, but pure, unlimited, universal. It
is impossible to speak to natures deeper than those from which you
speak. Reason cries to Reason, Love to Love. Hence the personal
elevation of the teacher is of supreme importance." Mr. Alcott, who
may easily be a little partial to an instructor who has adopted
cordially his own methods, writes thus of his friend.
"Mr. Wright is a younger disciple of the same eternal verity,
which I have loved and served so long. You have never seen his like,
so deep serene, so clear, so true, and so good. His school is a most
refreshing and happy place. The children are mostly under twelve
years of age, of both sexes; and his art and method of education
simple and natural. It seemed like being again in my own school,
save that a wiser wisdom directs, and a lovelier love presides over
its order and teachings. He is not yet thirty years of age, but he
has more genius for education than any man I have seen, and not of
children alone, but he possesses the rare art of teaching men and
women. What I have dreamed and stammered, and preached, and prayed
about so long, is in him clear and definite. It is life, influence,
reality. I flatter myself that I shall bring him with me on my
return. He cherishes hopes of making our land the place of his
experiment on human culture, and of proving to others the worth of
the divine idea that now fills and exalts him."
In consequence of Mr. Greaves's persuasion, which seems to be
shared by his friends, that the special remedy for the evils of
society at the present moment is association; perhaps from a more
universal tendency, which has drawn in many of the best minds in this
country also to accuse the idealism, which contents itself with the
history of the private mind, and to demand of every thinker the
warmest dedication to the race, this class of which we speak are
obviously inclined to favor the plans of the Socialists. They appear
to be in active literary and practical connexion with Mr. Doherty,
the intelligent and catholic editor of the London Phalanx, who is
described to us as having been a personal friend of Fourier, and
himself a man of sanguine temper, but a friend of temperate measures,
and willing to carry his points with wise moderation, on one side;
and in friendly relations with Robert Owen, "the philanthropist, `who
writes in brick and clay, in gardens and green fields,' who is a
believer in the comforts and humanities of life, and would give these
in abundance to all men," although they are widely distinguished from
this last in their devout spiritualism. Many of the papers on our
table contain schemes and hints for a better social organization,
especially the plan of what they call "a Concordium, or a Primitive
Home, which is about to be commenced by united individuals, who are
desirous, under industrial and progressive education, with simplicity
in diet, dress, lodging, &c., to retain the means for the harmonic
development of their physical, intellectual, and moral natures." The
institution is to be in the country, the inmates are to be of both
sexes, they are to labor on the land, their drink is to be water, and
their food chiefly uncooked by fire, and the habits of the members
throughout of the same simplicity. Their unity is to be based on
their education in a religious love, which subordinates all persons,
and perpetually invokes the presence of the spirit in every
transaction. It is through this tendency that these gentlemen have
been drawn into fellowship with a humbler, but far larger class of
their countrymen, of whom Goodwyn Barmby may stand for the
representative.
Mr. Barmby is the editor of a penny magazine, called "The
Promethean, or Communitarian Apostle," published monthly, and, as the
covers inform us, "the cheapest of all magazines, and the paper the
most devoted of any to the cause of the people; consecrated to
Pantheism in Religion, and Communism in Politics." Mr. Barmby is a
sort of Camille Desmoulins of British Revolution, a radical poet,
with too little fear of grammar and rhetoric before his eyes, with as
little fear of the Church or the State, writing often with as much
fire, though not with as much correctness, as Ebenezer Elliott. He
is the author of a poem called "The European Pariah," which will
compare favorably with the Corn-law Rhymes. His paper is of great
interest, as it details the conventions, the counsels, the measures
of Barmby and his friends, for the organization of a new order of
things, totally at war with the establishment. Its importance arises
from the fact, that it comes obviously from the heart of the people.
It is a cry of the miner and weaver for bread, for daylight, and
fresh air, for space to exist in, and time to catch their breath and
rest themselves in; a demand for political suffrage, and the power to
tax as a counterpart to the liability of being taxed; a demand for
leisure, for learning, for arts and sciences, for the higher social
enjoyments. It is one of a cloud of pamphlets in the same temper and
from the same quarter, which show a wholly new state of feeling in
the body of the British people. In a time of distress among the
manufacturing classes, severe beyond any precedent, when, according
to the statements vouched by Lord Brougham in the House of Peers, and
Mr. O'Connell and others in the Commons, wages are reduced in some of
the manufacturing villages to six pence a week, so that men are
forced to sustain themselves and their families at less than a penny
a day; when the most revolting expedients are resorted to for food;
when families attempt by a recumbent posture to diminish the pangs of
hunger; in the midst of this exasperation the voice of the people is
temperate and wise beyond all former example. They are intent on
personal as well as on national reforms. Jack Cade leaves behind him
his bludgeon and torch, and is grown amiable, literary,
philosophical, and mystical. He reads Fourier, he reads Shelley, he
reads Milton. He goes for temperance, for non-resistance, for
education, and for the love-marriage, with the two poets above named;
and for association, after the doctrines either of Owen or of
Fourier. One of the most remarkable of the tracts before us is "A
Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, addressed to
the Working Classes of the United Kingdom; written in Warwick Gaol,
by William Lovett, cabinet-maker, and John Collins, tool-maker,"
which is a calm, intelligent, and earnest plea for a new organization
of the people, for the highest social and personal benefits, urging
the claims of general education, of the Infant School, the Normal
School, and so forth; announcing rights, but with equal emphasis
admitting duties. And Mr. Barmby, whilst he attacks with great
spirit and great contempt the conventions of society, is a worshipper
of love and of beauty, and vindicates the arts. "The apostleship of
veritable doctrine," he says, "in the fine arts is a really religious
Apostolate, as the fine arts in their perfect manifestation tend to
make mankind virtuous and happy."
It will give the reader some precise information of the views
of the most devout and intelligent persons in the company we have
described, if we add an account of a public conversation which
occurred during the last summer. In the (London) Morning Chronicle,
of 5 July, we find the following advertisement. "Public Invitation.
An open meeting of the friends to human progress will be held
to-morrow, July 6, at Mr. Wright's Alcott-House School, Ham Common,
near Richmond, Surrey, for the purpose of considering and adopting
means for the promotion of the great end, when all who are interested
in human destiny are earnestly urged to attend. The chair taken at
Three o'clock and again at Seven, by A. Bronson Alcott, Esq., now on
a visit from America. Omnibuses travel to and fro, and the Richmond
steam-boat reaches at a convenient hour."
Of this conference a private correspondent has furnished us
with the following report.
A very pleasant day to us was Wednesday, the sixth of July. On
that day an open meeting was held at Mr. Wright's, Alcott-House
School, Ham, Surrey, to define the aims and initiate the means of
human culture. There were some sixteen or twenty of us assembled on
the lawn at the back of the house. We came from many places; one 150
miles; another a hundred; others from various distances; and our
brother Bronson Alcott from Concord, North America. We found it not
easy to propose a question sufficiently comprehensive to unfold the
whole of the fact with which our bosoms labored. We aimed at nothing
less than to speak of the instauration of Spirit and its incarnation
in a beautiful form. We had no chairman, and needed none. We came
not to dispute, but to hear and to speak. And when a word failed in
extent of meaning, we loaded the word with new meaning. The word did
not confine our experience, but from our own being we gave
significance to the word. Into one body we infused many lives, and
it shone as the image of divine or angelic or human thought. For a
word is a Proteus that means to a man what the man is. Three papers
were successively presented.
_Poems_. By ALFRED TENNYSON. Two Volumes. Boston: W. D.
Ticknor.
Tennyson is more simply the songster than any poet of our time.
With him the delight of musical expression is first, the thought
second. It was well observed by one of our companions, that he has
described just what we should suppose to be his method of composition
in this verse from "The Miller's Daughter."
"A love-song I had somewhere read,
An echo from a measured strain,
Beat time to nothing in my head
From some odd corner of the brain.
It haunted me the morning long,
With weary sameness in the rhymes,
_The phantom of a silent song_,
_That went and came a thousand times_."
So large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is
ever over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so
deeply tainted with a sentimental egotism, that this, whose chief
merits lay in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing.
What a relief, after sermonizing and wailing had dulled the sense
with such a weight of cold abstraction, to be soothed by this ivory
lute!
Not that he wanted nobleness and individuality in his thoughts,
or a due sense of the poet's vocation; but he won us to truths, not
forced them upon us; as we listened, the cope
"Of the self-attained futurity
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O'er the deep mind of dauntless infamy."
And he seemed worthy thus to address his friend,
"Weak truth a-leaning on her crutch,
Wan, wasted truth in her utmost need,
Thy kingly intellect shall feed,
Until she be an athlete bold."
Unless thus sustained, the luxurious sweetness of his verse
must have wearied. Yet it was not of aim or meaning we thought most,
but of his exquisite sense for sounds and melodies, as marked by
himself in the description of Cleopatra.
"Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range,
Touched by all passion, did fall down and glance
From tone to tone, and glided through all change
Of liveliest utterance."
Or in the fine passage in the Vision of Sin, where
"Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale;" &c.
Or where the Talking Oak composes its serenade for the pretty
Alice; but indeed his descriptions of melody are almost as abundant
as his melodies, though the central music of the poet's mind is, he
says, as that of the
"fountain
Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening
With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,
And the mountain draws it from heaven above,
And it sings a song of undying love."
