CONDUCT OF THE WAR.
Such is the condition of that guilty town, nearest of all Chinese towns to Hong-Kong, and indissolubly connected with ourselves. From this town it is that the insults to our flag, and the attempts at poisoning, wholesale and retail, have collectively emanated; and all under the original impulse of Yeh. Surely, in speculating on the conduct of the war, either as probable or as reasonable, the old oracular sentence of Cato the Elder and of the Roman senate (Delenda est Carthago) begins to murmur in our ears—not in this stern form, but in some modification, better suited to a merciful religion and to our western civilization. It is a great neglect on the part of somebody, that we have no account of the baker's trial at Hong-Kong. He was acquitted, it seems; but upon what ground? Some journals told us that he represented Yeh as coercing him into this vile attempt, through his natural affection for his family, alleged to be in Yeh's power at Canton. Such a fact, if true, would furnish some doubtful palliation of the baker's crime, and might have weight allowed in the sentence; but surely it would place a most dangerous power in the hands of Chinese grandees, if, through the leverage of families within their grasp, and by official connivance on our part, they could reach and govern a set of agents in Hong-Kong. No sympathy with our horror of secret murders by poison, under the shelter of household opportunities, must be counted on from the emperor, for he has himself largely encouraged, rewarded, and decorated these claims on his public bounty. The more necessary that such nests of crime as Canton, and such suggestors of crime as Yeh, should be thoroughly disarmed. This could be done, as regards the city, by three changes:—First, by utterly destroying the walls and gates; secondly, by admitting the British to the freest access, and placing their residence in a special quarter, upon the securest footing; thirdly, and as one chief means in that direction, by establishing a police on an English plan, and to some extent English in its composition. As to the cost, it is evident enough that the colonial head-quarters at Hong-Kong must in future keep up a permanent military establishment; and since any danger threatening this colony must be kindled and fed chiefly in Canton, why not make this large city, sole focus as it is of all mischief to us, and not a hundred miles distant from the little island, the main barrack of the armed force?
Upon this world's tariff of international connections, what is China in relation to Great Britain? Free is she, or not—free to dissolve her connection with us? Secondly, what is Great Britain, when commercially appraised, in relation to China? Is she of great value or slight value to China? First, then, concerning China, viewed in its connection with ourselves, this vast (but perhaps not proportionably populous) country offers by accident the same unique advantage for meeting a social hiatus in our British system that is offered by certain southern regions in the American United States for meeting another hiatus within the same British system. Without tea, without cotton, Great Britain, no longer great, would collapse into a very anomalous sort of second-rate power. Without cotton, the main bulwark of our export commerce would depart. And without tea, our daily life would, generally speaking, be as effectually-ruined as bees without a Flora. In both of these cases it happens that the benefit which we receive is unique; that is, not merely ranking foremost upon a scale of similar benefits reaped from other lands—a largest contribution where others might still be large—but standing alone, and in a solitude that we have always reason to regard as alarming. So that, if Georgia, &c., withdrew from Liverpool and Manchester her myriads of cotton bales, palsied would be our commercial supremacy; and, if childish China should refuse her tea (for as to her silk, that is of secondary importance), we must all go supperless to bed: seriously speaking, the social life of England would receive a deadly wound. It is certainly a phenomenon without a parallel in the history of social man—that a great nation, numbering twenty-five millions, after making an allowance on account of those amongst the very poorest of the Irish who do not use tea, should within one hundred years have found themselves able so absolutely to revolutionise their diet, as to substitute for the gross stimulation of ale and wine the most refined, elegant, and intellectual mode of stimulation that human research has succeeded in discovering.[6] But the material basis of this stimulation unhappily we draw from the soil of one sole nation—and that nation (are we ever allowed to forget?) capricious and silly beyond all that human experience could else have suggested as possible. In these circumstances, it was not to be supposed that we should neglect any opening that offered for making ourselves independent of a nation which at all times we had so much reason to distrust as the Chinese. Might not the tea-plant be made to prosper in some district of our Indian Empire? Forty years ago we began to put forth organised botanical efforts for settling that question. Forty years ago, and even earlier, according to my remembrance, Dr Roxburgh—in those days the paramount authority upon oriental botany—threw some energy into this experiment for creating our own nurseries of the tea-plant. But not until our Burmese victories, some thirty years since, and our consequent treaties had put the province of Assam into our power, was, I believe, any serious progress made in this important effort. Mr Fortune has since applied the benefits of his scientific knowledge, and the results of his own great personal exertions in the tea districts of China, to the service of this most important speculation; with what success, I am not able to report. Meantime, it is natural to fear that the very possibility of doubts hanging over the results in an experiment so vitally national, carries with it desponding auguries as to the ultimate issue. Were the prospects in any degree cheerful, it would be felt as a patriotic duty to report at short intervals all solid symptoms of progress made in this enterprise; for it is an enterprise aiming at a triumph far more than scientific—a triumph over a secret purpose of the Chinese, full of anti-social malice and insolence against Great Britain. Of late years, as often as we have accomplished a victory over any insult to our national honour offered or meditated by the Chinese, they have recurred to some old historical tradition (perhaps fabulous, perhaps not), of an emperor, Tartar or Chinese, who, rather than submit to terms of equitable reciprocity in commercial dealings with a foreign nation, or to terms implying an original equality of the two peoples, caused the whole establishments and machinery connected with the particular traffic to be destroyed, and all its living agents to be banished or beheaded. It is certain that, in the contemplation of special contingencies likely to occur between themselves and the British, the high mandarins dallied at intervals with this ancient precedent, and forbore to act upon it, partly under the salutary military panic which has for years been gathering gloomily over their heads, but more imperatively, perhaps, from absolute inability to dispense with the weekly proceeds from the customs, so eminently dependent upon the British shipping. Money, mere weight of dollars, the lovely lunar radiance of silver, this was the spell that moonstruck their mercenary hearts, and kept them for ever see-sawing—
'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.'
Now, upon this—a state of things suspected at times, or perhaps known, but not so established as that it could have been afterwards pleaded in evidence—a very grave question arose, but a question easily settled: had the Chinese a right, under the law of nations, to act upon their malicious caprice? No man, under any way of viewing the case, hesitated in replying, 'No.' China, it was argued, had possessed from the first a clear, undoubted right to dismiss us with our business unaccomplished, re infectâ, if that business were the establishment of a reciprocal traffic. In the initial stage of the relations between the two powers, the field was open to any possible movement in either party; but, according to the course which might be severally pursued on either side, it was possible that one or both should so act as, in the second stage of their dealings, wilfully to forfeit this original liberty of action. Suppose, for instance, that China peremptorily declined all commercial intercourse with Britain, undeniably, it was said, she had the right to do so. But, if she once renounced this right, no matter whether explicitly in words, or silently and implicitly in acts (as if, for example, she looked on tranquilly whilst Great Britain erected elaborate buildings for the safe housing of goods)—in any such case, China wilfully divested herself of all that original right to withdraw from commercial intercourse. She might say Go, or she might say, Come; but she could not first say, Come; and then, revoking this invitation, capriciously say, Go.
To this doctrine, thus limited, no man could reasonably demur. But to some people it has seemed that the limitations themselves are the only unsound part of the argument. It is denied that this original right of refusing a commercial intercourse has any true foundation in the relations of things or persons. Vainly, if any such natural right existed, would that broad basis have been laid providentially for insuring intercourse among nations, which, in fact, we find everywhere dispersed. Such a narrow and selfish distribution of natural gifts, all to one man, or all to one place, has in a first stage of human inter-relations been established, only that men might be hurried forward into a second stage where this false sequestration might be unlocked and dispersed. Concentrated masses, impropriations gathered into a few hands, useless alike to the possessor and to the world, why is it that, by primary arrangements of nature, they have been frozen into vast, inert insulation? Only that the agencies of commerce may thus the more loudly be invoked for thawing and setting them free to the world's use. Whereas, by a diffusive scattering, all motives to large social intercourse would have been neutralised.
It seems clear that the practical liberation and distribution throughout the world of all good gifts meant for the whole household of man, has been confided to the secret sense of a right existing in man for claiming such a distribution as part of his natural inheritance. Many articles of almost inestimable value to man, in relation to his physical well-being (at any rate bearing such a value when substitutional remedies were as yet unknown) such as mercury, Jesuit's bark, through a long period the sole remedy for intermitting fevers, opium, mineral waters, &c., were at one time locally concentred. In such cases, it might often happen, that the medicinal relief to an hospital, to an encampment, to a nation, might depend entirely upon the right to force a commercial intercourse.
Now, on the other hand, having thus noticed the question, what commercial value has China irrevocably for England, next in the reverse question—namely, what commercial value does England bear to China?—I would wish to place this in a new light, by bringing it for the first time into relation to the doctrine of rent. Multitudes in past days, when political economy was a more favoured study, have spoken and written upon the modern doctrine of rent, without apparently perceiving how immediately it bears upon China, and how summarily it shatters an objection constantly made to the value of our annual dealing with that country. First, let me sketch, in the very briefest way, an outline of this modern doctrine. Two men, without communication, and almost simultaneously, in the year 1815, discovered the law of rent. Suddenly it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making machine for a worse, but only for one that possesses the old powers at a less cost, or possesses greater powers, let us suppose, at an equal cost. But, in the natural progress of the bread-making machines, nature herself compels him to pursue the opposite course: he travels from the best machines to the worse. The best land is brought into cultivation first. As population expands, it becomes necessary to take up a second quality of land; then a third quality; and so on for ever. Left to the action of this one law, bread would be constantly growing dearer through a long succession of centuries. Its tendency lies in this direction even now; but this tendency is constantly met, thwarted, and retarded, by a counter-tendency in the general practice of agriculture, which is always slowly improving its own powers—that is, obtaining the same result at a cost slowly decreasing. It follows as a consequence, when closely pursued, that, whilst the products of pure human skill and human machines are constantly, by tendency, growing cheaper, on the other hand, by a counter-tendency, the products of natural machines (as the land, mines, rivers, &c.) are constantly on the ascent. Another consequence is, that the worst of these natural machines gives the price for the whole; whereas, in a conflict between human machines, all the products of the worse would be beaten out of the field by those of the better. It is in dependency upon this law that all those innumerable proposals for cultivating waste-lands, as in the Scottish Highlands, in the Irish bogs, &c., are radically vicious; and, instead of creating plenty, would by their very success impoverish us. For suppose these lands, which inevitably must have been the lowest in the scale (or else why so long neglected?) to be brought into tillage—what follows? Inevitably this: that their products enter the market as the very lowest on the graduated tariff—i. e., as lower than any already cultured. And these it is—namely, the very lowest by the supposition—that must give the price for the whole; so that every number on the scale will rise at once to the level fixed by these lowest soils, so ruinously (though benevolently) taken up into active and efficient life. If you add 20,000 quarters of wheat to the amount already in the market, you seem to have done a service; but, if these 20,000 have been gained at an extra cost of half-a-crown on each quarter, and if these it is that, being from the poorest machines, rule the price, then you have added half-a-crown to every quarter previously in the market.
Meantime, returning to China, it is important to draw attention upon this point. A new demand for any product of land may happen to be not very large, and thus may seem not much to affect the markets, or the interests of those who produce it. But, since the rent doctrine has been developed, it has become clear that a new demand may affect the producers in two separate modes: first, in the ordinary known mode; secondly, by happening to call into activity a lower quality of soil. A very moderate demand, nay, a very small one, added to that previously existing, if it happens not to fall within the powers of those numbers already in culture (as, suppose, 1, 2, 3, 4), must necessarily call out No. 5; and so on.
Now, our case, as regards Chinese land in the tea districts, is far beyond this. Not only has it been large enough to benefit the landholder enormously, by calling out lower qualities of land, which process again has stimulated the counteracting agencies in the more careful and scientific culture of the plant; but also it has been in a positive sense enormous. It might have been large relatively to the power of calling out lower qualities of soil, and yet in itself have been small; but our demand, running up at present to 100,000,000 pounds weight annually, is in all senses enormous. The poorer class of Chinese tea-drinkers use the leaves three times over—i. e., as the basis of three separate tea-makings. Consequently, even upon that single deduction, 60,000,000 of Chinese tea-drinkers count only as 20,000,000 of ours. But I conclude, by repeating that the greatest of the impressions made by ourselves in the China tea districts, has been derived from this—that, whilst the native demand has probably been stationary, ours, moving by continual starts forward, must have stimulated the tea interest by continual descents upon inferior soils.
There is no doubt that the Emperor and all his arrogant courtiers have decupled their incomes from the British stimulation applied to inferior soils, that but for us never would have been called into culture. Not a man amongst them is aware of the advantages which he owes to England. But he soon would be aware of them, if for five years this exotic demand were withdrawn, and the tea-districts resigned to native patronage. Upon reviewing what I have said, not the ignorant and unteachable Chinese only, but some even amongst our own well-informed and reflecting people, will see that they have prodigiously underrated the commercial value of England to China; since, when an Englishman calls for a hundred tons of tea, he does not (as is usually supposed) benefit the Chinese merchant only by giving him the ordinary profit on a ton, repeated for a hundred times, but also infallibly either calls into profitable activity lands lying altogether fallow, or else, under the action of the rent laws, gives a new and secondary value to land already under culture.
Other and greater topics connected with this coming Chinese campaign clamorously call for notice: especially these three:—
First, the pretended literature and meagre civilisation of China—what they are, and with what real effects such masquerading phantoms operate upon the generation with which accidents of commerce have brought us connected.
Secondly, what is the true mode of facing that warfare of kidnapping, garotting, and poisoning, avowed as legitimate subjects of patronage in the practice and in the edicts of the Tartar Government? Two things may be said with painful certainty upon this subject: first, the British Government has signally neglected its duties in this field through a period of about ninety years, and apparently is not aware of any responsibility attaching in such a case to those who wield the functions of supreme power. Hyder Ali, the tiger, and his more ferocious son Tippoo, practised, in the face of all India, the atrocities of Virgil's Mezentius upon their British captives. These men filled the stage of martial history, through nearly forty years of the eighteenth century, with the tortures of the most gallant soldiers on earth, and were never questioned or threatened upon the subject. In this nineteenth century, again, we have seen a Spanish queen and her uncle sharing between them the infamy of putting to death (unjudged and unaccused) British soldiers on the idlest of pretences. Was it then in the power of the British Government to have made a vigorous and effectual intercession? It was; and in various ways they have the same power over the Chinese sovereign (still more over his agents) at present. The other thing which occurs to say is this: that, if we do not interfere, some morning we shall probably all be convulsed with unavailing wrath at a repetition of Mr Stead's tragic end, on a larger scale, and exemplified in persons of more distinguished position.
Finally, it would have remained to notice the vast approaching revolution for the total East that will be quickened by this war, and will be ratified by the broad access to the Orient, soon to be laid open on one plan or other. Then will Christendom first begin to act commensurately on the East: Asia will begin to rise from her ancient prostration, and, without exaggeration, the beginnings of a new earth and new heavens will dawn.
SHAKSPERE'S TEXT.—SUETONIUS UNRAVELLED.
To the Editor of 'Titan'.
Dear Sir,—A year or two ago,[7] I received as a present from a distinguished and literary family in Boston (United States), a small pamphlet (twin sister of that published by Mr Payne Collier) on the text of Shakspere. Somewhere in the United States, as here in England, some unknown critic, at some unknown time, had, from some unknown source, collected and recorded on the margin of one amongst the Folio reprints of Shakspere by Heminge & Condell, such new readings as either his own sagacity had summarily prompted, or calm reflection had recommended, or possibly local tradition in some instances, and histrionic tradition in others, might have preserved amongst the habitués of a particular theatre. In Mr P. Collier's case, if I recollect rightly, it was the First Folio (i. e., by much the best); in this American case, I think it is the Third Folio (about the worst) which had received the corrections. But, however this may be, there are two literary collaborateurs concerned in each of these parallel cases—namely, first, the original collector (possibly author) of the various readings, who lived and died probably within the seventeenth century; and, secondly, the modern editor, who stations himself as a repeating frigate that he may report and pass onwards these marginal variations to us of the nineteenth century.
Cor. for Corrector, is the shorthand designation by which I have distinguished the first; Rep. for Reporter designates the other. My wish and purpose is to extract all such variations of the text as seem to have any claim to preservation, or even, to a momentary consideration. But in justice to myself, and in apology for the hurried way in which the several parts of this little memorandum are brought into any mimicry of order and succession, I think it right to say that my documents are all dispersed into alien and distant quarters; so that I am reduced into dependence upon my own unassisted memory.
[The Tempest. Act I. Scene 1.
'Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation.'
Cor. here substitutes, 'But felt a fever of the mind:' which substitution strikes me as entirely for the worse; 'a fever of the mad' is such a fever as customarily attacks the delirious, and all who have lost the control of their reasoning faculties.
[Ibid.
'O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him; for
He's gentle, and not fearful.'