Next to his music, his delicate, various, gorgeous music,
stands his power of picturesque representation. And his, unlike
those of most poets, are eye-pictures, not mind-pictures. And yet
there is no hard or tame fidelity, but a simplicity and ease at
representation (which is quite another thing from reproduction)
rarely to be paralleled. How, in the Palace of Art, for instance,
they are unrolled slowly and gracefully, as if painted one after
another on the same canvass. The touch is calm and masterly, though
the result is looked at with a sweet, self-pleasing eye. Who can
forget such as this, and of such there are many, painted with as few
strokes and with as complete a success?
"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."
Tennyson delights in a garden. Its groups, and walks, and
mingled bloom intoxicate him, and us through him. So high is his
organization, and so powerfully stimulated by color and perfume, that
it heightens all our senses too, and the rose is glorious, not from
detecting its ideal beauty, but from a perfection of hue and scent,
we never felt before. All the earlier poems are flower-like, and
this tendency is so strong in him, that a friend observed, he could
not keep up the character of the tree in his Oak of Summer Chase, but
made it talk like an "enormous flower." The song,
"A spirit haunts the year's last hours,"
is not to be surpassed for its picture of the autumnal
garden.
The new poems, found in the present edition, show us our friend
of ten years since much altered, yet the same. The light he sheds on
the world is mellowed and tempered. If the charm he threw around us
before was somewhat too sensuous, it is not so now; he is deeply
thoughtful; the dignified and graceful man has displaced the Antinous
beauty of the youth. His melody is less rich, less intoxicating, but
deeper; a sweetness from the soul, sweetness as of the hived honey of
fine experiences, replaces the sweetness which captivated the ear
only, in many of his earlier verses. His range of subjects was great
before, and is now such that he would seem too merely the amateur,
but for the success in each, which says that the same fluent and
apprehensive nature, which threw itself with such ease into the forms
of outward beauty, has now been intent rather on the secrets of the
shaping spirit. In `Locksley Hall,' `St. Simeon Stylites,'
`Ulysses,' `Love and Duty,' `The Two Voices,' are deep tones, that
bespeak that acquaintance with realities, of which, in the `Palace of
Art,' he had expressed his need. The keen sense of outward beauty,
the ready shaping fancy, had not been suffered to degrade the poet
into that basest of beings, an intellectual voluptuary, and a pensive
but serene wisdom hallows all his song.
His opinions on subjects, that now divide the world, are stated
in two or three of these pieces, with that temperance and candor of
thought, now more rare even than usual, and with a simplicity
bordering on homeliness of diction, which is peculiarly pleasing,
from the sense of plastic power and refined good sense it imparts.
A gentle and gradual style of narration, without prolixity or
tameness, is seldom to be found in the degree in which such pieces as
`Dora' and `Godiva' display it. The grace of the light ballad pieces
is as remarkable in its way, as was his grasp and force in `Oriana,'
`The Lord of Burleigh,' `Edward Gray,' and `Lady Clare,' are
distinguished for different shades of this light grace, tender, and
speaking more to the soul than the sense, like the different hues in
the landscape, when the sun is hid in clouds, so gently shaded that
they seem but the echoes of themselves.
I know not whether most to admire the bursts of passion in
`Locksley Hall,' the playful sweetness of the `Talking Oak,' or the
mere catching of a cadence in such slight things as
"Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O sea," &c.
Nothing is more uncommon than the lightness of touch, which
gives a charm to such little pieces as the `Skipping Rope.'
We regret much to miss from this edition `The Mystic,' `The
Deserted House,' and `Elegiacs,' all favorites for years past, and
not to be disparaged in favor of any in the present collection.
England, we believe, has not shown a due sense of the merits of this
poet, and to us is given the honor of rendering homage more readily
to an accurate and elegant intellect, a musical reception of nature,
a high tendency in thought, and a talent of singular fineness,
flexibility, and scope.
_A Letter to Rev. Wm. E. Channing, D. D._ By O. A. BROWNSON
Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1842.
That there is no knowledge of God possible to man but a
subjective knowledge, -- no revelation but the development of the
individual within himself, and to himself, -- are prevalent
statements, which Mr. Brownson opposes by a single formula, that
_life is relative in its very nature_. God alone is; all creatures
live by virtue of what is not themselves, no less than by virtue of
what is themselves, the prerogative of man being to do consciously,
that is, more or less intelligently. Mr. Brownson carefully
discriminates between Essence and Life. Essence, being object to
itself, alone has freedom, which is what the old theologians named
sovereignty; -- a noble word for the thing intended, were it not
desecrated in our associations, in being usurped by creatures that
are slaves to time and circumstance. But life implies a causative
object, as well as causative subject; wherefore _creatures_ are only
free by Grace of God.
That men should live, with God for predominating object, is the
Ideal of Humanity, or the Law of Holiness, in the highest sense; for
this object alone can emancipate them from what is below themselves.
But a nice discrimination must be made here. The Ideal of Humanity,
as used by Mr. Brownson, does not mean the highest idea of himself,
which a man can form by induction on himself as an individual; it
means God's idea of man, which shines into every man from the
beginning; "Enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,"
though his darkness comprehendeth it not, until it is "made flesh."
It is by virtue of that freedom which is God's alone, and which is
the issue of absolute love, that is, "because God so loved the
world," he takes up the subject, Jesus, and makes himself objective
to him without measure, thereby rendering his life as divine as it is
human, though it remains also as human, -- strictly speaking, -- as
it is divine.
To all men's consciousness it is true that God is objective in
a degree, or they were not distinctively human. His glory is
refracted, as it were, to their eyes, through the universe. But only
in a man, to whom he has made himself the imperative object, does he
approach men, in all points, in such degree as to make them divine.
He is no less free (sovereign) in coming to each man in Christ, than,
in the first instance, in making Jesus of Nazareth the Christ. Men
are only free inasmuch as they are open to this majestic access, and
are able to pray with St. Augustine, "What art thou to me, oh Lord?
_Have mercy on me that I may ask_. The house of my soul is too
strait for thee to come into; but let it, oh Lord, be enlarged by
thee. It is ruinous, but let it be repaired by thee," &c.
The Unitarian Church, as Mr. Brownson thinks, indicates truth,
in so far as it insists on the life of Jesus as being that wherein we
find grace; but in so far as it does not perceive that this life is
something more than a series of good actions, which others may
reproduce, it leans on an arm of flesh, and puts an idol in the place
of Christ. The Trinitarian Church, he thinks, therefore, has come
nearer the truth, by its formulas of doctrine; and especially the
Roman Catholic Church, by the Eucharist. The error of both Churches
has been to predicate of the being, Jesus, what is only true of his
life. The being, Jesus, was a man; his life is God. It is the
doctrine of John the Evangelist throughout, that the soul lives by
the real presence of Jesus Christ, as literally as the body lives by
bread. The unchristianized live only partially, by so much of the
word as shines in the darkness which may not hinder it quite. This
partial life repeats in all time the prophecies of antiquity, and is
another witness to Jesus Christ, "the same yesterday, to-day, and
forever."
Mr. Brownson thinks that he has thus discovered a formula of
"the faith once delivered to the saints," which goes behind and
annihilates the controversy between Unitarians and Trinitarians, and
may lead them both to a deeper comprehension and clearer expression
of the secret of life.
_Literary Intelligence_
The death of Dr. Channing at Bennington in Vermont, on the 2d
October, is an event of great note to the whole country. The great
loss of the community is mitigated by the new interest which
intellectual power always acquires by the death of the possessor.
Dr. Channing was a man of so much rectitude, and such power to
express his sense of right, that his value to this country, of which
he was a kind of public _Conscience_, can hardly be overestimated.
Not only his merits, but his limitations also, which made all his
virtues and talents intelligible and available for the correction and
elevation of society, made our Cato dear, and his loss not to be
repaired. His interest in the times, and the fidelity and
independence, with which, for so many years, he had exercised that
censorship on commercial, political, and literary morals, which was
the spontaneous dictate of his character, had earned for him an
accumulated capital of veneration, which caused his opinion to be
waited for in each emergency, as that of the wisest and most upright
of judges. We shall probably soon have an opportunity to give an
extended account of his character and genius. In most parts of this
country notice has been taken of this event, and in London also.
Beside the published discourses of Messrs. Gannett, Hedge, Clarke,
Parker, Pierpont, and Bellows, Mr. Bancroft made Dr. Channing's
genius the topic of a just tribute in a lecture before the Diffusion
Society at the Masonic Temple. We regret that the city has not yet
felt the propriety of paying a public honor to the memory of one of
the truest and noblest of its citizens.
_Confessions of St. Augustine_. Boston: E. P. Peabody.
We heartily welcome this reprint from the recent London
edition, which was a revision, by the Oxford divines, of an old
English translation. It is a rare addition to our religious library.
The great Augustine, -- one of the truest, richest, subtlest,
eloquentest of authors, comes now in this American dress, to stand on
the same shelf with his far-famed disciples, with A-Kempis, Herbert,
Taylor, Scougal, and Fenelon. The Confessions have also a high
interest as one of the honestest autobiographies ever written. In
this view it takes even rank with Montaigne's Essays, with Luther's
Table Talk, the Life of John Bunyan, with Rousseau's Confessions, and
the Life of Dr. Franklin. In opening the book at random, we have
fallen on his reflections on the death of an early friend.
"O madness, which knowest not how to love men like men! I
fretted, sighed, wept, was distracted, had neither rest nor counsel.
For I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being
borne by me, yet where to repose it I found not. All things looked
ghastly; yea the very light; whatsoever was not what he was, was
revolting and hateful, except groaning and tears. In those alone
found I a little refreshment. I fled out of my country; for so
should mine eyes look less for him where they were not wont to see
him. And thus from Thagaste I came to Carthage. Times lose no time;
nor do they roll idly by; through our senses they work strange
operations on the mind. Behold, they went and came day by day, and
by coming and going introduced into my mind other imaginations and
other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my
old kind of delights unto which that my sorrow gave way. And yet
there succeeded not indeed other griefs, yet the causes of other
griefs. For whence had that former grief so easily reached my inmost
soul but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust in loving one,
that must die, as if he would never die. For what restored and
refreshed me chiefly, was the solaces of other friends with whom I
did love what instead of thee I loved: and this was a |P1249|p1 great
fable and protracted lie, by whose adulterous stimulus our soul,
which lay itching in our ears, was defiled. But that fable would not
die to me so oft as any of my friends died. There were other things
which in them did more take my mind; to talk and jest together; to do
kind offices by turns; to read together honied books; to play the
fool or be earnest together; to dissent at times without discontent,
as a man might with his ownself; and even with the seldomness of
those dissentings, to season our more frequent consentings; sometimes
to teach, and sometimes learn; long for the absent with impatience,
and welcome the coming with joy."
-- BOOK 4.
_Europe and European Books_
The American Academy, the Historical Society, and Harvard
University, would do well to make the Cunard steamers the subject of
examination in regard to their literary and ethical influence. These
rapid sailers must be arraigned as the conspicuous agents in the
immense and increasing intercourse between the old and the new
continents. We go to school to Europe. We imbibe an European taste.
Our education, so called, -- our drilling at college, and our reading
since, -- has been European, and we write on the English culture and
to an English public, in America and in Europe. This powerful star,
it is thought, will soon culminate and descend, and the impending
reduction of the transatlantic excess of influence on the American
education is already a matter of easy and frequent computation. Our
eyes will be turned westward, and a new and stronger tone in
literature will be the result. The Kentucky stumporatory, the
exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of western
pioneers, agriculturalists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack
Downing, are genuine growths, which are sought with avidity in
Europe, where our European-like books are of no value. It is easy to
see that soon the centre of population and property of the English
race, which long ago began its travels, and which is still on the
eastern shore, will shortly hover midway over the Atlantic main, and
then as certainly fall within the American coast, so that the writers
of the English tongue shall write to the American and not to the
island public, and then will the great Yankee be born.
But at present we have our culture from Europe and Europeans.
Let us be content and thankful for these good gifts for a while yet.
The collections of art, at Dresden, Paris, Rome, and the British
Museum and libraries offer their splendid hospitalities to the
American. And beyond this, amid the dense population of that
continent, lifts itself ever and anon some eminent head, a prophet to
his own people, and their interpreter to the people of other
countries. The attraction of these individuals is not to be resisted
by theoretic statements. It is true there is always something
deceptive, self-deceptive, in our travel. We go to France, to
Germany, to see men, and find but what we carry. A man is a man, one
as good as another, many doors to one open court, and that open court
as entirely accessible from our private door, or through John or
Peter, as through Humboldt or Laplace. But we cannot speak to
ourselves. We brood on our riches but remain dumb; that makes us
unhappy; and we take ship and go man-hunting in order to place
ourselves _en rapport_, according to laws of personal magnetism, to
acquire speech or expression. Seeing Herschel or Schelling, or Swede
or Dane, satisfies the conditions, and we can express ourselves
happily.
But Europe has lost weight lately. Our young men go thither in
every ship, but not as in the golden days, when the same tour would
show the traveler the noble heads of Scott, of Mackintosh, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Goethe, Cuvier, and Humboldt. We remember when arriving
in Paris, we crossed the river on a brilliant morning, and at the
bookshop of Papinot, in the Rue de Sorbonne, at the gates of the
University, purchased for two sous a Programme, which announced that
every Monday we might attend the lecture of Dumas on Chemistry at
noon; at a half hour later either Villemain or Ampere on French
literature; at other hours, Guizot on Modern History; Cousin on the
Philosophy of Ancient History; Fauriel on Foreign Literature; Prevost
on Geology; Lacroix on the Differential Calculus: Jouffroy on the
History of Modern Philosophy; Lacretelle on Ancient History;
Desfontaines or Mirbel on Botany.
Hard by, at the Place du Pantheon, Degerando, Royer Collard,
and their colleagues were giving courses on Law, on the law of
nations, the Pandects and commercial equity. For two magical sous
more, we bought the Programme of the College Royal de France, on
which we still read with admiring memory, that every Monday,
Silvestre de Sacy lectures on the Persian language; at other hours,
Lacroix on the Integral Mathematics; Jouffroy on Greek Philosophy;
Biot on Physics; Lerminier on the History of Legislation; Elie de
Beaumont on Natural History; Magendie on Medicine; Thenard on
Chemistry; Binet on Astronomy; and so on, to the end of the week. On
the same wonderful ticket, as if royal munificence had not yet
sufficed, we learned that at the Museum of Natural History, at the
Garden of Plants, three days in the week, Brongniart would teach
Vegetable Physiology, and Gay-Lussac Chemistry, and Flourent Anatomy.
With joy we read these splendid news in the Cafe Procope, and
straightway joined the troop of students of all nations, kindreds,
and tongues, whom this great institution drew together to listen to
the first _savans_ of the world without fee or reward. The
professors are changed, but the liberal doors still stand open at
this hour. This royal liberality, which seems to atone for so many
possible abuses of power, could not exist without important
consequences to the student on his return home.
The University of Gottingen has sunk from its high place by the
loss of its brightest stars. The last was Heeren, whose learning was
really useful, and who has made ingenious attempts at the solution of
ancient historical problems. Ethiopia, Assyria, Carthage, and the
Theban Desart are still revealing secrets, latent for three
millenniums, under the powerful night glass of the Teutonic scholars,
who make astronomy, geology, chemistry, trade, statistics, medals,
tributary to their inquisitions. In the last year also died
Sismondi, who by his History of the Italian Republics reminded
mankind of the prodigious wealth of life and event, which Time,
devouring his children as fast as they are born, is giving to
oblivion in Italy, the piazza and forum of History, and for a time
made Italian subjects of the middle age popular for poets, and
romancers, and by his kindling chronicles of Milan and Lombardy
perhaps awoke the great genius of Manzoni. That history is full of
events, yet, as Ottilia writes in Goethe's novel, that she never can
bring away from history anything but a few anecdotes, so the "Italian
Republics" lies in the memory like a confused _melee_, a confused
noise of slaughter, and rapine, and garments rolled in blood. The
method, if method there be, is so slight and artificial, that it is
quite overlaid and lost in the unvaried details of treachery and
violence. Hallam's sketches of the same history were greatly more
luminous and memorable, partly from the advantage of his design,
which compelled him to draw outlines, and not bury the grand lines of
destiny in municipal details. Italy furnished in that age no man of
genius to its political arena, though many of talent, and this want
degrades the history. We still remember with great pleasure, Mr.
Hallam's fine sketch of the external history of the rise and
establishment of the Papacy, which Mr. Ranke's voluminous researches,
though they have great value for their individual portraits, have not
superseded.
It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary
calendar, when within the twelvemonth a single London advertisement
announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and
a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth's nature or character has had all
the time it needed, in order to make its mark, and supply the want of
talent. We have learned how to read him. We have ceased to expect
that which he cannot give. He has the merit of just moral
perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton
curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style! Many of his poems,
as, for example, the Rylstone Doe, might be all improvised. Nothing
of Milton, nothing of Marvell, of Herbert, of Dryden, could be.
These are such verses as in a just state of culture should be _vers
de Societe_, such as every gentleman could write, but none would
think of printing or of claiming the poet's laurel on their merit.
The Pindar, the Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the just and
open soul, have also the eye to see the dimmest star that glimmers in
the Milky Way, the serratures of every leaf, the test objects of the
microscope, and then the tongue to utter the same things in words
that engrave them on all the ears of mankind. The poet demands all
gifts and not one or two only.
The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer
to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down
to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only
converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the
senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and
cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good
story, and its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on
the Copyright Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley,
the coroner, quoted Wordsworth's poetry in derision, and asked the
roaring House of Commons, what that meant, and whether a man should
have a public reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace, Milton,
and Chaucer would defy the coroner. Whilst they have wisdom to the
wise, he would see, that to the external, they have external meaning.
Coleridge excellently said of poetry, that poetry must first be good
sense, as a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a
house.
Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet
Wordsworth, though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind
his own mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on
his compositions, though confounding his accidental with the
universal consciousness, and taking the public to task for not
admiring his poetry, -- is really a superior master of the English
language, and his poems evince a power of diction that is no more
rivalled by his contemporaries, than is his poetic insight. But the
capital merit of Wordsworth is, that he has done more for the sanity
of this generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a
crisis, it is said, in his private affairs, he made his election
between assuming and defending some legal rights with the chances of
wealth and a position in the world -- and the inward promptings of
his heavenly genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a
poet, and sat down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain
fare to obey the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his
will, manifested itself in every line to be real. We have poets who
write the poetry of society, of the patrician and conventional
Europe, as Scott and Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer,
write the poetry of vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself
into his place, made no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were
not to be divided. He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin
of Winandermere, and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime
midnights for his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace,
nor Milton, nor Dante. He once for all forsook the styles, and
standards, and modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books
read there, and the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and
Winandermere, and the dim spirits which these haunts harbored. There
was not the least attempt to reconcile these with the spirit of
fashion and selfishness, nor to show with great deference to the
superior judgment of dukes and earls, that although London was the
home for men of great parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations
for such as fate had condemned to the country life; but with a
complete satisfaction, he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and
celebrated his own with the religion of a true priest. Hence the
antagonism which was immediately felt between his poetry and the
spirit of the age, that here not only criticism but conscience and
will were parties; the spirit of literature, and the modes of living,
and the conventional theories of the conduct of life were called in
question on wholly new grounds, not from Platonism, nor from
Christianity, but from the lessons which the country muse taught a
stout pedestrian climbing a mountain, and in following a river from
its parent rill down to the sea. The Cannings and Jeffreys of the
capital, the Court Journals and Literary Gazettes were not well
pleased, and voted the poet a bore. But that which rose in him so
high as to the lips, rose in many others as high as to the heart.