Upon this the Reporter's remark is, that 'If we take fearful in its common acceptation of timorous, the proposed change renders the passage clearer;' but that, if we take the word fearful in its rarer signification of that which excites terror, 'no alteration is needed.' Certainly: none is needed; for the mistake (as I regard it) of Rep. lies simply in supposing the passive sense of fearful—namely, that which suffers fear—to be the ordinary sense; which now, in the nineteenth century, it is; but was not in the age of Shakspere.
[Macbeth. Scene 7.
'Thus even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.'
Cor. proposes, Returns the ingredients of, &c.; and, after the word returns is placed a comma; which, however, I suppose to be a press oversight, and no element in the correction. Meantime, I see no call for any change whatever. The ordinary use of the word commend, in any advantageous introduction of a stranger by letters, seems here to maintain itself—namely, placing him in such a train towards winning favour as may give a favourable bias to his opportunities. The opportunities are not left to their own casual or neutral action, but are armed and pointed towards a special result by the influence of the recommender. So, also, it is here supposed that amongst several chalices, which might else all have an equal power to conciliate notice, one specially—namely, that which contains the poison—is armed by Providence with a power to bias the choice, and commend itself to the poisoner's favour.
[Ibid.
'His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince.'
Cor. is not happy at this point in his suggestion: tinkers are accused (often calumniously, for tinkers have enemies as well as other people) of insidiously enlarging holes, making simple into compound fractures, and sometimes of planting two holes where they find one. But I have it on the best authority—namely, the authority of three tinkers who were unanimous—that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason' by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came nearest to the seraphic character in one century was a tinker—namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions do cheat at uncertain times, are traitors in a small proportion, must be perfidious, unless they make an odious hypocritical pretension to the character of angels. That tinkers are not alone in their practice of multiplying the blemishes on which their healing art is invoked, seems broadly illustrated by the practice of verbal critics. Those who have applied themselves to the ancient classics, are notorious for their corrupt dealings in this way. And Coleridge founded an argument against the whole body upon the confessedly dreadful failure of Bentley, prince of all the order, when applied to a case where most of us could appreciate the result—namely, to the Paradise Lost. If, said Coleridge, this Bentley could err so extravagantly in a case of mother-English, what must we presume him often to have done in Greek? Here we may see to this day that practice carried to a ruinous extent, which, when charged upon tinkers, I have seen cause to restrict. In the present case from Macbeth, I fear that Cor. is slightly indulging in this tinkering practice. As I view the case, there really is no hole to mend. The old meaning of the word convince is well brought out in the celebrated couplet—
'He, that's convinc'd against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.
How can that be? I have often heard objectors say. Being convinced by his opponent—i. e., convinced that his opponent's view is the right one—how can he retain his own original opinion, which by the supposition is in polar opposition. But this argument rests on a false notion of the sense attached originally to the word convinced. That word was used in the sense of refuted; redargued, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The case supposed was that of a man who is reduced to an absurdity; he cannot deny that, from his own view, an absurdity seems to follow; and, until he has shown that this absurdity is only apparent, he is bound to hold himself provisionally answered. Yet that does not reconcile him to his adversary's opinion; he retains his own, and is satisfied that somewhere an answer to it exists, if only he could discover it.
Here the meaning is, 'I will convince his chamberlains with wine'—i. e., will refute by means of the confusion belonging to the tragedy itself, when aided by intoxication, all the arguments (otherwise plausible) which they might urge in self-defence.
['Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined:'—
This our friend Cor. alters to twice; but for the very reason which should have checked him—namely, on Theobald's suggestion that 'odd numbers are used in enchantments and magical operations;' and here he fancies himself to obtain an odd number by the arithmetical summation—twice added to once makes thrice. Meantime the odd number is already secured by viewing the whines separately, and not as a sum. The hedge-pig whined thrice—that was an odd number. Again he whined, and this time only once—this also was an odd number. Otherwise Cor. is perfectly right in his general doctrine, that
'Numero Deus impare gaudet.'
Nobody ever heard of even numbers in any case of divination. A dog, for instance, howling under a sick person's window, is traditionally ominous of evil—but not if he howls twice, or four times.
['I pull in resolution.'—Act V. Scene 5.
Cor. had very probably not seen Dr Johnson's edition of Shakspere, but in common with the Doctor, under the simple coercion of good sense, he proposes 'I pall;' a restitution which is so self-attested, that it ought fearlessly to be introduced into the text of all editions whatever, let them be as superstitiously scrupulous as in all reason they ought to be.
[Hamlet. Act II. Scene in the Speech of Polonius.
'Good sir, or so, or friend, or gentleman,'
is altered by Cor., and in this case with an effect of solemn humour which justifies itself, into
'Good sir, or sir, or friend, or gentleman;'
meaning good sir, or sir simply without the epithet good, which implies something of familiarity. Polonius, in his superstitious respect for ranks and degrees, provides four forms of address applying to four separate cases: such is the ponderous casuistry which the solemn courtier brings to bear upon the most trivial of cases.
At this point, all at once, we find our sheaf of arrows exhausted: trivial as are the new resources offered for deciphering the hidden meanings of Shakspere, their quality is even less a ground of complaint than their limitation in quantity. In an able paper published by this journal, during the autumn of 1855, upon the new readings offered by Mr Collier's work, I find the writer expressing generally a satisfaction with the condition of Shakspere's text. I feel sorry that I cannot agree with him. To me the text, though improved, and gradually moving round to a higher and more hopeful state of promise, is yet far indeed from the settled state which is desirable. I wish, therefore, as bearing upon all such hopes and prospects, to mention a singular and interesting case of sudden conquest over a difficulty that once had seemed insuperable. For a period of three centuries there had existed an enigma, dark and insoluble as that of the Sphinx, in the text of Suetonius. Isaac Casaubon had vainly besieged it; then, in a mood of revolting arrogance, Joseph Scaliger; Ernesti; Gronovius; many others; and all without a gleam of success.
The passage in Suetonius which so excruciatingly (but so unprofitably) has tormented the wits of such scholars as have sat in judgment upon it through a period of three hundred and fifty years, arises in the tenth section of his Domitian. That prince, it seems, had displayed in his outset considerable promise of moral excellence: in particular, neither rapacity nor cruelty was apparently any feature in his character. Both qualities, however, found a pretty early development in his advancing career, but cruelty the earliest. By way of illustration, Suetonius rehearses a list of distinguished men, clothed with senatorian or even consular rank, whom he had put to death upon allegations the most frivolous: amongst them Aelius Lamia, a nobleman whose wife he had torn from him by open and insulting violence. It may be as well to cite the exact words of Suetonius: 'Aelium Lamiam (interemit) ob suspiciosos quidem, verum et veteres et innoxios jocos; quòd post abductam uxorem laudanti vocem suam—dixerat, Heu taceo; quòdque Tito hortanti se ad alterum matrimonium, responderat μη και συ γαμησαι θελεις;'—that is, Aelius Lamia he put to death on account of certain jests; jests liable to some jealousy, but, on the other hand, of old standing, and that had in fact proved harmless as regarded practical consequences—namely, that to one who praised his voice as a singer he had replied, Heu taceo; and that on another occasion, in reply to the Emperor Titus, when urging him to a second marriage, he had said, 'What now, I suppose you are looking out for a wife?'
The latter jest is intelligible enough, stinging, and witty. As if the young men of the Flavian family could fancy no wives but such as they had won by violence from other men, he affects in a bitter sarcasm to take for granted that Titus, as the first step towards marrying, counselled his friends to marry as the natural means for creating a fund of eligible wives. The primal qualification of any lady as a consort being, in their eyes, that she had been torn away violently from a friend, it became evident that the preliminary step towards a Flavian wedding was, to persuade some incautious friend into marrying, and thus putting himself into a capacity of being robbed. How many ladies that it was infamous for this family to appropriate as wives, so many ladies that in their estimate were eligible in that character. Such, at least in the stinging jest of Lamia, was the Flavian rule of conduct. And his friend Titus, therefore, simply as the brother of Domitian, simply as a Flavian, he affected to regard as indirectly providing a wife, when he urged his friend by marrying to enrol himself as a pillagee elect.
The latter jest, therefore, when once apprehended, speaks broadly and bitingly for itself. But the other—what can it possibly mean? For centuries has that question been reiterated; and hitherto without advancing by one step nearer to solution. Isaac Casaubon, who about 230 years since was the leading oracle in this field of literature, writing an elaborate and continuous commentary upon Suetonius, found himself unable to suggest any real aids for dispersing the thick darkness overhanging the passage. What he says is this:—'Parum satisfaciunt mihi interpretes in explicatione hujus Lamiæ dicti. Nam quod putant Heu taceo suspirium esse ejus—indicem doloris ob abductam uxorem magni sed latentis, nobis non ita videtur; sed notatam potius fuisse tyrannidem principis, qui omnia in suo genere pulchra et excellentia possessoribus eriperet, unde necessitas incumbebat sua bona dissimulandi celandique.' Not at all satisfactory to me are the commentators in the explanation of the dictum (which is here equivalent to dicterium) of Lamia. For, whereas they imagine Heu taceo to be a sigh of his—the record and indication of a sorrow, great though concealed, on behalf of the wife that had been violently torn away from him—me, I confess, that the case does not strike in that light; but rather that a satiric blow was aimed at the despotism of the sovereign prince, who tore away from their possessors all objects whatsoever marked by beauty or distinguished merit in their own peculiar class: whence arose a pressure of necessity for dissembling and hiding their own advantages. 'Sic esse exponendum,' that such is the true interpretation (continues Casaubon), 'docent illa verba [LAUDANTI VOCEM SUAM],' (we are instructed by those words), [to one who praised his singing voice, &c.].
This commentary was obscure enough, and did no honour to the native good sense of Isaac Casaubon, usually so conspicuous. For, whilst proclaiming a settlement, in reality it settled nothing. Naturally, it made but a feeble impression upon the scholars of the day; and not long after the publication of the book, Casaubon received from Joseph Scaliger a friendly but gasconading letter, in which that great scholar brought forward a new reading—namely, ευτακτω, to which he assigned a profound technical value as a musical term. No person even affected to understand Scaliger. Casaubon himself, while treating so celebrated a man with kind and considerate deference, yet frankly owned that, in all his vast reading, he had never met with this strange Greek word. But, without entering into any dispute upon that verbal question, and conceding to Scaliger the word and his own interpretation of the word, no man could understand in what way this new resource was meant to affect the ultimate question at issue—namely, the extrication of the passage from that thick darkness which overshadowed it.
'As you were' (to speak in the phraseology of military drill), was in effect the word of command. All things reverted to their original condition. And two centuries of darkness again enveloped this famous perplexity of Roman literature. The darkness had for a few moments seemed to be unsettling itself in preparation for flight: but immediately it rolled back again; and through seven generations of men this darkness was heavier, because less hopeful than before.
Now then, I believe, all things are ready for the explosion of the catastrophe; 'which catastrophe,' I hear some malicious reader whispering, 'is doubtless destined to glorify himself' (meaning the unworthy writer of this little paper). I cannot deny it. A truth is a truth. And, since no medal, nor riband, nor cross, of any known order, is disposable for the most brilliant successes in dealing with desperate (or what may be called condemned) passages in Pagan literature, mere sloughs of despond that yawn across the pages of many a heathen dog, poet and orator, that I could mention, the more reasonable it is that a large allowance should be served out of boasting and self-glorification to all those whose merits upon this field national governments have neglected to proclaim. The Scaligers, both father and son, I believe, acted upon this doctrine; and drew largely by anticipation upon that reversionary bank which they conceived to be answerable for such drafts. Joseph Scaliger, it strikes me, was drunk when he wrote his letter on the present occasion, and in that way failed to see (what Casaubon saw clearly enough) that he had commenced shouting before he was out of the wood. For my own part, if I go so far as to say that the result promises, in the Frenchman's phrase, to 'cover me with glory,' I beg the reader to remember that the idea of 'covering' is of most variable extent: the glory may envelope one in a voluminous robe—a princely mantle that may require a long suite of train-bearers, or may pinch and vice one's arms into that succinct garment (now superannuated) which some eighty years ago drew its name from the distinguished Whig family in England of Spencer. Anticipating, therefore, that I shall—nay, insisting, and mutinously, if needful, that I will—be covered with glory by the approaching result, I do not contemplate anything beyond that truncated tunic, once known as a 'spencer,' and which is understood to cover only the shoulders and the chest.
Now, then, all being ready, and the arena being cleared of competitors (for I suppose it is fully understood that everybody but myself has retired from the contest), thrice, in fact, has the trumpet sounded, 'Do you give it up?' Some preparations there are to be made in all cases of contest. Meantime, let it be clearly understood what it is that the contest turns upon. Supposing that one had been called, like Œdipus of old, to a turn-up with that venerable girl the Sphinx, most essential it would have been that the clerk of the course (or however you designate the judge, the umpire, &c.) should have read the riddle propounded to Greece: how else judge of the solution? At present the elements of the case to be decided stand thus:—
A Roman noble, a man, in fact, of senatorial rank, has been robbed, robbed with violence, and with cruel scorn, of a lovely young wife, to whom he was most tenderly attached. But by whom? the indignant reader demands. By a younger son[8] of the Roman emperor Vespasian.
For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his own head. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. Patience had been the word; silence, and below all the deep, deep word—wait; and if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word wait would have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian. Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole, therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been resolved that he should die. But previously that he should drink off a final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady herself, again—that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so total a stranger to man and his generations—had she also suffered in sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profoundly on what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning torments, it may have been that the dreadful Cæsar might have found the 'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellowship in exalting the furnace of misery. The lady herself—may we not suppose her at the last to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so nobly released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this followed—that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native nobility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay, inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such public manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the existence of other and nobler agencies in human affairs? Not at all. Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not known, or imperfectly known to them, these they ignore. What it was circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives—namely, that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that his death followed. But what was it that he did say? That is precisely the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present we know, and we do not know, what it was that he said. We have bequeathed to us by history two words—involving eight letters—which in their present form, with submission to certain grandees of classic literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the following five conditions:—First, it must allude to his wife, as one that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice; fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless words—'Heu taceo.'
Here is a monstrous quantity of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters—namely, Oh lord, sir. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of Heu taceo was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:—Let me premise, however, what at any rate the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every school-boy knows that this means a wife-revoking voice. But first let me remark that there is such a legitimate word as Orpheutaceam: and in that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus—Suavem dixisti? Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to recognise in this form our old friend Heu taceo. But here he is to a certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the compositor will show him, up to you as—vellem et Orp. [HEU TACEAM]. Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the seemingly surreptitious AM, though believing the real word to be taceo. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives taceam. Here, then, shines out at once—(1) Eurydice the lovely wife; (2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4) the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous form.
HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH.[10]
Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. Why particularly at this time? Simply, because the interest in that language rests upon two separate foundations: there are two separate principles concerned in its pretensions; and by accident in part, but in part also through the silent and inevitable march of human progress, there has been steadily gathering for many years an interest of something like sceptical and hostile curiosity about each of these principles, considered as problems open to variable solutions, as problems already viewed from different national centres, and as problems also that press forward to some solution or other with more and more of a clamorous emphasis, in proportion as they tend to consequences no longer merely speculative and scholastic, but which more and more reveal features largely practical and political. The two principles upon which the English language rests the burden of its paramount interest, are these:—first, its powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet on which we live might be said to have assembled and opened her first parliament for representing the grandeur of the human intellect. That particular assembly, I mean, for celebrating the Olympic Games about four centuries and a half before the era of Christ, when Herodotus opened the gates of morning for the undying career of history, by reading to the congregated children of Hellas, to the whole representative family of civilisation, that loveliest of earthly narratives, which, in nine musical cantos, unfolded the whole luxury of human romance as at the bar of some austere historic Areopagus, and, inversely again, which crowded the total abstract of human records, sealed[11] as with the seal of Delphi in the luxurious pavilions of human romance.
That most memorable of Panhellenic festivals it was, which first made known to each other the two houses of Grecian blood that typified its ultimate and polar capacities, the most and the least of exorbitations, the utmost that were possible from its equatorial centre; viz., on the one side, the Asiatic Ionian, who spoke the sweet musical dialect of Homer, and, on the other side, the austere Dorian, whom ten centuries could not teach that human life brought with it any pleasure, or any business, or any holiness of duty, other or loftier than that of war. If it were possible that, under the amenities of a Grecian sky, too fierce a memento could whisper itself of torrid zones, under the stern discipline of the Doric Spartan it was that you looked for it; or, on the other hand, if the lute might, at intervals, be heard or fancied warbling too effeminately for the martial European key of the Grecian muses, amidst the sweet blandishments it was of Ionian groves that you arrested the initial elements of such a relaxing modulation. Twenty-five centuries ago, when Europe and Asia met for brotherly participation in the noblest, perhaps,[12] of all recorded solemnities, viz., the inauguration of History in its very earliest and prelusive page, the coronation (as with propriety we may call it) of the earliest (perhaps even yet the greatest?) historic artist, what was the language employed as the instrument of so great a federal act? It was that divine Grecian language to which, on the model of the old differential compromise in favour of Themistocles, all rival languages would cordially have conceded the second honour. If now, which is not impossible, any occasion should arise for a modern congress of the leading nations that represent civilisation, not probably in the Isthmus of Corinth, but on that of Darien, it would be a matter of mere necessity, and so far hardly implying any expression of homage, that the English language should take the station formerly accorded to the Grecian. But I come back to the thesis which I announced, viz., to the twofold onus which the English language is called upon to sustain:—first, to the responsibility attached to its powers; secondly, to the responsibility and weight of expectation attached to its destiny. To the questions growing out of the first, I will presently return. But for the moment, I will address myself to the nature of that Destiny, which is often assigned to the English language: what is it? and how far is it in a fair way of fulfilling this destiny?