What he said, they were prepared to hear and confirm. The influence
was in the air, and was wafted up and down into lone and into
populous places, resisting the popular taste, modifying opinions
which it did not change, and soon came to be felt in poetry, in
criticism, in plans of life, and at last in legislation. In this
country, it very early found a strong hold, and its effect may be
traced on all the poetry both of England and America.
But notwithstanding all Wordsworth's grand merits, it was a
great pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson's two volumes were coming
out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The
elegance, the wit, and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his
power of language, his metrical skill, his independence on any living
masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and gorgeous,
discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories of parks
and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that he wants
rude truth, he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask and
alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life than
in Lallah Rookh and "the Loves of the Angels." Amid swinging censers
and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain and
frost. Otto of roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical
friend of ours affirms that the vice, which bereaved modern painters
of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended;
to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of in their
religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough:
they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which
agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw
all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors,
and paint for their predecessors' public. It seems as if the same
vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson's compositions are not so much
poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry
old masters. He is not the husband who builds the homestead after
his own necessity, from foundation stone to chimney-top and turret,
but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint stair cases and groined
ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make
our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then
legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary
expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy,
hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare
occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson's beauty is more
grateful than Tennyson's. It is a natural manly grace of a robust
workman. Ben's flowers are not in pots, at a city florist's ranged
on a flower stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home,
attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and
apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck with
boughs of hemlock and sweet briar, with ferns and pond lilies which
the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our
benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then?
It is long since we have as good a lyrist; it will be long before we
have his superior. "Godiva" is a noble poem that will tell the
legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present
age, for which we predict the longest term, is "Abou ben Adhem" of
Leigh Hunt. Fortune will still have her part in every victory, and
it is strange that one of the best poems should be written by a man
who has hardly written any other. And "Godiva" is a parable which
belongs to the same gospel. "Locksley Hall" and "the Two Voices" are
meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read. "The
Talking Oak," though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is
beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. "Ulysses" belongs to a
high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more
cultivated in the next generation. "oEnone" was a sketch of the same
kind. One of the best specimens we have of the class is Wordsworth's
"Laodamia," of which no special merit it can possess equals the total
merit of having selected such a subject in such a spirit.
Next to the poetry the novels, which come to us in every ship
from England, have an importance increased by the immense extension
of their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them to
so many willing thousands. So much novel reading ought not to leave
the readers quite unaffected, and undoubtedly gives some tinge of
romance to the daily life of young merchants and maidens. We have
heard it alleged, with some evidence, that the prominence given to
intellectual power in Bulwer's romances had proved a main stimulus to
mental culture in thousands of young men in England and America. The
effect on manners cannot be less sensible, and we can easily believe
that the behavior of the ball room, and of the hotel has not failed
to draw some addition of dignity and grace from the fair ideals, with
which the imagination of a novelist has filled the heads of the most
imitative class.
We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read
Mr. Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he
has really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant
caricatures. He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with
great energy, and with a courage of experiment which in each instance
had its degree of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those
world-fables which is so agreeable to the human imagination, that it
is found in some form in the language of every country, and is always
reappearing in literature. Many of the details of this novel
preserve a poetic truth. We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic
is natural. It is implied in all superior culture that a complete
man would need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. The eye and
the word are certainly subtler and stronger weapons than either money
or knives. Whoever looked on the hero, would consent to his will,
being certified that his aims were universal, not selfish; and he
would be obeyed as naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For
this reason, children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in
them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true. But
Zanoni pains us, and the author loses our respect, because he
speedily betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the
charm; because the power with which his hero is armed, is a toy,
inasmuch as the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in
the mind; is a power for London; a divine power converted into a
burglar's false key or a highwayman's pistol to rob and kill with.
But Mr. Bulwer's recent stories have given us, who do not read
novels, occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed
to be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that
the obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds; first, the
novels _of costume_ or _of circumstance_, which is the old style, and
vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any
particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is
greatly in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and
the business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the
problem to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the
Porter novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and
Scott romances.
It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales
will so take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old
foolish trap; -- then, as before, to feel indignant to have been
duped and dragged after a foolish boy and girl, to see them at last
married and portioned, and the reader instantly turned out of doors,
like a beggar that has followed a gay procession into a castle. Had
one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect, one
sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the reader had
been made a participator of their triumph; he too had been an invited
and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is property,
all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and for
none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude and
insulting to all but the minion.
Excepting in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent
knew how to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the
novels of costume are all one, and there is but one standard English
novel, like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is
repeated every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which Wilhelm Meister is the best
specimen, the novel _of character_, treats the reader with more
respect; a castle and a wife are not the indispensable conclusion,
but the development of character being the problem, the reader is
made a partaker of the whole prosperity. Every thing good in such a
story remains with the reader, when the book is closed.
A noble book was Wilhelm Meister. It gave the hint of a
cultivated society which we found nowhere else. It was founded on
power to do what was necessary, each person finding it an
indispensable qualification of membership, that he could do something
useful, as in mechanics or agriculture or other indispensable art;
then a probity, a justice, was to be its element, symbolized by the
insisting that each property should be cleared of privilege, and
should pay its full tax to the State. Then, a perception of beauty
was the equally indispensable element of the association, by which
each was so dignified and all were so dignified; then each was to
obey his genius to the length of abandonment. They watched each
candidate vigilantly, without his knowing that he was observed, and
when he had given proof that he was a faithful man, then all doors,
all houses, all relations were open to him; high behavior fraternized
with high behavior, without question of heraldry and the only power
recognised is the force of character.
The novels of Fashion of D'Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong
to the class of novels of costume, because the aim is a purely
external success.
Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable and
the most efficient, was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are
the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with no
tithe of Byron's genius, rules longer. One can distinguish at sight
the Vivians in all companies. They would quiz their father, and
mother, and lover, and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty
and fate, love and death, over the soup. They never sleep, go
nowhere, stay nowhere, eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to
anything, though it were the Genesis of nature, or the last
Cataclasm, -- Festus-like, Faust-like, Jove-like; and could write an
Iliad any rainy morning, if fame were not such a bore. Men, women,
though the greatest and fairest, are stupid things; but a rifle, and
a mild pleasant gunpowder, a spaniel, and a cheroot, are themes for
Olympus. I fear it was in part the influence of such pictures on
living society, which made the style of manners, of which we have so
many pictures, as for example, in the following account of the
English fashionist. "His highest triumph is to appear with the most
wooden manners, as little polished as will suffice to avoid
castigation, nay, to contrive even his civilities, so that they may
appear as near as may be to affronts; instead of a noble high-bred
ease, to have the courage to offend against every restraint of
decorum, to invert the relation in which our sex stand to women, so
that they appear the attacking, and he the passive or defensive
party."
We must here check our gossip in mid volley, and adjourn the
rest of our critical chapter to a more convenient season.
_The Bible in Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures, and
Imprisonments of an Englishman in an attempt to circulate the
Scriptures in the Peninsula_.
By GEORGE BORROW. Author of "The Gipsies in Spain.
"This is a charming book, full of free breezes, and mountain
torrents, and pictures of romantic interest. Mr. Borrow is a
self-sufficing man of free nature, his mind is always in the fresh
air; he is not unworthy to climb the sierras and rest beneath the
cork trees where we have so often enjoyed the company of Don Quixote.
And he has the merit, almost miraculous to-day, of leaving us almost
always to draw our own inferences from what he gives us. We can
wander on in peace, secure against being forced back upon ourselves,
or forced sideways to himself. It is as good to read through this
book of pictures, as to stay in a house hung with Gobelin tapestry.
The Gipsies are introduced here with even more spirit than in his
other book. He sketches men and nature with the same bold and clear,
though careless touch. Cape Finisterre and the entrance into
Gallicia are as good parts as any to look at.
_Paracelsus_
Mr. Browning was known to us before, by a little book called
"Pippa Passes," full of bold openings, motley with talent like this,
and rich in touches of personal experience. A version of the thought
of the day so much less penetrating than Faust and Festus cannot
detain us long; yet we are pleased to see each man in his kind
bearing witness, that neither sight nor thought will enable to attain
that golden crown which is the reward of life, of profound
experiences and gradual processes, the golden crown of wisdom. The
artist nature is painted with great vigor in Aprile. The author has
come nearer that, than to the philosophic nature. There is music in
the love of Festus for his friend, especially in the last scene, the
thought of his taking sides with him against the divine judgment is
true as poesy.
_Past and Present_
By Thomas Carlyle.
Here is Carlyle's new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to
follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French
Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since
Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. It
grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and
disposes them with a master's mind, -- and with a heart full of manly
tenderness, offers his best counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is
the book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, who has looked with
naked eyes at the dreadful political signs in England for the last
few years, has conversed much on these topics with such wise men of
all ranks and parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until such
daily and nightly meditation has grown into a great connexion, if not
a system of thoughts, and the topic of English politics becomes the
best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended
to him by the desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the
worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book,
and not a semblance. "No new truth," say the critics on all sides.
Is it so? truth is very old; but the merit of seers is not to invent,
but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander
who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but
throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger
and juster totality than any other. The book makes great approaches
to true contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds
up to daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and
European system. It is such an appeal to the conscience and honor of
England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be forgotten. It
has the merit which belongs to every honest book, that it was
self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits all other men,
and, as the country people say of good preaching, "comes bounce down
into every pew." Every reader shall carry away something. The
scholar shall read and write, the farmer and mechanic shall toil with
new resolution, nor forget the book when they resume their labor.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer
in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of
the times not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good
bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and
the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its
great value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the
topics, we are struck with the force given to the plain truths; the
picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted, the poor
enchanted so they cannot work, the rich enchanted so that they cannot
enjoy, and are rich in vain; the exposure of the progress of fraud
into all arts and social activities; the proposition, that the
laborer must have a greater share in his earnings; that the principle
of permanence shall be admitted into all contracts of mutual service;
that the state shall provide at least school-master's education for
all the citizens; the exhortation to the workman, that he shall
respect the work and not the wages; to the scholar, that he shall be
there for light; to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture
of Abbot Samson, the true governor, who "is not there to expect
reason and nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own
reason and nobleness;" and the assumption throughout the book, that a
new chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labor is replacing
the old nobilities. These things strike us with a force, which
reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters, and
of no modern book. Truly in these things there is great reward. It
is not by sitting still at a grand distance, and calling the human
race _larvae_, that men are to be helped, nor by helping the depraved
after their own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly the
particular work we were born to do. Let no man think himself
absolved because he does a generous action and befriends the poor,
but let him see whether he so holds his property that a benefit goes
from it to all. A man's diet should be what is simplest and readiest
to be had, because it is so private a good. His house should be
better, because that is for the use of hundreds, perhaps of
thousands, and is the property of the traveler. But his speech is a
perpetual and public instrument; let that always side with the race,
and yield neither a lie nor a sneer. His manners, -- let them be
hospitable and civilizing, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have
taught anything better in canvass or stone; and his acts should be
representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in his
having and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men for
his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the problem,
and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The task is
superhuman; and the poet knows well, that a little time will do more
than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of
opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges
without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of
the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is
unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if
he will; but to bring out the truth for beauty and as literature,
surmounts the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day
will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The
historian of to-day is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend
into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence
that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must
stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous, that the
sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher than
literary inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of
character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take his
reputation in his hand, and should descend into the ring, and he has
added to his love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To atone
for this departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal
duties, to this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that
here is a message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose
but hear. Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that
whether by hope or by fear, or were it only by delight in this
panorama of brilliant images, all the great classes of English
society must read, even those whose existence it proscribes. Poor
Queen Victoria, -- poor Sir Robert Peel, -- poor Primate and Bishops,
-- poor Dukes and Lords! there is no help in place or pride, or in
looking another way; a grain of wit is more penetrating than the
lightning of the night-storm, which no curtains or shutters will keep
out. Here is a book which will be read, no thanks to anybody but
itself. What pains, what hopes, what vows, shall come of the
reading! Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of
meat, and every lordship and worship and high form and ceremony of
English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the air, and kept
in the air with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is
punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal; and yet
these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming sword of
Cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon, and shows
to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all
for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy,
by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservatism, and
impressing the reader with the conviction, that the satirist himself
has the truest love for everything old and excellent in English land
and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in
those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault
of this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent
displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the
wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection
which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the
picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In
this work, as in his former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick
giant. His humors, are expressed with so much force of constitution,
that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the
sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone
wearies whilst it stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduction
from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but
everything is seen in lurid stormlights. Every object attitudinizes,
to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refractions of this
wonderful humorist, and instead of the common earth and sky, we have
a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived
which requires a _deus ex machina_. One can hardly credit, whilst
under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same
bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us, -- as of a failed world
just recollecting its old withered forces to begin again and try and
do a little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to
write a book of wit and imagination on English politics that a
certain local emphasis and of effect, such as is the vice of
preaching, should appear, producing on the reader a feeling of
forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But
the splendor of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always
shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its
own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its
superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you should
ask the contemporary, he would tell you with pride or with regret
(according as he was practical or poetic) that it had none. But
after a short time, down go its follies and weakness, and the memory
of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the
poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight
clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and color. The
revelation of Reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of
humanity under all its subjective aspects, that to the cowering it
always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients
are only venerable to us, because distance has destroyed what was
trivial; as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we
cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces, and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
dangers of the English state, may easily excuse some over-coloring of
the picture, and we at this distance are not so far removed from any
of the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to
share the gloom, and thank the love and the courage of the
counsellor. This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more
excellent in this, as in all Mr. Carlyle's works, than the attitude
of the writer. He has the dignity of a man of letters who knows what
belongs to him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of
the great line of scholars, and sustains their office in the highest
credit and honor. If the good heaven have any word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its
occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let
who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that
gracious Infinite which embosoms us. As a literary artist, he has
great merits, beginning with the main one, that he never wrote one
dull line. How well read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one
art of writing; with his expedient for expressing those unproven
opinions, which he entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one
of his men of straw from the cell, and the respectable Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrock, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveller says what is put
into his mouth and disappears. That morbid temperament has given his
rhetoric a somewhat bloated character, a luxury to many imaginative
and learned persons, like a showery south wind with its sunbursts and
rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its
offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish
some concession were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it
must not be forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of
tunes with a whiplash like some renowned charioteers, -- in all this
glad and needful vending of his redundant spirits, -- he does yet
ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the
crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone
the very word, and then with new glee returns to his game. He is
like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade,
which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which
it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity
where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in
literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple
ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains.
Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fulness, though deficient
in depth. Carlyle in his strange half mad way, has entered the Field
of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource, which
has no rival in the tourney play of these times; -- the indubitable
champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the
modern system with its infinity of details into style. We have been
civilizing very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New
England and India, New Holland and Oregon, -- and it has not appeared
in literature, -- there has been no analogous expansion and
recomposition in books. Carlyle's style is the first emergence of
all this wealth and labor, with which the world has gone with child
so long. London and Europe tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with
trade-nobility, and east and west Indies for dependencies, and
America, with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been
conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest.
How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over
the continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first
experiment; and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to
so great an achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper,
simpler, but fortunate is he who did it first, though never so
giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit
and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so
like earthquakes, as the laughter of Carlyle. He "shakes with his
mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the genii in the horizon.
These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple,
and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other
particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who
is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the
limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual
melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand
returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once
appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him
henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier
import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation, in
gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next
ages returned the sound.
_Antislavery Poems._
By JOHN PIERPONT. Boston: Oliver Johnson. 1843.
These poems are much the most readable of all the metrical
pieces we have met with on the subject; indeed, it is strange how
little poetry this old outrage of negro slavery has produced.
Cowper's lines in the Task are still the best we have. Mr. Pierpont
has a good deal of talent, and writes very spirited verses, full of
point. He has no continuous meaning which enables him to write a
long and equal poem, but every poem is a series of detached epigrams,
some better, some worse. His taste is not always correct, and from
the boldest flight he shall suddenly alight in very low places.
Neither is the motive of the poem ever very high, so that they seem
to be rather squibs than prophecies or imprecations: but for
political satire, we think the "Word from a Petitioner" very strong,
and the "Gag" the best piece of poetical indignation in America.
_Sonnets and other Poems._
By WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
Boston. 1843. pp. 96.
Mr. Garrison has won his palms in quite other fields than those
of the lyric muse, and he is far more likely to be the subject than
the author of good poems. He is rich enough in the earnestness and
the success of his character to be patient with the very rapid
withering of the poetic garlands he has snatched in passing. Yet
though this volume contains little poetry, both the subjects and the
sentiments will everywhere command respect. That piece in the
volume, which pleased us most, was the address to his first-born
child.
_America -- an Ode; and other Poems._
By N. W. COFFIN. Boston: S. G. SIMPKINS.
Our Maecenas shakes his head very doubtfully at this
well-printed Ode, and only says, "An ode nowadays needs to be
admirable to carry sail at all. Mr. Sprague's Centennial Ode, and
Ode at the Shakspeare Jubilee, are the only American lyrics that we
have prospered in reading, -- if we dare still remember them." Yet he
adds mercifully, "The good verses run like golden brooks through the
dark forests of toil, rippling and musical, and undermine the heavy
banks till they fall in and are borne away. Thirty-five pieces
follow the Ode, of which everything is neat, pretty, harmonious,
tasteful, the sentiment pleasing, manful, if not inspired. If the
poet have nothing else, he has a good ear."
_Poems by_
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. Boston. 1843.
We have already expressed our faith in Mr. Channing's genius,
which in some of the finest and rarest traits of the poet is without
a rival in this country. This little volume has already become a
sign of great hope and encouragement to the lovers of the muse. The
refinement and the sincerity of his mind, not less than the
originality and delicacy of the diction, are not merits to be
suddenly apprehended, but are sure to find a cordial appreciation.
Yet we would willingly invite any lover of poetry to read "The
Earth-Spirit," "Reverence," "The Lover's Song," "Death," and "The
Poet's Hope."