As early as the middle of the last century, and by people with as little enthusiasm as David Hume, it had become the subject of plain prudential speculations, in forecasting the choice of a subject, or of the language in which it should reasonably be treated, that the area of expectation for an English writer was prodigiously expanding under the development of our national grandeur, by whatever names of 'colonial' or 'national' it might be varied or disguised. The issue of the American War, and the sudden expansion of the American Union into a mighty nation on a scale corresponding to that of the four great European potentates—Russia, Austria, England, and France—was not in those days suspected. But the tendencies could not be mistaken. And the same issue was fully anticipated, though undoubtedly through the steps of a very much slower process. Whilst disputing about the items on the tess apettiele, the disputed facts were overtaking us, and flying past us, on the most gigantic scale. All things were changing: and the very terms of the problem were themselves changing, and putting on new aspects, in the process and at the moment of enunciation. For instance, it had been sufficiently seen that another Christendom, far more colossal than the old Christendom of Europe, might, and undoubtedly would, form itself rapidly in America. Against the tens of millions in Europe would rise up, like the earth-born children of Deucalion and Pyrrha (or of the Theban Cadmus and Hermione) American millions counted by hundreds. But from what radix? Originally, it would have been regarded as madness to take Ireland, in her Celtic element, as counting for anything. But of late—whether rationally, however, I will inquire for a brief moment or so—the counters have all changed in these estimates. The late Mr O'Connell was the parent of these hyperbolical anticipations. To count his ridiculous 'monster-meetings' by hundreds of thousands, and then at last by millions, cost nobody so much as a blush; and considering the open laughter and merriment with which all O'Connell estimates were accepted and looked at, I must think that the London Standard was more deeply to blame than any other political party, in giving currency and acceptation to the nursery exaggerations of Mr O'Connell. Meantime those follies came to an end. Mr O'Connell died; all was finished: and a new form of mendacity was transferred to America. There has always existed in the United States one remarkable phenomenon of Irish politics applied to the deception of both English, Americans, and Irish. All people who have given any attention to partisanship and American politics, are aware of a rancorous malice burning sullenly amongst a small knot of Irishmen, and applying itself chiefly to the feeding of an interminable feud against England and all things English. This, as it chiefly expresses itself in American journals, naturally passes for the product of American violence; which in reality it is not. And hence it happens, and for many years it has happened, that both Englishmen and Americans are perplexed at intervals by a malice and an acharnement of hatred to England, which reads very much like that atrocious and viperous malignity imputed to the father of Hannibal against the Romans. It is noticeable, both as keeping open a peculiar exasperation of Irish patriotism absurdly directed against England; as doing a very serious injustice to Americans, who are thus misrepresented as the organs of this violence, so exclusively Irish; and, finally, as the origin of the monstrous delusion which I now go on to mention. The pretence of late put forward is, that the preponderant element in the American population is indeed derived from the British Islands, but by a vast overbalance from Ireland, and from the Celtic part of the Irish population. This monstrous delusion has recently received an extravagant sanction from the London Quarterly Review. Half a dozen other concurrent papers, in journals political and literary, hold the same language. And the upshot of the whole is—that, whilst the whole English element (including the earliest colonisation of the New England states at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and including the whole stream of British emigration since the French Revolution) is accredited for no more than three and a half millions out of pretty nearly twenty millions of white American citizens, on the other hand, against this English element, is set up an Irish (meaning a purely Hiberno-Celtic) element, amounting—oh, genius of blushing, whither hast thou fled?—to a total of eight millions. Anglo-Saxon blood, it seems, is in a miserable minority in the United States; whilst the German blood composes, we are told, a respectable nation of five millions; and the Irish-Celtic young noblemen, though somewhat at a loss for shoes, already count as high as eight millions!
Now, if there were any semblance of truth in all this, we should have very good reason indeed to tremble for the future prospects of the English language throughout the Union. Eight millions struggling with three and a half should already have produced some effect on the very composition of Congress. Meantime, against these audacious falsehoods I observe a reasonable paper in the Times (August 23, 1852), rating the Celtic contribution from Ireland—that is, exclusively of all the Ulster contribution—at about two millions; which, however, I view as already an exaggeration, considering the number that have always by preference resorted to the Canadas. Two millions, whom poverty, levity, and utter want of all social or political consideration, have reduced to ciphers the most absolute—two millions, in the very lowest and most abject point of political depression, cannot do much to disturb the weight of the English language: which, accordingly, on another occasion, I will proceed to consider, with and without the aid of the learned Dr Gordon Latham, and sometimes (if he will excuse me) in defiance of that gentleman, though far enough from defiance in any hostile or unfriendly sense.
THE CASUISTRY OF DUELLING.[13]
This mention of Allan Cunningham recalls to my recollection an affair which retains one part of its interest to this day, arising out of the very important casuistical question which it involves. We Protestant nations are in the habit of treating casuistry as a field of speculation, false and baseless per se; nay, we regard it not so much in the light of a visionary and idle speculation, as one positively erroneous in its principles, and mischievous for its practical results. This is due in part to the disproportionate importance which the Church of Rome has always attached to casuistry; making, in fact, this supplementary section of ethics take precedency of its elementary doctrines in their catholic simplicity: as though the plain and broad highway of morality were scarcely ever the safe road, but that every case of human conduct were to be treated as an exception, and never as lying within the universal rule: and thus forcing the simple, honest-minded Christian to travel upon a tortuous by-road, in which he could not advance a step in security without a spiritual guide at his elbow: and, in fact, whenever the hair-splitting casuistry is brought, with all its elaborate machinery, to bear upon the simplicities of household life, and upon the daily intercourse of the world, there it has the effect (and is expressly cherished by the Romish Church with a view to the effect) of raising the spiritual pastor into a sort of importance which corresponds to that of an attorney. The consulting casuist is, in fact, to all intents and purposes, a moral attorney. For, as the plainest man, with the most direct purposes, is yet reasonably afraid to trust himself to his own guidance in any affair connected with questions of law; so also, when taught to believe that an upright intention and good sense are equally insufficient in morals, as they are in law, to keep him from stumbling or from missing his road, he comes to regard a conscience-keeper as being no less indispensable for his daily life and conversation, than his legal agent, or his professional 'man of business,' for the safe management of his property, and for his guidance amongst the innumerable niceties which beset the real and inevitable intricacies of rights and duties, as they grow out of human enactments and a complex condition of society. Fortunately for the happiness of human nature and its dignity, those holier rights and duties which grow out of laws heavenly and divine, written by the finger of God upon the heart of every rational creature, are beset by no such intricacies, and require, therefore, no such vicarious agency for their practical assertion. The primal duties of life, like the primal charities, are placed high above us—legible to every eye, and shining like the stars, with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur. So far, however, the question between us and Rome is a question of degrees. They push casuistry into a general and unlimited application; we, if at all, into a very narrow one. But another difference there is between us even more important; for it regards no mere excess in the quantity of range allowed to casuistry, but in the quality of its speculations: and which it is (more than any other cause) that has degraded the office of casuistical learning amongst us. Questions are raised, problems are entertained, by the Romish casuistry, which too often offend against all purity and manliness of thinking. And that objection occurs forcibly here, which Southey (either in The Quarterly Review or in his Life of Wesley) has urged and expanded with regard to the Romish and also the Methodist practice of auricular confession—viz., that, as it is practically managed, not leaving the person engaged in this act to confess according to the light of his own conscience, but at every moment interfering, on the part of the confessor, to suggest leading questions (as lawyers call them), and to throw the light of confession upon parts of the experience which native modesty would leave in darkness,—so managed, the practice of confession is undoubtedly the most demoralising practice known to any Christian society. Innocent young persons, whose thoughts would never have wandered out upon any impure images or suggestions, have their ingenuity and their curiosity sent roving upon unlawful quests: they are instructed to watch what else would pass undetained in the mind, and would pass unblameably, on the Miltonic principle: ('Evil into the mind of God or man may come unblamed,' &c.) Nay, which is worst of all, unconscious or semi-conscious thoughts and feelings or natural impulses, rising, like a breath of wind under some motion of nature, and again dying away, because not made the subject of artificial review and interpretation, are now brought powerfully under the focal light of the consciousness: and whatsoever is once made the subject of consciousness, can never again have the privilege of gay, careless thoughtlessness—the privilege by which the mind, like the lamps of a mail-coach, moving rapidly through the midnight woods, illuminate, for one instant, the foliage or sleeping umbrage of the thickets; and, in the next instant, have quitted them, to carry their radiance forward upon endless successions of objects. This happy privilege is forfeited for ever, when the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality.
Here, then, are objections sound and deep, to casuistry, as managed in the Romish church. Every possible objection ever made to auricular confession applies with equal strength to casuistry; and some objections, besides these, are peculiar to itself. And yet, after all, these are but objections to casuistry as treated by a particular church. Casuistry in itself—casuistry as a possible, as a most useful, and a most interesting speculation—remains unaffected by any one of these objections; for none applies to the essence of the case, but only to its accidents, or separable adjuncts. Neither is this any curious or subtle observation of little practical value. The fact is as far otherwise as can be imagined—the defect to which I am here pointing, is one of the most clamorous importance. Of what value, let me ask, is Paley's Moral Philosophy? What is its imagined use? Is it that in substance it reveals any new duties, or banishes as false any old ones? No; but because the known and admitted duties—duties recognised in every system of ethics—are here placed (successfully or not) upon new foundations, or brought into relation with new principles not previously perceived to be in any relation whatever. This, in fact, is the very meaning of a theory[14] or contemplation, [Θεωρια,] when A, B, C, old and undisputed facts have their relations to each other developed. It is not, therefore, for any practical benefit in action, so much as for the satisfaction of the understanding, when reflecting on a man's own actions, the wish to see what his conscience or his heart prompts reconciled to general laws of thinking—this is the particular service performed by Paley's Moral Philosophy. It does not so much profess to tell what you are to do, as the why and the wherefore; and, in particular, to show how one rule of action may be reconciled to some other rule of equal authority, but which, apparently, is in hostility to the first. Such, then, is the utmost and highest aim of the Paleyian or the Ciceronian ethics, as they exist. Meantime, the grievous defect to which I have adverted above—a defect equally found in all systems of morality, from the Nichomachéan ethics of Aristotle downwards—is the want of a casuistry, by way of supplement to the main system, and governed by the spirit of the very same laws, which the writer has previously employed in the main body of his work. And the immense superiority of this supplementary section, to the main body of the systems, would appear in this, that the latter I have just been saying, aspires only to guide the reflecting judgment in harmonising the different parts of his own conduct, so as to bring them under the same law; whereas the casuistical section, in the supplement, would seriously undertake to guide the conduct, in many doubtful cases, of action—cases which are so regarded by all thinking persons. Take, for example, the case which so often arises between master and servant, and in so many varieties of form—a case which requires you to decide between some violation of your conscience, on the one hand, as to veracity, by saying something that is not strictly true, as well as by evading (and that is often done) all answer to inquiries which you are unable to meet satisfactorily—a violation of your conscience to this extent, and in this way; or, on the other hand, a still more painful violation of your conscience in consigning deliberately some young woman—faulty, no doubt, and erring, but yet likely to derive a lesson from her own errors, and the risk to which they have exposed her—consigning her, I say, to ruin, by refusing her a character, and thus shutting the door upon all the paths by which she might retrace her steps. This I state as one amongst the many cases of conscience daily occurring in the common business of the world. It would surprise any reader to find how many they are; in fact, a very large volume might be easily collected of such cases as are of ordinary occurrence. Casuistry, the very word casuistry expresses the science which deals with such cases: for as a case, in the declension of a noun, means a falling away, or a deflection from the upright nominative (rectus), so a case in ethics implies some falling off, or deflection from the high road of catholic morality. Now, of all such cases, one, perhaps the most difficult to manage, the most intractable, whether for consistency of thinking as to the theory of morals, or for consistency of action as to the practice of morals, is the case of DUELLING.
As an introduction, I will state my story—the case for the casuist; and then say one word on the reason of the case.
First, let me report the case of a friend—a distinguished lawyer at the English bar. I had the circumstances from himself, which lie in a very small compass; and, as my friend is known, to a proverb almost, for his literal accuracy in all statements of fact, there need be no fear of any mistake as to the main points of the case. He was one day engaged in pleading before the Commissioners of Bankruptcy; a court then, newly appointed, and differently constituted, I believe, in some respects, from its present form. That particular commissioner, as it happened, who presided at the moment when the case occurred, had been recently appointed, and did not know the faces of those who chiefly practised in the court. All things, indeed, concurred to favour his mistake: for the case itself came on in a shape or in a stage which was liable to misinterpretation, from the partial view which it allowed of the facts, under the hurry of the procedure; and my friend, also, unluckily, had neglected to assume his barrister's costume, so that he passed, in the commissioner's appreciation, as an attorney. 'What if he had been an attorney?' it may be said: 'was he, therefore, less entitled to courtesy or justice?' Certainly not; nor is it my business to apologise for the commissioner. But it may easily be imagined, and (making allowances for the confusion of hurry and imperfect knowledge of the case) it does offer something in palliation of the judge's rashness, that, amongst a large heap of 'Old Bailey' attorneys, who notoriously attended this court for the express purpose of whitewashing their clients, and who were in bad odour as tricksters, he could hardly have been expected to make a special exception in favour of one particular man, who had not protected himself by the insignia of his order. His main error, however, lay in misapprehending the case: misapprehension lent strength to the assumption that my friend was an 'Old Bailey' (i. e., a sharking) attorney; whilst, on the other hand, that assumption lent strength to his misapprehension of the case. Angry interruptions began: these, being retorted or resented with just indignation, produced an irritation and ill temper, which, of themselves, were quite sufficient to raise a cloud of perplexity over any law process, and to obscure it for any understanding. The commissioner grew warmer and warmer; and, at length, he had the presumption to say:—'Sir, you are a disgrace to your profession.' When such sugar-plums, as Captain M'Turk the peacemaker observes, were flying between them, there could be no room for further parley. That same night the commissioner was waited on by a friend of the barrister's, who cleared up his own misconceptions to the disconcerted judge; placed him, even to his own judgment, thoroughly in the wrong; and then most courteously troubled him for a reference to some gentleman, who would arrange the terms of a meeting for the next day. The commissioner was too just and grave a man to be satisfied with himself, on a cool review of his own conduct. Here was a quarrel ripened into a mortal feud, likely enough to terminate in wounds, or, possibly, in death to one of the parties, which, on his side, carried with it no palliations from any provocation received, or from wrong and insult, in any form, sustained: these, in an aggravated shape, could be pleaded by my friend, but with no opening for retaliatory pleas on the part of the magistrate. That name, again, of magistrate, increased his offence and pointed its moral: he, a conservator of the laws—he, a dispenser of equity, sitting even at the very moment on the judgment seat—he to have commenced a brawl, nay to have fastened a quarrel upon a man even then of some consideration and of high promise; a quarrel which finally tended to this result—shoot or be shot. That commissioner's situation and state of mind, for the succeeding night, were certainly not enviable: like Southey's erring painter, who had yielded to the temptation of the subtle fiend,
With repentance his only companion he lay;
And a dismal companion is she.