_A Letter_
As we are very liable in common with the letter-writing world,
to fall behindhand in our correspondence, and a little more liable
because, in consequence of our editorial function, we receive more
epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might
clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all and
several who have honored us in verse, or prose, with their
confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall
be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his
speculations on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall
have his own way. To the rail-way, we must say, like the courageous
lord mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming, "Let
it come, in Heaven's name, I am not afraid on 't." Very unlooked for
political and social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It
will require an expansion of the police of the old world. When a
rail-road train shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to
Vienna, from Vienna to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or
thirty miles, at a German customhouse, for examination of property
and passports. But when our correspondent proceeds to
Flying-machines, we have no longer the smallest taper light of
credible information and experience left, and must speak on _a
priori_ grounds. Shortly then, we think the population is not yet
quite fit for them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend
suggests so many inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to
orchards and lone houses, and also to other high fliers, and the
total inadequacy of the present system of defence, that we have not
the heart to break the sleep of the good public by the repetition of
these details. When children come into the library, we put the
inkstand and the watch on the high shelf, until they be a little
older; and nature has set the sun and moon in plain sight and use,
but laid them on the high shelf, where her roystering boys may not in
some mad Saturday afternoon pull them down or burn their fingers.
The sea and the iron road are safer toys for such ungrown people; we
are not yet ripe to be birds.
In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the
Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class, --
what answer? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers,
obviously persons of sincerity and of elegance, should be
dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company. They
have exhausted all its benefit, and will not bear it much longer.
Excellent reasons they have shown why something better should be
tried. They want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they
may hear now and then a reasonable word. They are willing to work,
so it be with friends. They do not entertain anything absurd or even
difficult. They do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor
to break with society. They do not wish a township, or any large
expenditure, or incorporated association, but simply a concentration
of chosen people. By the slightest possible concert persevered in
through four or five years, they think that a neighborhood might be
formed of friends who would provoke each other to the best activity.
They believe that this society would fill up the terrific chasm
of ennui, and would give their genius that inspiration which it seems
to wait in vain. But `the selfishness!' One of the writers
relentingly says, What shall my uncles and aunts do without me? and
desires to be distinctly understood not to propose the Indian mode of
giving decrepit relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they
can swallow, and more, but to begin the enterprise of concentration,
by concentrating all uncles and aunts in one delightful village by
themselves! -- so heedless is our correspondent of putting all the
dough into one pan, and all the leaven into another. Another
objection seems to have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is
it, he writes, a too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life, --
with life, which is better accepted than calculated? Perhaps so; but
let us not be too curiously good; the Buddhist is a practical
Necessitarian; the Yankee is not. We do a good many selfish things
every day; among them all let us do one thing of enlightened
selfishness. It were fit to forbid concert and calculation in this
particular, if that were our system, if we were up to the mark of
self-denial and faith in our general activity. But to be prudent in
all the particulars of life, and in this one thing alone religiously
forbearing; prudent to secure to ourselves an injurious society,
temptations to folly and despair, degrading examples and enemies; and
only abstinent when it is proposed to provide ourselves with guides,
examples, lovers!---
We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by which
we would too gladly be persuaded. The more discontent, the better we
like it. It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people
are busied with these projects of a better social state, and that
sincere persons of all parties are demanding somewhat vital and
poetic of our stagnant society. How fantastic and unpresentable
soever the theory has hitherto seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the
examination of practical men, let us not lose the warning of that
most significant dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of
larger natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that a
voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be
unjust not to remind our younger friends that, whilst this aspiration
has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous
individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied
along with the satisfaction of other aims. To live solitary and
unexpressed, is painful, -- painful in proportion to one's
consciousness of ripeness and equality to the offices of friendship.
But herein we are never quite forsaken by the Divine Providence. The
loneliest man after twenty years discovers that he stood in a circle
of friends, who will then show like a close fraternity held by some
masonic tie. But we are impatient of the tedious introductions of
Destiny, and a little faithless, and would venture something to
accelerate them. One thing is plain, that discontent and the luxury
of tears will bring nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles
and aesthetic villages are not a very self-helping class of
productions, but are the voices of debility. Especially to one
importunate correspondent we must say, that there is no chance for
the aesthetic village. Every one of the villagers has committed his
several blunder; his genius was good, his stars consenting, but he
was a marplot. And though the recuperative force in every man may be
relied on infinitely, it must be relied on, before it will exert
itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the present error, the
after-nature does not betray its resources. Whilst he dwells in the
old sin, he will pay the old fine.
More letters we have on the subject of the position of young
men, which accord well enough with what we see and hear. There is an
American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls on
young men in this country, as soon as they have finished their
college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves
them of animal spirits, so that the noblest youths are in a few years
converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions.
They are in the state of the young Persians, when "that mighty Yezdam
prophet" addressed them and said, "Behold the signs of evil days are
come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor any
self-devotion left among the Iranis." As soon as they have arrived at
this term, there are no employments to satisfy them, they are
educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it.
Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism of these
things, which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and
widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at
large. From this cause, companies of the best educated young men in
the Atlantic states every week take their departure for Europe; for
no business that they have in that country, but simply because they
shall so be hid from the reproachful eyes of their countrymen, and
agreeably entertained for one or two years, with some lurking hope,
no doubt, that something may turn up to give them a decided
direction. It is easy to see that this is only a postponement of
their proper work, with the additional disadvantage of a two years'
vacation. Add that this class is rapidly increasing by the
infatuation of the active class, who, whilst they regard these young
Athenians with suspicion and dislike, educate their own children in
the same courses, and use all possible endeavors to secure to them
the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described
by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite new and
peculiar, though we should not know where to find in literature any
record of so much unbalanced intellectuality; such undeniable
apprehension without talent, so much power without equal
applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt's
(* 1) account of Frederic Holderlin's "Hyperion," we were not a
little struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany,
whose tone is still so familiar, that we were somewhat mortified to
find that it was written in 1799.
(* 1) Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart. 1842. p. 86.
"Then came I to the Germans. I cannot conceive of a people
more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you shall see, but no
man; priests, but no man; thinkers, but no man. Is it not like some
battlefield, where hands and arms and all members lie scattered
about, whilst the life-blood runs away into the sand? Let every man
mind his own, you say, and I say the same. Only let him mind it with
all his heart, and not with this cold study, literally,
hypocritically to appear that which he passes for, but in good
earnest, and in all love, let him be that which he is; then there is
a soul in his deed. And is he driven into a circumstance where the
spirit must not live, let him thrust it from him with scorn, and
learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy which is not
desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among this people.
It is heartrending to see your poet, your artist, and all who still
revere genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The Good! They
live in the world as strangers in their own house; they are like the
patient Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar at his own
door, whilst shameless rioters shouted in the hall and ask, who
brought the raggamuffin here? Full of love, talent and hope, spring
up the darlings of the muse among the Germans; come seven years
later, and they flit about like ghosts, cold and silent; they are
like a soil which an enemy has sown with poison, that it will not
bear a blade of grass. On earth all is imperfect! is the old proverb
of the German. Aye, but if one should say to these Godforsaken, that
with them all is imperfect, only because they leave nothing pure
which they do not pollute, nothing holy which they do not defile with
their fumbling hands; that with them nothing prospers; because the
godlike nature which is the root of all prosperity, they do not
revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow and anxious and full
of discord, because they despise genius, which brings power and
nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endurance, and love
and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a people honors genius
in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere a universal soul,
to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-conceit, -- all
hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes. The home
of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger gladly
abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed, the
sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the
earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it;
drunkenness comes with disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue
and with the anxiety for a livelihood, the blessing of every year
becomes a curse, and all the gods depart."
The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the academic
class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more violent, that
whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea, our culture is
the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the desperation of our
contemporaries, least of all should we think a preternatural
enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A new perception, the
smallest new activity given to the perceptive power, is a victory won
to the living universe from chaos and old night, and cheaply bought
by any amounts of hard-fare and false social position. The balance
of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is
the real distemper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people
were supposed to suffer from too much wit, or as men said, from a
blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not wit
enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle and must go
to work, and that the times must be worse before they are better. It
is very certain, that speculation is no succedaneum for life. What
we would know, we must do. As if any taste or imagination could take
the place of fidelity! The old Duty is the old God. And we may come
to this by the rudest teaching. A friend of ours went five years ago
to Illinois to buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds of
emigrants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and long
intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five years he has
just been to visit the young farmer and see how he prospered, and
reports that a miracle has been wrought. From Massachusetts to
Illinois, the land is fenced in and builded over, almost like New
England itself, and the proofs of thrifty cultivation everywhere
abound; -- a result not so much owing to the natural increase of
population, as to the hard times, which, driving men out of cities
and trade, forced them to take off their coats and go to work on the
land, which has rewarded them not only with wheat but with habits of
labor. Perhaps the adversities of our commerce have not yet been
pushed to the wholesomest degree of severity. Apathies and total
want of work and reflection on the imaginative character of American
life, &c. &c., are like seasickness, which never will obtain any
sympathy, if there is a woodpile in the yard, or an unweeded patch in
the garden; not to mention the graver absurdity of a youth of noble
aims, who can find no field for his energies, whilst the colossal
wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain
unmitigated, and the religious, civil, and judicial forms of the
country are confessedly effete and offensive. We must refer our
clients back to themselves, believing that every man knows in his
heart the cure for the disease he so ostentatiously bewails.