Meantime, my friend—what was his condition; and how did he pass the interval? I have heard him feelingly describe the misery, the blank anguish of this memorable night. Sometimes it happens that a man's conscience is wounded; but this very wound is the means, perhaps, by which his feelings are spared for the present: sometimes his feelings are lacerated; but this very laceration makes the ransom for his conscience. Here, on the contrary, his feelings and his happiness were dimmed by the very same cause which offered pain and outrage to his conscience. He was, upon principle, a hater of duelling. Under any circumstances, he would have condemned the man who could, for a light cause, or almost for the weightiest, have so much as accepted a challenge. Yet, here he was positively offering a challenge; and to whom? To a man whom he scarcely knew by sight; whom he had never spoken to until this unfortunate afternoon; and towards whom (now that the momentary excitement of anger had passed away) he felt no atom of passion or resentment whatsoever. As a free 'unhoused' young man, therefore, had he been such, without ties or obligations in life, he would have felt the profoundest compunction at the anticipation of any serious injury inflicted upon another man's hopes or happiness, or upon his own. But what was his real situation? He was a married man, married to the woman of his choice within a very few years: he was also a father, having one most promising son, somewhere about three years old. His young wife and his son composed his family; and both were dependent, in the most absolute sense, for all they possessed or they expected—for all they had or ever could have—upon his own exertions. Abandoned by him, losing him, they forfeited, in one hour, every chance of comfort, respectability, or security from scorn and humiliation. The mother, a woman of strong understanding and most excellent judgment—good and upright herself—liable, therefore, to no habit of suspicion, and constitutionally cheerful, went to bed with her young son, thinking no evil. Midnight came, one, two o'clock; mother and child had long been asleep; nor did either of them dream of that danger which even now was yawning under their feet. The barrister had spent the hours from ten to two in drawing up his will, and in writing such letters as might have the best chance, in case of fatal issue to himself, for obtaining some aid to the desolate condition of those two beings whom he would leave behind, unprotected and without provision. Oftentimes he stole into the bedroom, and gazed with anguish upon the innocent objects of his love; and, as his conscience now told him, of his bitterest perfidy. 'Will you then leave us? Are you really going to betray us? Will you deliberately consign us to life-long poverty, and scorn, and grief?' These affecting apostrophes he seemed, in the silence of the night, to hear almost with bodily ears. Silent reproaches seemed written upon their sleeping features; and once, when his wife suddenly awakened under the glare of the lamp which he carried, he felt the strongest impulse to fly from the room; but he faltered, and stood rooted to the spot. She looked at him smilingly, and asked why he was so long in coming to bed. He pleaded an excuse, which she easily admitted, of some law case to study against the morning, or some law paper to draw. She was satisfied; and fell asleep again. He, however, fearing, above all things, that he might miss the time for his appointment, resolutely abided by his plan of not going to bed; for the meeting was to take place at Chalk Farm, and by half-past five in the morning: that is, about one hour after sunrise. One hour and a half before this time, in the gray dawn, just when the silence of Nature and of mighty London was most absolute, he crept stealthily, and like a guilty thing, to the bedside of his sleeping wife and child; took, what he believed might be his final look of them: kissed them softly; and, according to his own quotation from Coleridge's Remorse,
In agony that could not be remembered;
and a conflict with himself that defied all rehearsal, he quitted his peaceful cottage at Chelsea in order to seek for the friend who had undertaken to act as his second. He had good reason, from what he had heard on the night before, to believe his antagonist an excellent shot; and, having no sort of expectation that any interruption could offer to the regular progress of the duel, he, as the challenger, would have to stand the first fire; at any rate, conceiving this to be the fair privilege of the party challenged, he did not mean to avail himself of any proposal for drawing lots upon the occasion, even if such a proposal should happen to be made. Thus far the affair had travelled through the regular stages of expectation and suspense; but the interest of the case as a story was marred and brought to an abrupt conclusion by the conduct of the commissioner. He was a man of known courage, but he also, was a man of conscientious scruples; and, amongst other instances of courage, had the courage to own himself in the wrong. He felt that his conduct hitherto had not been wise or temperate, and that he would be sadly aggravating his original error by persisting in aiming at a man's life, upon which life hung also the happiness of others, merely because he had offered to that man a most unwarranted insult. Feeling this, he thought fit, at first coming upon the ground, to declare that, having learned, since the scene in court, the real character of his antagonist, and the extent of his own mistake, he was resolved to brave all appearances and ill-natured judgments, by making an ample apology; which, accordingly, he did; and so the affair terminated. I have thought it right, however, to report the circumstances, both because they were really true in every particular, but, much more, because they place in strong relief one feature, which is often found in these cases, and which is allowed far too little weight in distributing the blame between the parties: to this I wish to solicit the reader's attention. During the hours of this never-to-be-forgotten night of wretchedness and anxiety, my friend's reflection was naturally forced upon the causes which had produced it. In the world's judgment, he was aware that he himself, as the one charged with the most weighty responsibility, (those who depended upon him being the most entirely helpless,) would have to sustain by much the heaviest censure: and yet what was the real proportion of blame between the parties? He, when provoked and publicly insulted, had retorted angrily: that was almost irresistible under the constitution of human feelings; the meekest of men could scarcely do less. But surely the true onus of wrong and moral responsibility for all which might follow, rested upon that party who, giving way to mixed impulses of rash judgment and of morose temper, had allowed himself to make a most unprovoked assault upon the character of one whom he did not know; well aware that such words, uttered publicly by a person in authority, must, by some course or other, be washed out and cancelled; or, if not, that the party submitting to such defamatory insults, would at once exile himself from the society and countenance of his professional brethren. Now, then, in all justice, it should be so ordered that the weight of public indignation might descend upon him, whoever he might be, (and, of course, the more heavily, according to the authority of his station and his power of inflicting wrong,) who should thus wantonly abuse his means of influence, to the dishonour or injury of an unoffending party. We clothe a public officer with power, we arm him with influential authority over public opinion; not that he may apply these authentic sanctions to the backing of his own malice, and giving weight to his private caprices: and, wherever such abuse takes place, then it should be so contrived that some reaction in behalf of the injured person might receive a sanction equally public. And, upon this point, I shall say a word or two more, after first stating my own case; a case where the outrage was far more insufferable, more deliberate, and more malicious; but, on the other hand, in this respect less effectual for injury, that it carried with it no sanction from any official station or repute in the unknown parties who offered the wrong. The circumstances were these:—In 1824, I had come up to London upon an errand in itself sufficiently vexatious—of fighting against pecuniary embarrassments, by literary labours; but, as had always happened hitherto, with very imperfect success, from the miserable thwartings I incurred through the deranged state of the liver. My zeal was great, and my application was unintermitting; but spirits radically vitiated, chiefly through the direct mechanical depression caused by one important organ deranged; and, secondly, by a reflex effect of depression through my own thoughts, in estimating my prospects; together with the aggravation of my case, by the inevitable exile from my own mountain home,—all this reduced the value of my exertions in a deplorable way. It was rare indeed that I could satisfy my own judgment, even tolerably, with the quality of any literary article I produced; and my power to make sustained exertions, drooped, in a way I could not control, every other hour of the day: insomuch, that what with parts to be cancelled, and what with whole days of torpor and pure defect of power to produce anything at all, very often it turned out that all my labours were barely sufficient (some times not sufficient) to meet the current expenses of my residence in London. Three months' literary toil terminated, at times, in a result = 0; the whole plus being just equal to the minus, created by two separate establishments, and one of them in the most expensive city of the world. Gloomy, indeed, was my state of mind at that period: for, though I made prodigious efforts to recover my health, (sensible that all other efforts depended for their result upon this elementary effort, which was the conditio sine qua non for the rest), yet all availed me not; and a curse seemed to settle upon whatever I then undertook. Such was my frame of mind on reaching London: in fact it never varied. One canopy of murky clouds (a copy of that dun atmosphere which settles so often upon London) brooded for ever upon my spirits, which were in one uniformly low key of cheerless despondency; and, on this particular morning, my depression had been deeper than usual, from the effects of a long, continuous journey of 300 miles, and of exhaustion from want of sleep. I had reached London, about six o'clock in the morning, by one of the northern mails; and, resigning myself as usual in such cases, to the chance destination of the coach, after delivering our bags in Lombard Street, I was driven down to a great city hotel. Here there were hot baths; and, somewhat restored by this luxurious refreshment, about eight o'clock I was seated at a breakfast table; upon which, in a few minutes, as an appendage not less essential than the tea-service, one of the waiters laid that morning's Times, just reeking from the press. The Times, by the way, is notoriously the leading journal of Europe anywhere; but, in London, and more peculiarly in the city quarter of London, it enjoys a pre-eminence scarcely understood elsewhere. Here it is not a morning paper, but the morning paper: no other is known, no other is cited as authority in matters of fact. Strolling with my eye indolently over the vast Babylonian confusion of the enormous columns, naturally as one of the corps littéraire, I found my attention drawn to those regions of the paper which announced forthcoming publications. Amongst them was a notice of a satirical journal, very low priced, and already advanced to its third or fourth number. My heart palpitated a little on seeing myself announced as the principal theme for the malice of the current number. The reader must not suppose that I was left in any doubt as to the quality of the notice with which I had been honoured; and that, by possibility, I was solacing my vanity with some anticipation of honeyed compliments. That, I can assure him, was made altogether impossible, by the kind of language which flourished in the very foreground of the programme, and even of the running title. The exposure and depluming (to borrow a good word from the fine old rhetorician, Fuller,) of the leading 'humbugs' of the age—that was announced as the regular business of the journal: and the only question which remained to be settled was, the more or less of the degree; and also one other question, even more interesting still, viz.—whether personal abuse were intermingled with literary. Happiness, as I have experienced in other periods of my life, deep domestic happiness, makes a man comparatively careless of ridicule, of sarcasm, or of abuse. But calamity—the degradation, in the world's eye, of every man who is fighting with pecuniary difficulties—exasperates beyond all that can be imagined, a man's sensibility to insult. He is even apprehensive of insult—tremulously fantastically apprehensive, where none is intended; and like Wordsworth's shepherd, with his very understanding consciously abused and depraved by his misfortunes is ready to say, at all hours—
And every man I met or faced,
Methought he knew some ill of me.
Some notice, perhaps, the newspaper had taken of this new satirical journal, or some extracts might have been made from it; at all events, I had ascertained its character so well that, in this respect, I had nothing to learn. It now remained to get the number which professed to be seasoned with my particular case; and it may be supposed that I did not loiter over my breakfast after this discovery. Something which I saw or suspected amongst the significant hints of a paragraph or advertisement, made me fear that there might possibly be insinuations or downright assertion in the libel requiring instant public notice; and, therefore, on a motive of prudence, had I even otherwise felt that indifference for slander which now I do feel, but which, in those years, morbid irritability of temperament forbade me to affect, I should still have thought it right to look after the work; which now I did: and, by nine o'clock in the morning—an hour at which few people had seen me for years—I was on my road to Smithfield. Smithfield? Yes; even so. All known and respectable publishers having declined any connexion with the work, the writers had facetiously resorted to this aceldama, or slaughtering quarter of London—to these vast shambles, as typical, I suppose, of their own slaughtering spirit. On my road to Smithfield, I could not but pause for one moment to reflect on the pure defecated malice which must have prompted an attack upon myself. Retaliation or retort it could not pretend to be. To most literary men, scattering their written reviews, or their opinions, by word of mouth, to the right and the left with all possible carelessness, it never can be matter of surprise, or altogether of complaint, (unless as a question of degrees,) that angry notices, or malicious notices, should be taken of themselves. Few, indeed, of literary men can pretend to any absolute innocence from offence, and from such even as may have seemed deliberate. But I, for my part, could. Knowing the rapidity with which all remarks of literary men upon literary men are apt to circulate, I had studiously and resolutely forborne to say anything, whether of a writer or a book, unless where it happened that I could say something that would be felt as complimentary. And as to written reviews, so much did I dislike the assumption of judicial functions and authority over the works of my own brother authors and contemporaries, that I have, in my whole life, written only two; at that time only one; and that one, though a review of an English novel, was substantially a review of a German book, taking little notice, or none, of the English translator; for, although he, a good German scholar now, was a very imperfect one at that time, and was, therefore, every way open to criticism, I had evaded this invidious office applied to a novice in literature, and (after pointing out one or two slight blemishes of trivial importance) all that I said of a general nature was a compliment to him upon the felicity of his verses. Upon the German author I was, indeed, severe, but hardly as much as he deserved. The other review was a tissue of merriment and fun; and though, it is true, I did hear that the fair authoress was offended at one jest, I may safely leave it for any reader to judge between us. She, or her brother, amongst other Latin epigrams had one addressed to a young lady upon the loss of her keys. This, the substance of the lines showed to have been the intention; but (by a very venial error in one who was writing Latin from early remembrance of it, and not in the character of a professing scholar) the title was written De clavis instead of De clavibus amissis; upon which I observed that the writer had selected a singular topic for condolence with a young lady,—viz., 'on the loss of her cudgels;' (clavis, as an ablative, coming clearly from clava). This (but I can hardly believe it) was said to have offended Miss H.; and, at all events, this was the extent of my personalities. Many kind things I had said; much honour; much admiration, I had professed at that period of my life in occasional papers or private letters, towards many of my contemporaries, but never anything censorious or harsh; and simply on a principle of courteous forbearance which I have felt to be due towards those who are brothers of the same liberal profession with one's self. I could not feel, when reviewing my whole life, that in any one instance, by act, by word, or by intention, I had offered any unkindness, far less any wrong or insult, towards a brother author. I was at a loss, therefore, to decipher the impulse under which the malignant libeller could have written, in making (as I suspected already) my private history the subject of his calumnies. Jealousy, I have since understood, jealousy, was the foundation of the whole. A little book of mine had made its way into drawing-rooms where some book of his had not been heard of. On reaching Smithfield, I found the publisher to be a medical bookseller, and, to my surprise, having every appearance of being a grave, respectable man; notwithstanding this undeniable fact, that the libellous journal, to which he thought proper to affix his sanction, trespassed on decency, not only by its slander, but, in some instances, by downright obscenity; and, worse than that, by prurient solicitations to the libidinous imagination, through blanks, seasonably interspersed. I said nothing to him in the way of inquiry; for I easily guessed that the knot of writers who were here clubbing their virus, had not so ill combined their plans as to leave them open to detection by a question from any chance stranger. Having, therefore, purchased a set of the journal, then amounting to three or four numbers, I went out; and in the elegant promenades of Smithfield, I read the lucubrations of my libeller. Fit academy for such amenities of literature! Fourteen years have gone by since then; and, possibly, the unknown hound who yelled, on that occasion, among this kennel of curs, may, long since, have buried himself and his malice in the grave. Suffice it here to say, that, calm as I am now, and careless on recalling the remembrance of this brutal libel, at that time I was convulsed with wrath. As respected myself, there was a depth of malignity in the article which struck me as perfectly mysterious. How could any man have made an enemy so profound, and not even have suspected it? That puzzled me. For, with respect to the other objects of attack, such as Sir Humphrey Davy, &c., it was clear that the malice was assumed; that, at most, it was the gay impertinence of some man upon town, armed with triple Irish brass from original defect of feeling, and willing to raise an income by running amuck at any person just then occupying enough of public interest to make the abuse saleable. But, in my case, the man flew like a bull-dog at the throat, with a pertinacity and acharnement of malice that would have caused me to laugh immoderately, had it not been for one intolerable wound to my feelings. These mercenary libellers, whose stiletto is in the market, and at any man's service for a fixed price, callous and insensible as they are, yet retain enough of the principles common to human nature, under every modification, to know where to plant their wounds. Like savage hackney coachmen, they know where there is a raw. And the instincts of human nature teach them that every man is vulnerable through his female connexions. There lies his honour; there his strength; there his weakness. In their keeping is the heaven of his happiness; in them and through them the earthy of its fragility. Many there are who do not feel the maternal relation to be one in which any excessive freight of honour or sensibility is embarked. Neither is the name of sister, though tender in early years, and impressive to the fireside sensibilities, universally and through life the same magical sound. A sister is a creature whose very property and tendency (qua sister) is to alienate herself, not to gather round your centre. But the names of wife and daughter these are the supreme and starry charities of life: and he who, under a mask, fighting in darkness, attacks you there, that coward has you at disadvantage. I stood in those hideous shambles of Smithfield: upwards I looked to the clouds, downwards to the earth, for vengeance. I trembled with excessive wrath—such was my infirmity of feeling at that time, and in that condition of health; and had I possessed forty thousand lives, all, and every one individually, I would have sacrificed in vindication of her that was thus cruelly libelled. Shall I give currency to his malice, shall I aid and promote it by repeating it? No. And yet why not? Why should I scruple, as if afraid to challenge his falsehoods?—why should I scruple to cite them? He, this libeller, asserted—But faugh!
This slander seemed to have been built upon some special knowledge of me; for I had often spoken with horror of those who could marry persons in a condition which obliged them to obedience—a case which had happened repeatedly within my own knowledge; and I had spoken on this ground, that the authority of a master might be supposed to have been interposed, whether it really were so or not in favour of his designs; and thus a presumption, however false it might be, always remained that his wooing had been, perhaps, not the wooing of perfect freedom, so essential to the dignity of woman, and, therefore, essential to his own dignity; but that perhaps, it had been favoured by circumstances, and by opportunities created, if it had not even been favoured, by express exertions of authority. The libeller, therefore, did seem to have some knowledge of my peculiar opinions: yet, in other points, either from sincere ignorance or from affectation, and by way of turning aside suspicion, he certainly manifested a non-acquaintance with facts relating to me that must have been familiar enough to all within my circle.
Let me pursue the case to its last stage. The reader will say, perhaps, why complain of a paltry journal that assuredly never made any noise; for I, the reader, never heard of it till now. No, that is very possible; for the truth is, and odd enough it seems, this malicious journal prospered so little, that, positively, at the seventh No. it stopped. Laugh I did, and laugh I could not help but do, at this picture of baffled malice: writers willing and ready to fire with poisoned bullets, and yet perfectly unable to get an effective aim, from sheer want of co-operation on the part of the public.
However, the case as it respected me, went farther than it did with respect to the public. Would it be believed that human malice, with respect to a man not even known by sight to his assailants, as was clear from one part of their personalities, finally—that is to say, months afterwards—adopted the following course:—The journal had sunk under public scorn and neglect; neglect at first, but, perhaps, scorn at the last; for, when the writers found that mere malice availed not to draw public attention, they adopted the plan of baiting their hooks with obscenity; and they published a paper, professing to be written by Lord Byron, called, 'My Wedding Night;' and very possible, from internal evidence, to have been really written by him; and yet the combined forces of Byron and obscenity failed to save them,—which is rather remarkable. Having sunk, one might suppose the journal was at an end, for good and evil; and, especially, that all, who had been molested by it, or held up to ridicule, might now calculate on rest. By no means: First of all they made inquiries about the localities of my residence, and the town nearest to my own family. Nothing was effected unless they carried the insult, addressed to my family, into the knowledge of that family and its circle. My cottage in Grasmere was just 280 miles from London, and eighteen miles from any town whatsoever. The nearest was Kendal; a place of perhaps 16,000 inhabitants; and the nearest therefore, at which there were any newspapers printed. There were two: one denominated The Gazette; the other The Chronicle. The first was Tory and Conservative; had been so from its foundation; and was, besides, generous in its treatment of private character. My own contributions to it I will mention hereafter. The Chronicle, on the other hand, was a violent reforming journal, and conducted in a partisan spirit. To this newspaper the article was addressed; by this newspaper it was published; and by this it was carried into my own 'next-door' neighbourhood. Next-door neighbourhood? But that surely must be the very best direction these libellers could give to their malice; for there, at least, the falsehood of their malice must be notorious. Why, yes: and in that which was my neighbourhood, according to the most literal interpretation of the term, a greater favour could not have been done me, nor a more laughable humiliation for my unprovoked enemies. Commentary or refutation there needed none; the utter falsehood of the main allegations were so obvious to every man, woman, and child, that, of necessity, it discredited even those parts which might, for any thing known to my neighbours, have been true. Nay, it was the means of procuring for me a generous expression of sympathy, that would else have been wanting; for some gentlemen of the neighbourhood, who were but slightly known to me, put the malignant journal into the fire at a public reading-room. So far was well; but, on the other hand, in Kendal, a town nearly twenty miles distant, of necessity I was but imperfectly known; and though there was a pretty general expression of disgust at the character of the publication, and the wanton malignity which it bore upon its front, since, true or not true, no shadow of a reason was pleaded for thus bringing forward statements expressly to injure me, or to make me unhappy; yet there must have been many, in so large a place, who had too little interest in the question, or too limited means of inquiry, for ever ascertaining the truth. Consequently, in their minds, to this hour, my name, as one previously known to them, and repeatedly before the town in connexion with political or literary articles in their Conservative journal, must have suffered.
But the main purpose, for which I have reported the circumstances of these two cases, relates to the casuistry of duelling. Casuistry, as I have already said, is the moral philosophy of cases—that is, of anomalous combinations of circumstances—that, for any reason whatsoever, do not fall, or do not seem to fall, under the general rules of morality. As a general rule, it must, doubtless, be unlawful to attempt another man's life, or to hazard your own. Very special circumstances must concur to make out any case of exception; and even then it is evident, that one of the parties must always be deeply in the wrong. But it does strike me, that the present casuistry of society upon the question of duelling, is profoundly wrong, and wrong by manifest injustice. Very little distinction is ever made, in practice, by those who apply their judgments to such cases, between the man who, upon principle, practises the most cautious self-restraint and moderation in his daily demeanour, never under any circumstance offering an insult, or any just occasion of quarrel, and resorting to duel only under the most insufferable provocation, between this man, on the one side, and the most wanton ruffian, on the other, who makes a common practice of playing upon other men's feelings, whether in reliance upon superior bodily strength, or upon the pacific disposition of conscientious men, and fathers of families. Yet, surely, the difference between them goes the whole extent of the interval between wrong and right. Even the question, 'Who gave the challenge?' which is sometimes put, often merges virtually in the transcendant question, 'Who gave the provocation?' For it is important to observe, in both the cases which I have reported, that the onus of offering the challenge was thrown upon the unoffending party; and thus, in a legal sense, that party is made to give the provocation who, in a moral sense, received it. But surely, if even the law makes allowances for human infirmity, when provoked beyond what it can endure,—we, in our brotherly judgments upon each other, ought, a fortiori, to take into the equity of our considerations the amount and quality of the offence. It will be objected that the law, so far from allowing for, expressly refuses to allow for, sudden sallies of anger or explosions of vindictive fury, unless in so far as they are extempore, and before the reflecting judgment has had time to recover itself. Any indication that the party had leisure for calm review, or for a cool selection of means and contrivances in executing his vindictive purposes, will be fatal to a claim of that nature. This is true; but the nature of a printed libel is, continually to renew itself as an insult. The subject of it reads this libel, perhaps, in solitude; and, by a great exertion of self-command, resolves to bear it with fortitude and in silence. Some days after, in a public room, he sees strangers reading it also: he hears them scoffing and laughing loudly: in the midst of all this, he sees himself pointed out to their notice by some one of the party who happens to be acquainted with his person; and, possibly, if the libel take that particular shape which excessive malice is most likely to select, he will hear the name of some female relative, dearer, it may be to him, and more sacred in his ears, than all this world beside, bandied about with scorn and mockery by those who have not the poor excuse of the original libellers, but are, in fact, adopting the second-hand malignity of others. Such cases, with respect to libels that are quickened into popularity by interesting circumstances, or by a personal interest attached to any of the parties, or by wit, or by extraordinary malice, or by scenical circumstances, or by circumstances unusually ludicrous, are but too likely to occur; and, with every fresh repetition, the keenness of the original provocation is renewed, and in an accelerated ratio. Again, with reference to my own case, or to any case resembling that, let it be granted that I was immoderately and unreasonably transported by anger at the moment;—I thought so myself, after a time, when the journal which published the libel sank under the public neglect; but this was an after consideration; and, at the moment, how heavy an aggravation was given to the stings of the malice, by the deep dejection, from embarrassed circumstances and from disordered health, which then possessed me; aggravations, perhaps, known to the libellers as encouragements for proceeding at the time, and often enough likely to exist in other men's cases. Now, in the case as it actually occurred, it so happened that the malicious writers had, by the libel, dishonoured themselves too deeply in the public opinion, to venture upon coming forward, in their own persons, to avow their own work; but suppose them to have done so (as, in fact, even in this case, they might have done, had they not published their intention of driving a regular trade in libel and in slander); suppose them insolently to beard you in public haunts; to cross your path continually when in company with the very female relative upon whom they had done their best to point the finger of public scorn; and suppose them further, by the whole artillery of contemptuous looks, words, gestures, and unrepressed laughter, to republish, as it were, ratify, and publicly to apply, personally, their own original libel, as often as chance or as opportunity (eagerly improved) should throw you together in places of general resort; and suppose, finally, that the central figure—nay, in their account, the very butt throughout this entire drama of malice—should chance to be an innocent, gentle-hearted, dejected, suffering woman, utterly unknown to her persecutors, and selected as their martyr merely for her relationship to yourself—suppose her, in short, to be your wife—a lovely young woman sustained by womanly dignity, or else ready to sink into the earth with shame, under the cruel and unmanly insults heaped upon her, and having no protector upon earth but yourself: lay all this together, and then say whether, in such a case, the most philosophic or the most Christian patience might not excusably give way; whether flesh and blood could do otherwise than give way, and seek redress for the past, but, at all events, security for the future, in what, perhaps, might be the sole course open to you—an appeal to arms. Let it not be said that the case here proposed, by way of hypothesis, is an extreme one: for the very argument has contemplated extreme cases: since, whilst conceding that duelling is an unlawful and useless remedy for cases of ordinary wrong, where there is no malice to resist a more conciliatory mode of settlement, and where it is difficult to imagine any deliberate insult except such as is palliated by intoxication—conceding this, I have yet supposed it possible that cases may arise, with circumstances of contumely and outrage, growing out of deep inexorable malice, which cannot be redressed, as things now are, without an appeal to the voye de fait. 'But this is so barbarous an expedient in days of high civilisation.' Why, yes, it labours with the semi-barbarism of chivalry: yet, on the other hand, this mention of chivalry reminds me to say, that if this practice of duelling share the blame of chivalry, one memorable praise there is, which also it may claim as common to them both. It is a praise which I have often insisted on; and the very sublime of prejudice I would challenge to deny it. Burke, in his well-known apology for chivalry, thus expresses his sense of the immeasurable benefits which it conferred upon society, as a supplementary code of law, reaching those cases which the weakness of municipal law was then unavailing to meet, and at a price so trivial in bloodshed or violence—he calls it 'the cheap defence of nations.' Yes, undoubtedly; and surely the same praise belongs incontestably to the law of duelling. For one duel in esse, there are ten thousand, every day of our lives, amid populous cities, in posse: one challenge is given, a myriad are feared: one life (and usually the most worthless, by any actual good rendered to society) is sacrificed, suppose triennially, from a nation; every life is endangered by certain modes of behaviour. Hence, then, and at a cost inconceivably trifling, the peace of society is maintained in cases which no law, no severity of police, ever could effectually reach. Brutal strength would reign paramount in the walks of public life; brutal intoxication would follow out its lawless impulses, were it not for the fear which now is always in the rear—the fear of being summoned to a strict summary account, liable to the most perilous consequences. This is not open to denial: the actual basis upon which reposes the security of us all, the peace of our wives and our daughters, and our own immunity from the vilest degradations under their eyes, is the necessity, known to every gentleman, of answering for his outrages in a way which strips him of all unfair advantages, except one (which is not often possessed), which places the weak upon a level with the strong, and the quiet citizen upon a level with the military adventurer, or the ruffian of the gambling-house. The fact, I say, cannot be denied; neither can the low price be denied at which this vast result is obtained. And it is evident that, on the principle of expediency, adopted as the basis of morality by Paley, the justification of duelling is complete: for the greatest sum of immediate happiness is produced at the least possible sacrifice.[15] But there are many men of high moral principle, and yet not professing to rest upon Christianity, who reject this prudential basis of ethics as the death of all morality. And these men hold, that the social recognition of any one out of the three following dangerous and immoral principles, viz.—1st, That a man may lawfully sport with his own life; 2dly, That he may lawfully sport with the life of another; 3dly, That he may lawfully seek his redress for a social wrong, by any other channel than the law tribunals of the land: that the recognition of these, or any of them, by the jurisprudence of a nation, is a mortal wound to the very key-stone upon which the whole vast arch of morality reposes. Well, in candour, I must admit that, by justifying, in courts of judicature, through the verdicts of juries, that mode of personal redress and self-vindication, to heal and prevent which was one of the original motives for gathering into social communities, and setting up an empire of public law as paramount to all private exercise of power, a fatal wound is given to the sanctity of moral right, of the public conscience, and of law in its elementary field. So much I admit; but I say also, that the case arises out of a great dilemma, with difficulties on both sides; and that, in all practical applications of philosophy, amongst materials so imperfect as men, just as in all attempts to realize the rigour of mathematical laws amongst earthly mechanics, inevitably there will arise such dilemmas and cases of opprobrium to the reflecting intellect. However, in conclusion, I shall say four things, which I request my opponent, whoever he may be, to consider; for they are things which certainly ought to have weight; and some important errors have arisen by neglecting them.
First, then, let him remember that it is the principle at stake—viz., the recognition by a legal tribunal, as lawful or innocent of any attempt to violate the laws, or to take the law into our own hands: this it is and the mortal taint which is thus introduced into the public morality of a Christian land, thus authentically introduced; thus sealed and countersigned by judicial authority; the majesty of law actually interfering to justify, with the solemnities of trial, a flagrant violation of law; this it is, this only, and not the amount of injury sustained by society, which gives value to the question. For, as to the injury, I have already remarked, that a very trivial annual loss—one life, perhaps, upon ten millions, and that life often as little practically valuable as any amongst us—that pays our fine or ransom in that account. And, in reality, there is one popular error made upon this subject, when the question is raised about the institution of some Court of Honour, or Court of Appeal in cases of injury to the feelings, under the sanction of parliament, which satisfactorily demonstrates the trivial amount of injury sustained: it is said on such occasions that de minimis non curat lex—that the mischief, in fact, is too narrow and limited for the regard of the legislature. And we may be assured that, if the evil were ever to become an extensive one, the notice of Parliament soon would be attracted to the subject; and hence we may derive a hint for an amended view of the policy adopted in past ages. Princes not distinguished for their religious scruples, made it, in different ages and places, a capital offence to engage in a duel: whence it is inferred, falsely, that, in former times, a more public homage was paid to Christian principle. But the fact is, that not the anti-Christian character of the offence so much as its greater frequency, and the consequent extension of a civil mischief was the ruling consideration with the lawgiver. Among other causes for this greater prevalence of duels, was the composition of armies, more often brought together upon mercenary principles from a large variety of different nations, whose peculiar usages, points of traditional honour, and even the oddness of their several languages to the ear, formed a perpetual occasion of insult and quarrel. Fluellen's affair with Pistol, we may be sure, was no rare but a representative case.
Secondly, In confirmation of what I have said about duelling, as the great conductor for carrying off the excess of angry irritation in society, I will repeat what was said to me by a man of great ability and distinguished powers, as well as opportunities for observation, in reference to a provincial English town, and the cabals which prevailed there. These cabals—some political, arising out of past electioneering contests; some municipal, arising out of the corporation disputes; some personal, arising out of family rivalships, or old traditionary disputes—had led to various feuds that vexed the peace of the town in a degree very considerably beyond the common experience of towns reaching the same magnitude. How was this accounted for? The word tradesman is, more than even the term middle class, liable to great ambiguity of meaning; for it includes a range so large as to take in some who tread on the heels even of the highest aristocracy, and some at the other end, who rank not at all higher than day-labourers or handicraftsmen. Now, those who ranked with gentlemen, took the ordinary course of gentlemen in righting themselves under personal insults; and the result was, that, amongst them or their families, no feuds were subsisting of ancient standing. No ill blood was nursed; no calumnies or conspicuous want of charity prevailed. Not that they often fought duels: on the contrary, a duel was a very rare event amongst the indigenous gentry of the place; but it was sufficient to secure all the effects of duelling, that it was known, with respect to this class, that, in the last resort, they were ready to fight. Now, on the other hand, the lowest order of tradesmen had their method of terminating quarrels—the old English method of their fathers—viz., by pugilistic contests. And they also cherished no malice against each other or amongst their families. 'But,' said my informant, 'some of those who occupied the intermediate stations in this hierarchy of trade, found themselves most awkwardly situated. So far they shared in the refinements of modern society, that they disdained the coarse mode of settling quarrels by their fists. On the other hand, there was a special and peculiar reason pressing upon this class, which restrained them from aspiring to the more aristocratic modes of fighting. They were sensible of a ridicule, which everywhere attaches to many of the less elevated or liberal modes of exercising trade in going out to fight with sword and pistol. This ridicule was sharpened and made more effectual, in their case, from the circumstance of the Royal Family and the court making this particular town a frequent place of residence. Besides that apart from the ridicule, many of them depended for a livelihood upon the patronage of royalty or of the nobility, attached to their suite; and most of these patrons would have resented their intrusion upon the privileged ground of the aristocracy in conducting disputes of honour. What was the consequence? These persons, having no natural outlet for their wounded sensibilities, being absolutely debarred from any mode of settling their disputes, cherished inextinguishable feuds: their quarrels in fact had no natural terminations; and the result was, a spirit of malice and most unchristian want of charity, which could not hope for any final repose, except in death.' Such was the report of my observing friend: the particular town may be easily guessed at; and I have little doubt that its condition continues as of old.
Thirdly, It is a very common allegation against duelling, that the ancient Romans and Grecians never practised this mode of settling disputes; and the inference is, of course, unfavourable, not to Christianity, but to us as inconsistent disciples of our own religion; and a second inference is, that the principle of personal honour, well understood, cannot require this satisfaction for its wounds. For the present I shall say nothing on the former head, but not for want of something to say. With respect to the latter, it is a profound mistake, founded on inacquaintance with the manners and the spirit of manners prevalent amongst these imperfectly civilised nations. Honour was a sense not developed in many of its modifications amongst either Greeks or Romans. Cudgelling was at one time used as the remedy in cases of outrageous libel and pasquinade. But it is a point very little to the praise of either people, that no vindictive notice was taken of any possible personalities, simply because the most hideous license had been established for centuries in tongue license and unmanly Billingsgate. This had been promoted by the example hourly ringing in their ears of vernile scurrility. Verna—that is, the slave born in the family—had each from the other one universal and proverbial character of foul-mouthed eloquence, which heard from infancy, could not but furnish a model almost unconsciously to those who had occasion publicly to practise vituperative rhetoric. What they remembered of this vernile licentiousness, constituted the staple of their talk in such situations. And the horrible illustrations left even by the most accomplished and literary of the Roman orators, of their shameless and womanly fluency in this dialect of unlicensed abuse, are evidences, not to be resisted, of such obtuseness, such coarseness of feeling, so utter a defect of all the gentlemanly sensibilities, that no man, alive to the real state of things amongst them, would ever think of pleading their example in any other view than as an object of unmitigated disgust. At all events, the long-established custom of deluging each other in the Forum, or even in the Senate, with the foulest abuse, the precedent traditionally delivered through centuries before the time of Cæsar and Cicero, had so robbed it of its sting, that, as a subject for patient endurance, or an occasion for self conquest in mastering the feelings, it had no merit at all. Anger, prompting an appeal to the cudgel, there might be, but sense of wounded honour, requiring a reparation by appeal to arms, or a washing away by blood, no such feeling could have been subdued or overcome by a Roman, for none such existed. The feelings of wounded honour on such occasions, it will be allowed, are mere reflections (through sympathetic agencies) of feelings and opinions already existing, and generally dispersed through society. Now, in Roman society, the case was a mere subject for laughter; for there were no feelings or opinions pointing to honour, personal honour as a principle of action, nor, consequently, to wounded honour as a subject of complaint. The Romans were not above duelling, but simply not up to that level of civilisation.