As far as our correspondents have entangled their private
griefs with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them to
disengage themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge orations, and
elsewhere, there is much inquiry for that great absentee American
Literature. What can have become of it? The least said is best. A
literature is no man's private concern, but a secular and generic
result, and is the affair of a power which works by a prodigality of
life and force very dismaying to behold, -- the race never dying, the
individual never spared, and every trait of beauty purchased by
hecatombs of private tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of
nature is never forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption,
many of despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great
and fortunate life, which they each predicted, can shoot up into a
thrifty and beneficent existence.
But passing to a letter which is a generous and a just tribute
to Bettina von Arnim, we have it in our power to furnish our
correspondent and all sympathizing readers with a sketch, (* 2)
though plainly from no very friendly hand, of the new work of that
eminent lady, who in the silence of Tieck and Schelling, seems to
hold a monopoly of genius in Germany.
(* 2) We translate the following extract from the Berlin
Correspondence of the Deutsche Schnellpost of September.
"At last has the long expected work of the Frau von Arnim here
appeared. It is true her name is not prefixed; more properly is the
dedication, _This Book belongs to the King_, also the title; but
partly because her genius shines so unmistakeably out of every line,
partly because this work refers so directly to her earlier writings,
and appears only as an enlargement of them, none can doubt who the
author is. We know not how we should characterize to the reader this
most original work. Bettina, or we should say, the Frau von Arnim,
exhibits her eccentric wisdom under the person of Goethe's Mother,
the Frau Rath, whilst she herself is still a child, who, (1807) sits
upon `the shawl' at the foot of the Frau Rath, and listens devoutly
to the gifted mother of the great poet. Moreover, Bettina does not
conceal that she solely, or at any rate principally, propounds _her_
views from the Frau Rath. And in fact, it could not be otherwise,
since we come to hear the newest philosophical wisdom which makes a
strange enough figure in the mouth of Goethe's mother. If we mistake
not, the intimate intercourse with Bruno Bauer is also an essential
impulse for Frau von Arnim, and we must not therefore wonder if the
Frau Rath loses her way in pure philosophical hypotheses, wherein she
avails herself of the known phrases of the school. It is true, she
quickly recovers herself again, clothes her perceptions in poetical
garb, mounts bravely to the boldest visions, or, (and this oftenest
happens,) becomes a humorist, spices her discourses in Frankfort
dialect by idiomatic expressions, and hits off in her merriest humors
capital sketches. For the most part, the whole humoristic dress
seems only assumed in order to make the matter, which is in the last
degree radical, less injurious. As to the object of these `sayings
and narratives reported from memory' of the Frau Rath, (since she
leads the conversation throughout,) our sketch must be short. `It is
Freedom which constitutes the truest being' of man. Man should be
free from all traditions, from all prejudices, since every holding on
somewhat traditional, is unbelief, spiritual selfmurder. The God's
impulse to truth is the only right belief. Man himself should handle
and prove, `since whoever reflects on a matter, has always a better
right to truth, than who lets himself be slapped on the cheek by an
article-of-Faith.' By Sin she understands that which derogates from
the soul, since every hindrance and constraint interrupts the
Becoming of the soul. In general, art and science have only the
destination to make free what is bound. But the human spirit can
rule all, and, in that sense, `man is God, only we are not arrived so
far as to describe the true pure Man in us.' If, in the department
of religion, this principle leads to the overthrow of the whole
historical Christendom, so, in the political world, it leads to the
ruin of all our actual governments. Therefore she wishes for a
strong reformer, as Napoleon promised for a time to be, who, however,
already in 1807, when these conversations are ascribed to the Frau
Rath, had shown that instead of a world's liberator, he would be a
world's oppressor. Bettina makes variations on the verse, `and wake
an avenger, a hero awake!' and in this sense is also her dedication
to read. It were noble if a stronger one should come, who in more
beautiful moderation, in perfecter clearness of soul and freedom of
thought, should plant the tree of equity. Where remains the Regent,
if it is not the genius of humanity? that is the Executive principle,
in her system. The state has the same will, the same
conscience-voice for good and evil as the Christ; yet it crumbles
itself away into dogmaticalness of civil officers against one
another. The transgressor is the state's own transgression! the
proof that it, as man, has trespassed against humanity. The old
state's doctors, who excite it to a will, are also its disease. But
they who do not agree in this will, and cannot struggle through
soul-narrowing relations, are the demagogues, against whom the
unsound state trespasses, so long as it knows not how to bring their
sound strength into harmony. And precisely to those must it dedicate
itself, since they are its integration and restoration, whilst the
others who conform to it, make it more sunken and stagnant. If it be
objected, that this her truth is only a poetic dream which in the
actual world has no place, she answers; `even were the truth a dream,
it is not therefore to be denied; let us dedicate our genius to this
dream, let us form an Ideal Paradise, which the spiritual system of
Nature requires at our hands.' `Is the whole fabric of state, she
asks, only a worse arranged hospital, where the selfish or the
ambitious would fasten on the poor human race the foolish fantastic
malversations of their roguery for beneficent co;auoperation? and
with it the political economy, so destitute of all genius to bind the
useful with the beautiful, on which these state's doctors plume
themselves so much, and so with their triviality exhibit as a pattern
to us, a wretched picture of ignorance, of selfishness, and of
iniquity; when I come on that, I feel my veins swell with wrath. If
I come on the belied nature, or how should I call this spectre of
actuality! Yea justly! No! with these men armed in mail against
every poetic truth, we must not parley; the great fools' conspiracy
of that actuality-spectre defends with mock reasoning its Turkish
states'-conduct, before which certainly the revelation of the Ideal
withdraws into a poetic dream-region.' But whilst the existing state
in itself is merely null, whilst the transgressor against this state
is not incorporated with its authorizations with its directions and
tendencies, so is the transgressor ever the accuser of the state
itself. In general, must the state draw up to itself at least the
lowest class, and not let it sink in mire; and Bettina lets the Frau
Rath make the proposal, instead of shutting up the felon in
penitentiaries, to instruct him in the sciences, as from his native
energies, from his unbroken powers, great performances might be
looked for. But in order also to show practically the truth of her
assertions, that the present state does not fulfil its duties
especially to the poorest class, at the close of the book are
inserted, `Experiences of a young Swiss in Voigtland.' This person
visited the so-called Family-houses, which compose a colony of
extremest poverty. There he went into many chambers, listened to the
history of the life, still oftener to the history of the day, of the
inhabitants; informed himself of their merit and their wants, and
comes to the gloomiest results. The hard reproaches, which were made
against the Overseers of the Poor, appear unhappily only too well
founded. We have hastily sketched, with a few literal quotations,
the contents of this remarkable book of this remarkable woman, and
there remains no space further to elaborate judgment. The highflying
idealism, which the Frau von Arnim cherishes, founders and must
founder against the actuality which, as opposed to her imagination,
she holds for absolute nothing. So reality, with her, always
converts itself to spectres, whilst these dreams are to her the only
reality. In our opinion an energetic thorough experiment for the
realization of her ideas would plunge us in a deeper misery than we
at present have to deplore."
_The Huguenots in France and America_
The Huguenots is a very entertaining book, drawn from excellent
sources, rich in its topics, describing many admirable persons and
events, and supplies an old defect in our popular literature. The
editor's part is performed with great assiduity and conscience. Yet
amidst this enumeration of all the geniuses, and beauties, and
sanctities of France, what has the greatest man in France, at that
period, Michael de Montaigne, done, or left undone, that his name
should be quite omitted?
_The Spanish Student. A Play in Three Acts_.
By H. W. Longfellow.
A pleasing tale, but Cervantes shall speak for us out of _La
Gitanilla_.
"You must know, Preciosa, that as to this name of _Poet_, few
are they who deserve it, -- and I am no _Poet_, but only a lover of
Poesy, so that I have no need to beg or borrow the verses of others.
The verses, I gave you the other day, are mine, and those of to-day
as well; -- but, for all that, I am no poet, neither is it my prayer
to be so."
"Is it then so bad a thing to be a poet?" asked Preciosa.
"Not bad," replied the Page, "but to be a poet and nought else,
I do not hold to be very good. For poetry should be like a precious
jewel, whose owner does not put it on every day, nor show it to the
world at every step; but only when it is fitting, and when there is a
reason for showing it. Poetry is a most lovely damsel; chaste,
modest, and discreet; spirited, but yet retiring, and ever holding
itself within the strictest rule of honor. She is the friend of
Solitude. She finds in the fountains her delight, in the fields her
counsellor, in the trees and flowers enjoyment and repose; and
lastly, she charms and instructs all that approach her."
_The Dream of a Day, and other Poems_.
By JAMES G. PERCIVAL.
New Haven. 1843.
Mr. Percival printed his last book of poems sixteen years ago,
and every school-boy learned to declaim his "Bunker Hill," since
which time, he informs us, his studies have been for the most part
very adverse to poetic inspirations. Yet here we have specimens of
no less than one hundred and fifty different forms of stanza. Such
thorough workmanship in the poetical art is without example or
approach in this country, and deserves all honor. We have imitations
of four of the leading classes of ancient measures, -- the Dactylic,
Iambic, Anapestic, and Trochaic, to say nothing of rarer measures,
now never known out of colleges. Then come songs for national airs,
formed on the rhythm of the music, including Norwegian, German,
Russian, Bohemian, Gaelic, and Welsh, -- Teutonian and Slavonian.
But unhappily this diligence is not without its dangers. It has
prejudiced the creative power,
"And made that art, which was a rage."