Finally, with respect to the suggestion of a Court of Honour, much might be said that my limits will not allow; but two suggestions I will make. First, Recurring to a thing I have already said, I must repeat that no justice would be shown unless (in a spirit very different from that which usually prevails in society) the weight of public indignation and the displeasure of the court were made to settle conspicuously upon the AGGRESSOR; not upon the challenger, who is often the party suffering under insufferable provocation (provocation which even the sternness of penal law and the holiness of Christian faith allow for), but upon the author of the original offence. Secondly, A much more searching investigation must be made into the conduct of the SECONDS than is usual in the unprofessional and careless inquisitions of the public into such affairs. Often enough, the seconds hold the fate of their principals entirely in their hands; and instances are not a few, within even my limited knowledge, of cases where murder has been really committed, not by the party who fired the fatal bullet, but by him who (having it in his power to interfere without loss of honour to any party) has cruelly thought fit—[and, in some instances, apparently for no purpose but that of decorating himself with the name of an energetic man, and of producing a public 'sensation,' as it is called—a sanguinary affair]—to goad on the tremulous sensibility of a mind distracted between the sense of honour on the one hand, and the agonising claims of a family on the other, into fatal extremities that might, by a slight concession, have been avoided. I could mention several instances; but, in some of these, I know the circumstances only by report. In one, however, I had my information from parties who were personally connected with the unhappy subject of the affair. The case was this:—A man of distinguished merit, whom I shall not describe more particularly, because it is no part of my purpose to recall old buried feuds, or to insinuate any personal blame whatsoever (my business being not with this or that man, but with a system and its principles); this man, by a step well-meant but injudicious, and liable to a very obvious misinterpretation, as though taken in a view of self-interest, had entangled himself in a quarrel. That quarrel would have been settled amicably, or, if not amicably, at least without bloodshed, had it not been for an unlucky accident combined with a very unwise advice. One morning, after the main dispute had been pretty well adjusted, he was standing at the fireside after breakfast, talking over the affair so far as it had already travelled, when it suddenly and most unhappily came into his head to put this general question—'Pray, does it strike you that people will be apt, on a review of this whole dispute, to think that there has been too much talking and too little doing?' His evil genius so ordered it, that the man to whom he put this question, was one who, having no military character to rest on, could not (or thought he could not) recommend those pacific counsels which a truly brave man is ever ready to suggest—I put the most friendly construction upon his conduct—and his answer was this—'Why, if you insist upon my giving a faithful reply, if you will require me to be sincere (though I really wish you would not), in that case my duty is to tell you, that the world has been too free in its remarks—that it has, with its usual injustice, been sneering at literary men and paper pellets, as the ammunition in which they trade; in short, my dear friend, the world has presumed to say that not you only, but that both parties, have shown a little of'——'Yes; I know what you are going to say,' interrupted the other, 'of the white feather. Is it not so?'—'Exactly; you have hit the mark—that is what they say. But how unjust it is; for, says I, but yesterday, to Mr. L. M., who was going on making himself merry with the affair in a way that was perfectly scandalous—"Sir," says I,'——but this says I never reached the ears of the unhappy man: he had heard enough; and, as a secondary dispute was still going on that had grown out of the first, he seized the very first opening which offered itself for provoking the issue of a quarrel. The other party was not backward or slack in answering the appeal; and thus, in one morning, the prospect was overcast—peace was no longer possible; and a hostile meeting was arranged. Even at this meeting much still remained in the power of the seconds: there was an absolute certainty that all fatal consequences might have been evaded, with perfect consideration for the honour of both parties. The principals must unquestionably have felt that; but if the seconds would not move in that direction, of course their lips were sealed. A more cruel situation could not be imagined: two persons, who never, perhaps, felt more than that fiction of enmity which belonged to the situation, that is to say, assumed the enmity which society presumes rationally incident to a certain position—assumed it as a point of honour, but did not heartily feel it; and even for the slight shade of animosity which, for half an hour, they might have really felt, had thoroughly quelled it before the meeting, these two persons—under no impulses whatever, good or bad, from within, but purely in a hateful necessity of servile obedience to a command from without—prepared to perpetrate what must, in that frame of dispassionate temper have appeared to each, a purpose of murder, as regarded his antagonist—a purpose of suicide, as regarded himself. Simply a word, barely a syllable, was needed from the 'Friends' (such Friends!) of the parties, to have delivered them, with honour, from this dreadful necessity: that word was not spoken; and because a breath, a motion of the lips, was wanting—because, in fact, the seconds were thoughtless and without feeling, one of the parties has long slept in a premature grave—his early blossoms scattered to the wind—his golden promise of fruit blasted; and the other has since lived that kind of life, that, in my mind, he was happier who died. Something of the same kind happened in the duel between Lord Camelford and his friend, Mr. Best; something of the same kind in that between Colonel Montgomery and Captain Macnamara. In the former case, the quarrel was, at least, for a noble subject; it concerned a woman. But in the latter, a dog, and a thoughtless lash applied to his troublesome gambols, was the sole subject of dispute. The colonel, as is well known, a very elegant and generous young man, fell; and Captain Macnamara had thenceforwards a worm at his heart whose gnawings never died. He was a post-captain; and my brother afterwards sailed with him in quality of midshipman. From him I have often heard affecting instances of the degree in which the pangs of remorse had availed, to make one of the bravest men in the service a mere panic-haunted, and, in a moral sense, almost a paralytic wreck. He that, whilst his hand was unstained with blood, would have faced an army of fiends in discharge of his duty, now fancied danger in every common rocking of a boat: he made himself at times, the subject of laughter at the messes of the junior and more thoughtless officers: and his hand, whenever he had occasion to handle a spy-glass, shook, (to use the common image,) or, rather, shivered, like an aspen tree. Now, if a regular tribunal, authenticated, by Parliament, as the fountain of law, and, by the Sovereign, as the fountain of honour, were, under the very narrowest constitution, to apply itself merely to a review of the whole conduct pursued by the seconds, even under this restriction such a tribunal would operate with great advantage. It is needless to direct any severity to the conduct of the principals, unless when that conduct has been outrageous or wanton in provocation: supposing anything tolerably reasonable and natural in the growth of the quarrel, after the quarrel is once 'constituted,' (to borrow a term of Scotch law,) the principals, as they are called with relation to the subject of dispute, are neither principals nor even secondaries for the subsequent management of the dispute: they are delivered up, bound hand and foot, into the hands of their technical 'friends'; passive to the law of social usage as regards the general necessity of pursuing the dispute; passive to the directions of their seconds as regards the particular mode of pursuing it. It is, therefore, the seconds who are the proper objects of notice for courts of honour; and the error has been, in framing the project of such a court, to imagine the inquiry too much directed upon the behaviour of those who cease to be free agents from the very moment that they become liable to any legal investigation whatever: simply as quarrellers, the parties are no objects of question; they are not within the field of any police review; and the very first act which brings them within that field, translates the responsibility (because the free agency) from themselves to their seconds. The whole questio vexata, therefore, reduces itself to these logical moments, (to speak the language of mathematics:) the two parties mainly concerned in the case of duelling, are Society and the Seconds. The first, by authorising such a mode of redress; the latter, by conducting it. Now, I presume, it will be thought hopeless to arraign Society at the bar of any earthly court, or apply any censure or any investigation to its mode of thinking.[16] To the principals, for the reasons given, it would be unjust to apply them; and the inference is, that the seconds are the parties to whom their main agency should be directed—as the parties in whose hands lies the practical control of the whole affair, and the whole machinery of opportunities, (so easily improved by a wise humanity)—for sparing bloodshed, for promoting reconciliation, for making those overtures of accommodation and generous apology which the brave are so ready to agree to, in atonement for hasty words, or rash movements of passion, but which it is impossible for them to originate. In short, for impressing the utmost possible spirit of humanising charity and forbearance upon a practice which, after all, must for ever remain somewhat of an opprobrium to a Christian people; but which, tried by the law of worldly wisdom, is the finest bequest of chivalry; the most economic safety-valve for man's malice that man's wit could devise; the most absolute safe-guard of the weak against the brutal; and, finally, (once more to borrow the words of Burke,) in a sense the fullest and most practical, 'the cheap defence of nations;' not indeed against the hostility which besieges from without, but against the far more operative nuisance of bad passions that vex and molest the social intercourse of men by ineradicable impulses from within.
I may illustrate the value of one amongst the suggestions I have made, by looking back and applying it to part of my last anecdote: the case of that promising person who was cut off so prematurely for himself, and so ruinously for the happiness of the surviving antagonist. I may mention, (as a fact known to me on the very best authority,) that the Duke of Wellington was consulted by a person of distinction, who had been interested in the original dispute, with a view to his opinion upon the total merits of the affair, on its validity, as a 'fighting' quarrel, and on the behaviour of the parties to it. Upon the last question, the opinion of his Grace was satisfactory. His bias, undoubtedly, if he has any, is likely to lie towards the wisdom of the peacemaker; and possibly, like many an old soldier, he may be apt to regard the right of pursuing quarrels by arms as a privilege not hastily to be extended beyond the military body. But, on the other question, as to the nature of the quarrel, the duke denied that it required a duel; or that a duel was its natural solution. And had the duke been the mediator, it is highly probable that the unfortunate gentleman would now have been living. Certainly, the second quarrel involved far less of irritating materials than the first. It grew out of a hasty word, and nothing more; such as drops from parliamentary debaters every night of any interesting discussion—drops hastily, is as hastily recalled, or excused, perhaps, as a venial sally of passion, either by the good sense or the magnanimity of the party interested in the wrong. Indeed, by the unanimous consent of all who took notice of the affair, the seconds, or one of them at least, in this case, must be regarded as deeply responsible for the tragical issue; nor did I hear of one person who held them blameless, except that one who, of all others, might the most excusably have held them wrong in any result. But now, from such a case brought under the review of a court, such as I have supposed, and improved in the way I have suggested, a lesson so memorable might have been given to the seconds, by a two-years' imprisonment—punishment light enough for the wreck of happiness which they caused—that soon, from this single case, raised into a memorable precedent, there would have radiated an effect upon future duels for half a century to come. And no man can easily persuade me that he is in earnest about the extinction of duelling, who does not lend his countenance to a suggestion which would, at least, mitigate the worst evils of the practice, and would, by placing the main agents in responsibility to the court, bring the duel itself immediately under the direct control of that court; would make a legal tribunal not reviewers subsequently, but, in a manner, spectators of the scene; and would carry judicial moderation and skill into the very centre of angry passions; not, as now they act, inefficiently to review, and, by implication, sometimes to approve their most angry ebullitions, but practically to control and repress them.
THE LOVE-CHARM.
A TALE FROM THE GERMAN OF TIECK.[17]
Emilius was sitting in deep thought at his table, awaiting his friend Roderick. The light was burning before him; the winter evening was cold; and to-day he wished for the presence of his fellow-traveller, though at other times wont rather to avoid his society: for on this evening he was about to disclose a secret to him, and beg for his advice. The timid, shy Emilius found in every business and accident of life so many difficulties, such insurmountable hindrances, that it might seem to have been an ironical whim of his destiny which brought him and Roderick together, Roderick being in everything the reverse of his friend. Inconstant, flighty, always determined by the first impression, and kindling in an instant, he engaged in everything, had a plan for every occasion; no undertaking was too arduous for him, no obstacle could deter him. But in the midst of the pursuit he slackened and wearied just as suddenly as at first he had caught fire and sprung forward. Whatever then opposed him, was for him not a spur to urge him onward, but only led him to abandon what he had so hotly rushed into; so that Roderick was every day thoughtlessly beginning something new, and with no better cause relinquishing and idly forgetting what he had begun the day before. Hence, never a day passed but the friends got into a quarrel, which seemed to threaten the death of their friendship; and yet what to all appearance thus severed them, was perhaps the very thing that most closely bound them together; each loved the other heartily; but each found passing satisfaction in being able to discharge the most justly deserved reproaches upon his friend.
Emilius, a rich young man, of a susceptible and melancholy temperament, on the death of his parents had become master of his fortune. He had set out on a journey in order thereby to complete his education, but had now already spent several months in a large town, for the sake of enjoying the pleasures of the carnival, about which he never gave himself the least trouble, and of making certain arrangements of importance about his fortune with some relations, to whom as yet he had scarcely paid a visit. On the road he had fallen in with the restless, ever-shifting and veering Roderick, who was living at variance with his guardians, and who, to free himself wholly from them and their burdensome admonitions, eagerly grasped at the opportunity held out to him by his new friend of becoming his companion on his travels. During their journey they had often been on the point of separating; but each after every dispute had only felt the more clearly that he could not live without the other. Scarce had they left their carriage in any town, when Roderick had already seen everything remarkable in it, to forget it all again on the morrow; while Emilius took a week to acquire a thorough knowledge of the place from his books, lest he should omit seeing anything that was to be seen; and after all, from indolence and indifference thought there was hardly anything worth his while to go and look at. Roderick had immediately made a thousand acquaintances, and visited every public place of entertainment; often too he brought his new-made friends to the lonely chamber of Emilius, and would then leave him alone with them, as soon as they began to tire him. At other times he would confound the modest Emilius by extravagantly praising his merits and his acquirements before intelligent and learned men, and by giving them to understand how much they might learn from his friend about languages, or antiquities, or the fine arts, although he himself could never find time for listening to him on such subjects, when the conversation happened to turn on them. But if Emilius ever chanced to be in a more active mood, he might almost make sure of his truant friend having caught cold the night before at a ball or a sledge-party, and being forced to keep his bed; so that, with the liveliest, most restless, and most communicative of men for his companion, Emilius lived in the greatest solitude.
To-day he confidently expected him; for Roderick had been forced to give him a solemn promise of spending the evening with him, in order to learn what it was that for weeks had been depressing and agitating his thoughtful friend. Meanwhile Emilius wrote down the following lines:
'Tis sweet when spring its choir assembles,
And every nightingale is steeping
The trees in his melodious weeping,
Till leaf and bloom with rapture trembles.
Fair is the net which moonlight weaves;
Fair are the breezes' gambolings,
As with lime-odours on their wings
They chase each other through the leaves.
Bright is the glory of the rose,
When Love's rich magic decks the earth,
From countless roses Love looks forth,
Those stars wherewith Love's heaven glows.
But sweeter, fairer, brighter far
To me that little lamp's pale gleaming,
When through the narrow casement streaming,
It bids me hail my evening star;
As from their braids her locks she flings,
Then twines them in a flowery band,
While at each motion of her hand
The white robe to her fair form clings;
Or when she breaks her lute's deep slumbers,
And as at morning's touch up-darting,
The notes, beneath her fingers starting,
Dance o'er the strings in playful numbers.
To stop their flight her voice she pours
Full after them; they laugh and fly,
And to my heart for refuge hie;
Her voice pursues them through its doors.
Leave me, ye fierce ones! hence remove!
They bar themselves within, and say,
'Till this be broken, here we stay,
That thou mayst know what 'tis to love.'
Emilius arose fretfully. It grew darker, and Roderick came not, and he was wishing to tell him of his love for an unknown fair one, who dwelt in the opposite house, and who kept him all day long at home, and waking through many a night. At length footsteps sounded up the stairs; the door opened without anybody knocking at it, and in walked two gay masks with ugly visages, one a Turk, dressed in red and blue silk, the other a Spaniard in pale yellow and pink with many waving feathers on his hat. As Emilius was becoming impatient, Roderick took off his mask, showed his well-known laughing countenance, and said: 'Heyday, my good friend, what a drowned puppy of a face! Is this the way to look in carnival time? I and our dear young officer are come to fetch you away. There is a grand ball to-night at the masquerade rooms; and as I know you have forsworn ever going out in any other suit than that which you always wear, of the devil's own colour, come with us as black as you are, for it is already somewhat late.'
Emilius felt angry, and said: 'You have, it seems, according to custom, altogether forgotten our agreement. I am extremely sorry,' he continued, turning to the stranger, 'that I cannot possibly accompany you; my friend has been over-hasty in promising for me; indeed I cannot go out at all, having something of importance to talk to him about.'
The stranger, who was well-bred, and saw what Emilius meant, withdrew; but Roderick, with the utmost indifference, put on his mask again, placed himself before the glass, and said: 'Verily I am a hideous figure, am I not? To say the truth, it is a tasteless, worthless, disgusting device.'
'That there can be no question about,' answered Emilius, in high indignation. 'Making a caricature of yourself, and making a fool of yourself, are among the pleasures you are always driving after at full gallop.'
'Because you do not like dancing yourself,' said the other, 'and look upon dancing as a mischievous invention, not a soul in the world must wear a merry face. How tiresome it is, when a person is made up of nothing but whims!'
'Doubtless!' replied his angry friend, 'and you give me ample opportunity for finding that it is so. I thought after our agreement you would have given me this evening; but——'
'But it is the carnival, you know,' pursued the other, 'and all my acquaintances and certain fair ladies are expecting me at the grand ball to-night. Assure yourself, my good friend, it is mere disease in you that makes you so unreasonable against all such matters.'
'Which of us has the fairest claim to disease,' said Emilius, 'I will not examine. At least your inconceivable frivolousness, your hunger and thirst after stop-gaps for every hour you are awake, your wild-goose chase after pleasures that leave the heart empty, seem not to me altogether the healthiest state of the soul. In certain things, at all events, you might make a little allowance for my weakness, if it must once for all pass for such: and there is nothing in the world that so jars through and through me as a ball with its frightful music. Somebody once said, that to a deaf person who cannot hear the music, a set of dancers must look like so many patients for a mad-house; but, in my opinion, this dreadful music itself, this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each treading on its own heels, in those accursed tunes which ram themselves into our memories, yea, I might say, mix themselves up with our very blood, so that one cannot get rid of their taint for many a miserable day after—this to me is the very trance of madness; and if I could ever bring myself to think dancing endurable, it must be dancing to the tune of silence.'
'Well done, signor Paradox-monger!' exclaimed the mask. 'Why, you are so far gone, that you think the most natural, most innocent, and merriest thing in the world unnatural, ay, and shocking.'
'I cannot change my feelings,' said his grave friend. 'From my very childhood these tunes have made me wretched, and have often well-nigh driven me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and furies in the world of sound, and come thus and buzz round my head, and grin at me with horrid laughter.'
'All nervous irritability!' returned the other; 'just like your extravagant abhorrence of spiders and many other harmless insects.'
'Harmless you call them,' cried Emilius, now quite untuned, 'because you have no repugnance toward them. To one, however, who feels the same disgust and loathing, the same nameless horror, that I feel, rise up in his soul and shoot through his whole being at the sight of them, these miscreate deformities, such as toads, spiders, or that most loathsome of nature's excrements, the bat, are not indifferent or insignificant: their very existence is directly at enmity and wages war with his. In truth, one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful spectres, and those births of night which we see in sickness, to take root therein, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions, when the commonest every-day life brings before our eyes such frightful distorted master-pieces among the works of horror. Yet, can we really and faithfully love the beautiful, without being stricken with pain at the sight of such monstrosities?'
'Wherefore stricken with pain?' asked Roderick. 'Why should the great realm of the waters and the seas present us with nothing but those terrors which you have accustomed yourself to find there? Why not rather look on such creatures as strange, entertaining, and ludicrous mummers, and on the whole region in the light of a great masked ball-room? But your whims go still further; for as you love roses with a kind of idolatry, there are many flowers for which you have a no less vehement hatred: yet what harm has the dear good tulip ever done you, or all the other dutiful children of summer that you persecute? So again you have an aversion to many colours, to many scents, and to many thoughts; and you take no pains to harden yourself against these weaknesses, but yield to them and sink down into them as into a luxurious feather-bed; and I often fear I shall lose you altogether some day, and find nothing but a patchwork of whims and prejudices sitting at that table instead of my Emilius.'
Emilius was wrath to the bottom of his heart, and answered not a word. He had long given up all design of making his intended confession; nor did the thoughtless Roderick show the least wish to hear the secret which his melancholy friend had announced to him with such an air of solemnity. He sat carelessly in the arm-chair, playing with his mask, when he suddenly cried: 'Be so kind, Emilius, as to lend me your large cloak.'
'What for?' asked the other.
'I hear music in the church on the opposite side of the street,' answered Roderick, 'and this hour has hitherto escaped me every evening since we have been here. To-day it comes just as if called for. I can hide my dress under your cloak, which will also cover my mask and turban, and when it is over I can go straight to the ball.'
Emilius muttered between his teeth as he looked in the wardrobe for his cloak, then constraining himself to an ironical smile, gave it to Roderick, who was already on his legs. 'There is my Turkish dagger which I bought yesterday,' said the mask, as he wrapped himself up; 'put it by for me; it is a bad habit carrying about toys of cold steel: one can never tell what ill use may be made of them, should a quarrel arise, or any other knot which it is easier to cut than to untie. We meet again to-morrow; farewell; a pleasant evening to you.' He waited for no reply, but hastened down-stairs.
When Emilius was alone, he tried to forget his anger, and to fix his attention on the laughable side of his friend's behaviour. After a while his eyes rested upon the shining, finely-wrought dagger, and he said: 'What must be the feelings of a man who could thrust this sharp iron into the breast of an enemy! but oh, what must be those of one who could hurt a beloved object with it! He locked it up, then gently folded back the shutters of his window, and looked across the narrow street. But no light was there; all was dark in the opposite house; the dear form that dwelt in it, and that used about this time to show herself at her household occupations, seemed to be absent. 'Perhaps she is at the ball,' thought Emilius, little as it suited her retired way of life.
Suddenly, however, a light entered; the little girl whom his beloved unknown had about her, and with whom, during the day and evening, she busied herself in various ways, carried a candle through the room, and closed the window-shutters. An opening remained light, large enough for over-looking a part of the little chamber from the spot where Emilius stood; and there the happy youth would often bide till after midnight, fixed as though he had been charmed there. He was full of gladness when he saw her teaching the child to read, or instructing her in sewing and knitting. Upon inquiry he had learnt that the little girl was a poor orphan whom his fair maiden had charitably taken into the house to educate her. Emilius's friends could not conceive why he lived in this narrow street, in this comfortless lodging, why he was so little to be seen in society, or how he employed himself. Without employment, in solitude he was happy: only he felt angry with himself and his own timidity and shyness, which kept him from venturing to seek a nearer acquaintance with this fair being, notwithstanding the friendliness with which on many occasions she had greeted and thanked him. He knew not that she would often bend over him eyes no less love-sick than his own; nor boded what wishes were forming in her heart, of what an effort, of what a sacrifice she felt herself capable, so she might but attain to the possession of his love.
After walking a few times up and down the room, when the light had departed with the child, he suddenly resolved upon going to the ball, though it was so against his inclination and his nature; for it struck him that his Unknown might have made an exception to her quiet mode of life, in order for once to enjoy the world, and its gaieties. The streets were brilliantly lighted up, the snow crackled under his feet, carriages rolled by, and masks in every variety of dress whistled and chirped as they passed him. From many a house there sounded the dancing-music he so abhorred, and he could not bring himself to go the nearest way towards the ball-room, whither people from every direction were streaming and thronging. He walked round the old church, gazed at its lofty tower rising solemnly into the dark sky, and felt gladdened by the stillness and loneliness of the remote square. Within the recess of a large door-way, the varied sculptures of which he had always contemplated with pleasure, recollecting, while so engaged, the olden times and the arts which adorned them, he now again paused, to give himself up for a few moments to his thoughts. He had not stood long, before a figure drew his attention, which kept restlessly walking to and fro, and seemed to be waiting for somebody. By the light of a lamp that was burning before an image of the Virgin, he clearly distinguished its features as well as its strange garb. It was an old woman of the uttermost hideousness, which struck the eye the more from being brought out by its extravagant contrast with a scarlet bodice embroidered with gold; the gown she wore was dark, and the cap on her head shone likewise with gold. Emilius fancied at first it must be some tasteless mask that had strayed there by mistake; but he was soon convinced by the clear light that the old, brown, wrinkled face was one of Nature's ploughing, and no mimic exaggeration. Many minutes had not passed when there appeared two men, wrapped up in cloaks, who seemed to approach the spot with cautions footsteps, often looking about them, as if to observe whether anybody was following. The old woman walked up to them. 'Have you got the candles?' asked she hastily, and with a gruff voice. 'Here they are,' said one of the men; 'you know the price; let the matter be settled forthwith.' The old woman seemed to be giving him money, which he counted over beneath his cloak. 'I rely upon you,' she again began, 'that they are made exactly according to the prescription, at the right time and place, so that the work cannot fail.' 'Feel safe as to that,' returned the man, and walked rapidly away. The other, who remained behind, was a youth: he took the old woman by the hand, and said: 'Can it then be, Alexia, that such rites and forms of words, as those old stories, in which I never could put faith, tell us, can fetter the free will of man, and make love and hatred grow in the heart?' 'So it is,' answered the scarlet woman; 'but one and one must make two, and many a one must be added thereto, before such things come to pass. It is not these candles alone, moulded beneath the midnight darkness of the new moon, and drenched with human blood, it is not the muttering magical words and invocations alone, that can give you the mastery over the soul of another; much more than this belongs to such works; but it is all known to the initiated.' 'I rely on you then,' said the stranger. 'To-morrow after midnight I am at your service,' returned the old woman. 'You shall not be the first person that ever was dissatisfied with the tidings I brought him. To-night, as you have heard, I have some one else in hand, one whose senses and understanding our art shall twist about whichever way we choose, as easily as I twist this hair out of my head.' These last words she uttered with a half grin: they now separated, and withdrew in different directions.
Emilius came from the dark niche shuddering, and raised his looks upon the image of the Virgin with the Child. 'Before thine eyes, thou mild and blessed one,' said he, half aloud, 'are these miscreants daring to hold their market, and trafficking in their hellish drugs. But as thou embracest thy Child with thy love, even so doth the unseen Love hold us all in its protecting arms, and we feel their touch, and our poor hearts beat in joy and in trembling toward a greater heart that will never forsake us.'
Clouds were wandering along over the pinnacles of the tower and the steep roof of the church; the everlasting stars looked down from amongst them, sparkling with mild serenity; and Emilius turned his thoughts resolutely away from these nightly horrors, and thought upon the beauty of his Unknown. He again entered the living streets, and bent his steps toward the brightly illuminated ball-room, whence voices, and the rattling of carriages, and now and then, between the pauses, the clamorous music came sounding to his ears.
In the hall he was instantly lost amid the streaming throng; dancers sprang round him, masks shot by him to and fro, kettle-drums and trumpets deafened his ears, and it was unto him as though human life were nothing but a dream. He walked along the lines; his eye alone was watchful, seeking for those beloved eyes and that fair head with its brown locks, for the sight of which he yearned to-day even more intensely than at other times; and yet he inwardly reproached the adored being for enduring to plunge into and lose itself in such a stormy sea of confusion and folly. 'No,' said he to himself, 'no heart that loves can lay itself open to this waste hubbub of noise, in which every longing and every tear of love is scoffed and mocked at by the pealing laughter of wild trumpets. The whispering of trees, the murmuring of fountains, harp-tones, and gentle song gushing forth from an overflowing bosom, are the sounds in which love abides. But this is the very thundering and shouting of hell in the trance of its despair.'
He found not what he was seeking; for the belief that her beloved face might perchance be lying hid behind some odious mask was what he could not possibly bring himself to. Thrice already had he ranged up and down the hall, and had vainly passed in array every sitting and unmasked female, when the Spaniard joined him and said: 'I am glad that after all you are come. You seem to be looking for your friend.'
Emilius had quite forgotten him: he said, however, in some confusion: 'Indeed I wonder at not having met him here; his mask is easily known.'
'Can you guess what the strange fellow is about?' answered the young officer. 'He did not dance, or even remain half an hour in the ball-room; for he soon met with his friend Anderson, who is just come from the country. Their conversation fell upon literature. As Anderson had not yet seen the new poem, Roderick would not rest till they had opened one of the back rooms for him; and there he now is, sitting with his companion beside a solitary taper, and declaiming the whole poem to him, beginning with the invocation to the Muse.'
'It is just like him,' said Emilius; 'he is always the child of the moment. I have done all in my power, not even shunning some amicable quarrels, to break him of this habit of always living extempore, and playing away his whole being in impromptus, card after card, as it happens to turn up, without once looking through his hand. But these follies have taken such deep root in his heart, he would sooner part with his best friend than with them. That very same poem, of which he is so fond that he always carries a copy of it in his pocket, he was desirous of reading to me, and I had even urgently entreated him to do so; but we were scarcely over the first description of the moon, when, just as I was resigning myself to an enjoyment of its beauties, he suddenly jumped up, ran off, came back with the cook's apron round his waist, tore down the bell-rope in ringing to have the fire lighted, and insisted on dressing me some beef-steaks, for which I had not the least appetite, and of which he fancies himself the best cook in Europe, though, if he is lucky, he spoils them only nine times out of ten.'
The Spaniard laughed, and asked: 'Has he never been in love?'
'In his way,' replied Emilius very gravely; 'as if he were making game both of love and of himself, with a dozen women at a time, and, if you would believe his words, raving after every one of them; but ere a week passes over his head they are all sponged out of it together, and not even a blot of them remains.'
They parted in the crowd, and Emilius walked toward the remote apartment, whence already from afar he heard his friend's loud recitative. 'Ah, so you are here too,' cried Roderick, as he entered; 'that is just what it should be. I have got to the very passage at which we broke down the other day; seat yourself, and you may listen to the rest.'
'I am not in a humour for it now,' said Emilius; 'besides, the room and the hour do not seem to me altogether fitted for such an employment.'
'And why not?' answered Roderick. 'Time and place are made for us, and not we for time and place. Is not good poetry as good at one place as at another? Or would you prefer dancing? there is scarcity of men; and with the help of nothing more than a few hours' jumping and a pair of tired legs, you may lay strong siege to the hearts of as many grateful beauties as you please.'
'Good-bye!' cried the other, already in the door-way; 'I am going home.'
Roderick called after him: 'Only one word! I set off with this gentleman at daybreak to-morrow, to spend a few days in the country, but will look in upon you to take leave before we start. Should you be asleep, as is most likely, do not take the trouble of waking; for in a couple of days I shall be with you again.—The strangest being on earth!' he continued, turning to his new friend, 'so moping and fretful and gloomy, that he turns all his pleasures sour; or rather there is no such thing as pleasure for him. Instead of walking about with his fellow-creatures in broad daylight and enjoying himself, he gets down to the bottom of the well of his thoughts, for the sake of now and then having a glimpse of a star. Everything must be in the superlative for him; everything must be pure and noble and celestial; his heart must be always heaving and throbbing, even when he is standing before a puppet-show. He never laughs or cries, but can only smile and weep; and there is mighty little difference between his weeping and his smiling. When anything, be it what you will, falls short of his anticipations and preconceptions, which are always flying up out of reach and sight, he puts on a tragical face, and complains that it is a base and soulless world. At this moment, I doubt not, he is exacting, that under the masks of a Pantaloon and a Pulcinello there should be a heart glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should out moralise Hamlet upon the nothingness of sublunary things; and should it not be so, the dew will rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole scene with desponding contempt.'
'He must be melancholic then?' asked his hearer.
'Not that exactly,' answered Roderick. 'He has only been spoilt by his over-fond parents, and by himself. He has accustomed himself to let his heart ebb and flow as regularly as the sea, and if this motion ever chances to intermit, he cries out miracle! and would offer a prize to the genius that can satisfactorily explain so marvellous a phenomenon. He is the best fellow under the sun; but all my painstaking to break him of this perverseness is utterly vain and thrown away; and if I would not earn sorry thanks for my good intentions, I must even let him follow his own course.'
'He seems to need a physician,' remarked Anderson.
'It is one of his whims,' said Roderick, 'to entertain a supreme contempt for the whole medical art. He will have it that every disease is something different and distinct in every patient, that it can be brought under no class, and that it is absurd to think of healing it, either by attention to ancient practice or by what is called theory. Indeed he would much rather apply to an old woman, and make use of sympathetic cures. On the same principle, he despises all foresight, on whatever occasion, as well as everything like regularity, moderation, and common sense. The last above all he holds in especial abhorrence, as the antipodes and arch-enemy of all enthusiasm. From his very childhood he framed for himself an ideal of a noble character; and his highest aim is to render himself what he considers such, that is, a being who shows his superiority to all things earthy by his contempt for gold. Merely in order that he may not be suspected of being parsimonious, or giving unwillingly, or ever talking about money, he tosses it about him right and left by handfuls; with all his large income is for ever poor and distressed, and becomes the fool of everybody not endowed with precisely the same kind of magnanimity, which for himself he is determined that he will have. To be his friend is the undertaking of all undertakings; for he is so irritable, one need only cough or eat with one's knife, or even pick one's teeth, to offend him mortally.'
'Was he never in love?' asked his country friend.
'Whom should he love? whom could he love?' answered Roderick. 'He scorns all the daughters of earth; and were he ever to suspect that his beloved had not an angelical contempt for dress, or liked dancing as well as star-gazing, it would break his heart; still more appalling would it be, if she were ever so unfortunate as to sneeze.'