Neatness, terseness, objectivity, or at any rate the absence of
subjectivity, characterize these poems. Our bard has not quite so
much fire as we had looked for, grows warm but does not ignite; those
sixteen years of "adverse" studies have had their effect on Pegasus,
who now trots soundly and resolutely on, but forbears rash motions,
and never runs away with us. The old critics of England were hardly
steadier to their triad of "Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer," than our
American magazines to the trinity of "Bryant, Dana, and Percival." A
gentle constellation truly, all of the established religion, having
the good of their country and their species at heart. Percival has
not written anything quite as good on the whole as his two fast
associates, but surpasses them both in labor, in his mimetic skill,
and in his objectiveness. He is the most objective of the American
poets. Bryant has a superb propriety of feeling, has plainly always
been in good society, but his sweet oaten pipe discourses only
pastoral music. Dana has the most established religion, more
sentiment, more reverence, more of England; whilst Mr. Percival is an
upright, soldierly, free-spoken man, very much of a patriot, hates
cant, and does his best.
_The Tragic_
He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the
House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the
surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The
conversation of men is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do
not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is
melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive
war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens surely
to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve. How
slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the
animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain,
retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its
planted fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own thoughts
and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of
memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leaped to
execute, find us, now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow.
And in the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot
afford to let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which
we do not need today, are the reserved fund against the calamity that
may arrive tomorrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have a
more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no
record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart
as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English
mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Aeolian
harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all
spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprizes,
they throw up the game. But whether we, and those who are next to
us, are more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any
right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease,
poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.
What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature?
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an
intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the
belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not
adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the
end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, --
crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, -- and heedless
whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that
lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the
;oEdipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless
commiseration. They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or
to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders, and takes
them up into its terrific system. The same idea makes the paralyzing
terror with which the East Indian mythology haunts the imagination.
The same thought is the predestination of the Turk. And universally
in uneducated and unreflecting persons, on whom too the religious
sentiment exerts little force, we discover traits of the same
superstition; `if you baulk water, you will be drowned the next
time:' `if you count ten stars, you will fall down dead:' `if you
spill the salt;' `if your fork sticks upright in the floor;' `if you
say the Lord's prayer backwards;' -- and so on, a several penalty,
nowise grounded in the nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will.
But this terror of contravening an unascertained and unascertainable
will, cannot coexist with reflection: it disappears with
civilization, and can no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts
after childhood. It is discriminated from the doctrine of
Philosophical Necessity herein: that the last is an Optimism, and
therefore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the
good of all, of which he is a part. But in Destiny, it is not the
good of the whole or the _best will_ that is enacted, but only _one
particular will_. Destiny properly is not a will at all, but an
immense whim; and this is the only ground of terror and despair in
the rational mind, and of tragedy in literature. Hence the antique
tragedy, which was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.
But after the reason and faith have introduced a better public
and private tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed.
There must always remain, however, the hindrance of our private
satisfaction by the laws of the world. The law which establishes
nature and the human race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant
individuals, and this in the particulars of disease, want,
insecurity, and disunion.
But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any
list of particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever,
inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness, and loss of friends, we have
not yet included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and
which does not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous
spirit which haunts the afternoon and the night, idleness and
solitude. A low haggard sprite sits by our side "casting the fashion
of uncertain evils," -- a sinister presentiment, a power of the
imagination to dislocate things orderly and cheerful, and show them
in startling disarray. Hark! what sounds on the night wind, the cry
of Murder in that friendly house: see these marks of stamping feet,
of hidden riot. The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the
glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge, and
mistakes darken the brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly
it is natures not clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but
imperfect characters from which somewhat is hidden that all others
see, who suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move
the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in
events. There are people who have an appetite for grief, pleasure is
not strong enough and they crave pain, mithridatic stomachs which
must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity
can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear
and mis-behold, they suspect and dread. They handle every nettle and
ivy in the hedge, and tread on every snake in the meadow.
"Come bad chance,
And we add to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to advance."
Frankly then it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a
low region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in
the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the
observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer. It looks like an
insupportable load under which earth moans aloud, but analyze it; it
is not I, it is not you, it is always another person who is
tormented. If a man says, lo I suffer, -- it is apparent that he
suffers not, for grief is dumb. It is so distributed as not to
destroy. That which would rend you, falls on tougher textures. That
which seems intolerable reproach or bereavement, does not take from
the accused or bereaved man or woman appetite or sleep. Some men are
above grief, and some below it. Few are capable of love. In
phlegmatic natures calamity is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is
rhetorical. Tragedy must be somewhat which I can respect. A
querulous habit is not tragedy. A panic such as frequently in
ancient or savage nations put a troop or an army to flight without an
enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror of freezing to death that seizes a
man in a winter midnight on the moors; a fright at uncertain sounds
heard by a family at night in the cellar or on the stairs; are
terrors that make the knees knock and the teeth chatter, but are no
tragedy, any more than sea-sickness, which may also destroy life. It
is full of illusion. As it comes, it has its support. The most
exposed classes, soldiers, sailors, paupers, are nowise destitute of
animal spirits. The spirit is true to itself, and finds its own
support in any condition, learns to live in what is called calamity,
as easily as in what is called felicity, as the frailest glass-bell
will support a weight of a thousand pounds of water at the bottom of
a river or sea, if filled with the same.
A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but should
keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands, rarely giving
way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It is observed that the
earliest works of the art of sculpture are countenances of sublime
tranquillity. The Egyptian sphinxes, which sit today as they sat
when the Greek came and saw them and departed, and when the Roman
came and saw them and departed, and as they will still sit when the
Turk, the Frenchman, and the Englishman, who visit them now, shall
have passed by, "with their stony eyes fixed on the East and on the
Nile," have countenances expressive of complacency and repose, an
expression of health, deserving their longevity, and verifying the
primeval sentence of history on the permanency of that people; "Their
strength is to sit still." To this architectural stability of the
human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty, without
disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no violence of mirth, or
wrath, or suffering. This was true to human nature. For, in life,
actions are few, opinions even few, prayers few; loves, hatreds, or
any emissions of the soul. All that life demands of us through the
greater part of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes
and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love,
and the genius of our life. There is a fire in some men which
demands an outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience
of quiet by an irregular Catalinarian gait; by irregular, faltering,
disturbed speech, too emphatic for the occasion. They treat trifles
with a tragic air. This is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod
or two of stone wall, and work off this superabundant irritability.
When two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of the
other is, that the aspect should show a firm mind, ready for any
event of good or ill, prepared alike to give death or to give life,
as the emergency of the next moment may require. We must walk as
guests in nature, -- not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. A man
should try time, and his face should wear the expression of a just
judge, who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing and even
hopes nothing, but who puts nature and fortune on their merits: he
will hear the case out, and then decide. For all melancholy, as all
passion, belongs to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded
in the divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils of
affection to society, -- mayhap to what is best and greatest in it,
and in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift and not
moored; but let any shock take place in society, any revolution of
custom, of law, of opinion, and at once his type of permanence is
shaken. The disorder of his neighbors appears to him universal
disorder; chaos is come again. But in truth he was already a driving
wreck, before the wind arose which only revealed to him his vagabond
state. If a man is centred, men and events appear to him a fair
image or reflection of that which he knoweth beforehand in himself.
If any perversity or profligacy break out in society, he will join
with others to avert the mischief, but it will not arouse resentment
or fear, because he discerns its impassable limits. He sees already
in the ebullition of sin, the simultaneous redress.
Particular reliefs, also, fit themselves to human calamities,
for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of
exaggeration. Time, the consoler, time, the rich carrier of all
changes, dries the freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new
costumes, new roads, on our eye, new voices on our ear. As the west
wind lifts up again the heads of the wheat which were bent down and
lodged in the storm, and combs out the matted and dishevelled grass
as it lay in night-locks on the ground, so we let in time as a drying
wind into the seed-field of thoughts which are dank and wet, and
low-bent. Time restores to them temper and elasticity. How fast we
forget the blow that threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit
still; the faculties will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new
affections twine, and the broken is whole again.
Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression of pain.
Nature proportions her defence to the assault. Our human being is
wonderfully plastic, if it cannot win this satisfaction here, it
makes itself amends by running out there and winning that. It is
like a stream of water, which, if dammed up on one bank, over-runs
the other, and flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or
mud, or marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is
torture: the patient has his own compensations. A tender American
girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of "the
middle passage:" and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to such
as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse and
barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than
the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the stench of
the hold. They have gratifications which would be none to the
civilized girl. The market-man never damned the lady because she had
not paid her bill, but the stout Irish woman has to take that once a
month. She, however, never feels weakness in her back because of the
slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen in
disease. "It is my duty," says Sir Charles Bell, "to visit certain
wards of the hospital where there is no patient admitted but with
that complaint which most fills the imagination with the idea of
insupportable pain and certain death. Yet these wards are not the
least remarkable for the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates.
The individual who suffers has a mysterious counterbalance to that
condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to be attended
with no alleviating circumstance." Analogous supplies are made to
those individuals whose character leads them to vast exertions of
body and mind. Napoleon said to one of his friends at St. Helena,
"Nature seems to have calculated that I should have great reverses to
endure, for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble.
Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along. The great
events of my life have slipped over me without making any impression
on my moral or physical nature."
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching, or
putting an interval between a man and his fortune, and so converts
the sufferer into a spectator, and his pain into poetry. It yields
the joys of conversation, of letters, and of science. Hence also the
torments of life become tuneful tragedy, solemn and soft with music,
and garnished with rich dark pictures. But higher still than the
activities of art, the intellect in its purity, and the moral sense
in its purity, are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish
us into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot
rise.
.