Meanwhile Emilius was again standing amid the throng; but suddenly there came over him that uneasiness, that shivering, which had already so often seized his heart when among a crowd in a state of similar excitement; it chased him out of the ball-room and house, down along the deserted streets; nor, till he reached his lonely chamber, did he recover himself and the quiet possession of his senses. The night-light was already kindled; he sent his servant to bed; everything in the opposite house was silent and dark; and he sat down to pour forth in verse the feelings which had been aroused by the ball.
Within the heart 'tis still;
Sleep each wild thought encages;
Now stirs a wicked will,
Would see how madness rages.
And cries, Wild Spirit, awake!
Loud cymbals catch the cry
And back its echoes shake;
And shouting peals of laughter,
The trumpet rushes after,
And cries, Wild Spirit, awake!
Amidst them flute tones fly,
Like arrows keen and numberless;
And with bloodhound yell
Pipes the onset swell;
And violins and violoncellos,
Creeking, clattering,
Shrieking and shattering;
And horns whence thunder bellows;
To leave the victim slumberless,
And drag forth prisoned madness,
And cruelly murder all quiet and innocent gladness.
What will be the end of this commotion?
Where the shore to this turmoiling ocean?
What seeks the tossing throng,
As it wheels and whirls along?
On! on! the lustres
Like hell-stars bicker:
Let us twine in closer clusters.
On! on! ever thicker and quicker!
How the silly things throb, throb amain!
Hence, all quiet!
Hither, riot!
Peal more proudly,
Squeal more loudly,
Ye cymbals, ye trumpets! Be-dull all pain,
Till it laugh again.
Thou becomest to me, beauty's daughter;
Smiles ripple over thy lips,
And o'er thine eyes blue water;
O let me breathe on thee,
Ere parted hence we flee.
Ere aught that light eclipse.
I know that beauty's flowers soon wither;
Those lips within whose rosy cells
Thy spirit warbles its sweet spells,
Death's clammy kiss ere long will press together.
I know, that face so fair and full
Is but a masquerading skull;
But hail to thee, skull so fair and so fresh!
Why should I weep and whine and wail,
That what blooms now must soon grow pale,
That worms must feed on that sweet flesh?
Let me laugh but to-day and to-morrow,
And I care not for sorrow,
While thus on the waves of the dance by each other we sail!
Now thou art mine
And I am thine:
And what though pain and sorrow wait
To seize thee at the gate,
And sob and tear and groan and sigh
Stand ranged in state
On thee to fly;
Blithely let us look and cheerily
On death, that grins so drearily.
What would grief with us, or anguish?
They are foes that we know how to vanquish.
I press thine answering fingers,
Thy look upon me lingers,
Or the fringe of thy garment will waft me a kiss:
Thou rollest on in light;
I fall back into night;
Even despair is bliss.
From this delight,
From this wild laughter's surge,
Perchance there may emerge
Foul jealousy and scorn and spite.
But this our glory! and pride!
When thee I despise,
I turn but mine eyes,
And the fair one beside thee will welcome my gaze;
And she is my bride;
Oh, happy, happy days!
Or shall it be her neighbour,
Whose eyes like a sabre
Flash and pierce,
Their glance is so fierce?
Thus capering and prancing,
All together go dancing
Adown life's giddy cave;
Nor living nor loving,
But dizzily roving
Through dreams to a grave.
There below 'tis yet worse;
Its flowers and its clay
Roof a gloomier day,
Hide a still deeper curse.
Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream!
Ye horns, shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream!
And jump, caper, leap, prance, dance yourselves out of breath!
For your life is all art;
Love has given you no heart:
Therefore shout till ye plunge into bottomless death.
He had ended and was standing at the window. Then came she into the opposite chamber, lovely, as he had never yet seen her; her brown hair floated freely and played in wanton ringlets about the whitest of necks; she was but lightly clad, and it seemed as though she was about to finish some household task at this late hour of the night before going to bed; for she placed two lights in two corners of the room, set to rights the green baize on the table, and again retired. Emilius was still sunk in his sweet dreams, and gazing on the image which his beloved had left on his mind, when to his horror the fearful, the scarlet old woman walked through the chamber; the gold on her head and breast glared ghastlily as it threw back the light. She had vanished again. Was he to believe his eyes? Was it not some blinding deception of the night, some spectre that his own feverish imagination had conjured up before him? But no! she returned still more hideous than before, with a long gray-and-black mane flying wildly and ruggedly about her breast and back. The fair maiden followed her, pale, frozen up; her lovely bosom was without a covering; but the whole form was like a marble statue. Betwixt them they led the little sweet child, weeping and clinging entreatingly to the fair maiden, who looked not down upon it. The child clasped and lifted up its little beseeching hands, and stroked the pale neck and cheeks of the marble beauty. But she held it fast by the hair, and in the other hand a silver basin. Then the old woman gave a growl, and pulled out a long knife, and drew it across the white neck of the child. Here something wound forth from behind them, which they seemed not to perceive; or it must have produced in them the same deep horror as in Emilius. The ghastly neck of a serpent curled forth, scale after scale, lengthening and ever lengthening out of the darkness, and stooped down between them over the child, whose lifeless limbs hung from the old woman's arms; its black tongue licked up the spirting red blood, and a green sparkling eye shot over into Emilius's eye, and brain, and heart, so that he fell at the same instant to the ground.
He was senseless when found by Roderick some hours after.
A party of friends was sitting, on the brightest summer morning, in a green arbour, assembled round an excellent breakfast. Laughter and jests passed round, and many a time did the glasses kiss with a merry health to the youthful couple, and a wish that they might be the happiest of the happy. The bride and bridegroom were not present; the fair one being still busied about her dress, while the young husband was sauntering alone in a distant avenue, musing upon his happiness.
'What a pity,' said Anderson, 'that we are to have no music. All our ladies are beclouded at the thought, and never in their whole lives longed for a dance so much as to-day, when to have one is quite out of the question. It is far too painful to his feelings.'
'I can tell you a secret though,' said a young officer; 'which is, that we are to have a dance after all, and a rare madcap and riotous one it will he. Everything is already arranged; the musicians are come secretly, and quartered out of sight. Roderick has managed it all; for he says, one ought not to let him have his own way, or to humour his strange prejudices over-much, especially on such a day as this. Besides, he is already grown far more like a human being, and is much more sociable than he used to be; so that I think even he will not dislike this alteration. Indeed, the whole wedding has been brought about all of a sudden, in a way that nobody could have expected.'
'His whole life,' said Anderson, 'is no less singular than his character. You must all remember how, being engaged on his travels, he arrived last autumn in our city, fixed himself there for the winter, lived like a melancholy man, scarcely ever leaving his room, and never gave himself the least trouble about our theatre or any other amusement. He almost quarrelled with Roderick, his most intimate friend, for trying to divert him, and not pampering him in all his moping humours. In fact, this exaggerated irritability and moodiness must have been a disease that was gathering in his body; for, as you know, he was seized four months since with a most violent nervous fever, so that we were all forced to give him up for lost. After his fancies had raved themselves out, on returning to his senses, he had almost entirely lost his memory; his childhood, indeed, and his early youth were still present to his mind, but he could not recollect anything that had occurred during his travels, or immediately before his illness. He was forced to begin anew his acquaintance with all his friends, even with Roderick; and only by little and little has it grown lighter with him; but slowly has the past with all that had befallen him come again, though still in dim colours, over his memory. He had been removed into his uncle's house, that the better care might be taken of him, and he was like a child, letting them do with him whatever they chose. The first time he went out to enjoy the warmth of spring in the park, he saw a girl sitting thoughtfully by the road-side. She looked up; her eye met his; and, as it were seized with an unaccountable yearning, he bade the carriage stop, got out, sat down by her, took hold of her hands, and poured himself forth in a full stream of tears. His friends were again alarmed for his understanding; but he grew tranquil, lively and conversable, got introduced to the girl's parents, and at the very first besought her hand; which, as her parents did not refuse their consent, she granted him. Thenceforward he was happy, and a new life sprang up within him; every day he became healthier and more cheerful. A week ago he visited me at this country-seat of mine, and was above measure delighted with it; indeed so much so that he would not rest till he had made me sell it to him. I might easily have turned his passionate wish to my own good account, and to his injury; for, whenever he sets his heart on a thing, he will have it, and that forthwith. He immediately made his arrangements, and had furniture brought hither that he may spend the summer months here; and in this way it has come to pass that we are all now assembled together to celebrate our friend's marriage at this villa, which a few days since belonged to me.'
The house was large, and situated in a very lovely country. One side looked down upon a river, and beyond it upon pleasant hills, clad and girt round with shrubs and trees of various kinds; immediately before it lay a beautiful flower-garden. Here the orange and lemon trees were ranged in a large open hall, from which small doors led to the store-rooms and cellars, and pantries. On the other side spread the green plain of a meadow, which was immediately bordered by a large park; here the two long wings of the house formed a spacious court; and three broad, open galleries, supported by rows of pillars standing above each other, connected all the apartments in the building, which gave it on this side an interesting and singular character; for figures were continually moving along these arcades in the discharge of their various household tasks; new forms kept stepping forth between the pillars and out of every room, which reappeared soon after above or below, to be lost behind some other doors; the company too would often assemble there for tea or for play; and thus, when seen from below, the whole had the look of a theatre, before which everybody would gladly pause awhile, expecting, as his fancies wandered, that something strange or pleasing would soon be taking place above.
The party of young people were just rising, when the full-dressed bride came through the garden and walked up to them. She was clad in violet-coloured velvet; a sparkling necklace lay cradled on her white neck; the costly lace just allowed her swelling bosom to glimmer through; her brown hair was tinged yet more beautifully by its wreath of myrtles and white roses. She addressed each in turn with a kind greeting, and the young men were astonished at her surpassing beauty. She had been gathering flowers in the garden, and was now returning into the house, to see after the preparations for the dinner. The tables had been placed in the lower open gallery, and shone dazzlingly with their white coverings and their load of sparkling crystal; rich clusters of many-coloured flowers rose from the graceful necks of alabaster vases; green garlands, starred with white blossoms, twined round the columns; and it was a lovely sight to behold the bride gliding along with gentle motion between the tables and the pillars, amid the light of the flowers, overlooking the whole with a searching glance, then vanishing, and re-appearing a moment afterwards higher up to pass into her chamber.
'She is the loveliest and most enchanting creature I ever saw,' cried Anderson; 'our friend is indeed the happiest of men.'
'Even her paleness,' said the officer, taking up the word, 'heightens her beauty. Her brown eyes sparkle only more intensely above those white cheeks, and beneath those dark locks; and the singular, almost burning, redness of her lips gives a truly magical appearance to her face.'
'The air of silent melancholy that surrounds her,' said Anderson, 'sheds a lofty majesty over her whole form.'
The bridegroom joined them, and inquired after Roderick. They had all missed him some time since, and could not conceive where he could be tarrying; and they all set out in search of him. 'He is below in the hall,' said at length a young man whom they happened to ask, 'in the midst of the coachmen, footmen, and grooms, showing off tricks at cards, which they cannot grow tired of staring at.' They went in, and interrupted the noisy admiration of the servants, without, however, disturbing Roderick, who quietly pursued his conjuring exhibition. When he had finished, he walked with the others into the garden, and said, 'I do it only to strengthen the fellows in their faith: for these puzzles give a hard blow to their groomships' free-thinking inclinations, and help to make them true believers.'
'I see,' said the bridegroom, 'my all-sufficing friend, among his other talents, does not think that of a mountebank beneath his cultivation.'
'We live in a strange time,' replied the other. 'Who knows whether mountebanks may not come to rule the roost in their turn. One ought to despise nothing nowadays: the veriest straw of talent may be that which is to break the camel's back.'
When the two friends found themselves alone, Emilius again turned down the dark avenue, and said, 'Why am I in such a gloomy mood on this the happiest day of my life? But I assure you, Roderick, little as you will believe it, I am not made for this moving about among such a mob of human beings; for this keeping my attention on the qui vive for every letter of the alphabet, so that neither A nor Z may go without all fitting respect; for this making a bow to her tenth, and shaking hands with my twentieth; for this rendering of formal homage to her parents; for this handing a flower from my nosegay of compliments to every lady that crosses my eye; for this waiting to receive the tide of newcomers as wave after wave rushes over me, and then turning to give orders that their servants and horses may have each a full trough and pail set before them.'
'That is a watch that goes of its own accord,' answered Roderick. 'Only look at your house, it was just built for such an occasion; and your head-butler, with his right hand taking up at the same time that his left is setting down, and one leg running north while the other seems to be making for south, was begotten and born for no other end than to put confusion in order. He would even set my brains to rights if he could get at them; were the whole city here he would find room for all; and he will make your hospitality the proverb of fifty miles round. Leave all such things to him and to your lovely bride; and where will you find so sweet a lightener of this world's cares?'
'This morning before sunrise,' said Emilius, 'I was walking through the wood; my thoughts were solemnly tuned, and I felt to the bottom of my soul that my life was now receiving its determinate character, that it was become a serious thing, and that this passion had created for me a home and a calling. I passed along by that arbour there, and heard sounds: it was my beloved in close conversation. "Has it not turned out now as I told you?" said a strange voice; "just as I knew it must turn out. You have got your wish, so cheer up and be merry." I would not go near them; afterwards I walked toward the arbour, but they had both already left it. Since then I keep thinking and thinking, what can these words mean?'
Roderick answered: 'Perhaps she may have been in love with you for some time without your knowing it; you are only so much the happier.'
A late nightingale here upraised her song, and seemed to be wishing the lover health and bliss. Emilius became more thoughtful. 'Come down with me, to cheer up your spirits,' said Roderick, 'down to the village, where you will find another couple; for you must not fancy that yours is the only wedding on which to-day's sun is to shine. A young clown, finding his time wear heavily in the house with an ugly old maid, for want of something better to do, did what makes the booby now think himself bound in honour to transform her into his wife. By this time they must both be already dressed, so let us not miss the sight; for doubtless, it will be a most interesting wedding.'
The melancholy man let himself be dragged along by his lively chattering friend, and they soon came to the cottage. The procession was just sallying forth, to go to the church. The young countryman was in his usual linen frock; all his finery consisted in a pair of leather breeches, which he had polished till they shone like a field of dandelions; he was of simple mien, and appeared somewhat confused. The bride was sun-burnt, with but a few farewell leaves of youth still hanging about her; she was coarsely and poorly, but cleanly dressed; some red and blue silk ribbons, already a good deal faded; but what chiefly disfigured her was, that her hair, stiffened with lard, flour, and pins, had been swept back from her forehead, and piled up at the top of her head in a mound, on the summit of which lay the bridal chaplet. She smiled and seemed glad at heart, but was shamefaced and downcast. Next came the aged parents; the father too was only a servant about the farm, and the hovel, the furniture, and the clothing, all bore witness that their poverty was extreme. A dirty, squinting musician followed the train, who kept grinning and screaming, and scratching his fiddle, which was patched together of wood and pasteboard, and instead of strings had three bits of pack-thread. The procession halted when his honour, their new master, came up to them. Some mischief-loving servants, young lads and girls, tittered and laughed, and jeered the bridal couple, especially the ladies' maids, who thought themselves far handsomer, and saw themselves infinitely better clad, and wondered how people could be so vulgar. A shuddering came over Emilius; he looked round for Roderick, but the latter had already run away from him again. An impertinent coxcomb, with a head pilloried in his high starched neck-cloth, a servant to one of the visitors, eager to show his wit, pressed up to Emilius, giggling, and cried: 'Now, your honour, what says your honour to this grand couple? They can neither of them guess where they are to find bread for to-morrow, and yet they mean to give a ball this afternoon, and that famous performer there is already engaged.' 'No bread!' said Emilius; 'can such things be?' 'Their wretchedness,' continued the chatterbox, 'is known to the whole neighbourhood; but the fellow says he bears the creature the same good-will, although she is such a sorry bit of clay. Ay, verily, as the song says, love can make black white! The couple of baggages have not even a bed, and must pass their wedding night on the straw. They have just been round to every house begging a pint of small beer, with which they mean to get drunk; a royal treat for a wedding day, your honour!' Everybody round about laughed loudly, and the unhappy, despised pair cast down their eyes. Emilius indignantly pushed the chatterer away. 'Here, take this!' he cried, and threw a hundred ducats, which he had received that morning, into the hands of the amazed bridegroom. The betrothed couple and their parents wept aloud, threw themselves clumsily on their knees, and kissed his hands and the skirts of his coat. He tried to make his escape. 'Let that keep hunger out of your doors as long as it lasts!' he exclaimed, quite stunned by his feelings. 'Oh!' they all screamed, 'oh, your honour! we shall be rich and happy till the day of our deaths, and longer too, if we live longer.'
He knew not how he got away from them; but he found himself alone, and hastened with unsteady steps into the wood. Here he sought out the thickest, loneliest spot, and threw himself down on a grassy knoll, no longer keeping back the bursting stream of his tears. 'I am sick of life,' he sobbed; 'I cannot be glad and happy, I will not. Make haste and receive me, thou dear kind earth, and hide me in thy cool, refreshing arms from the wild beasts that tread over thee and call themselves men. Oh, God in heaven! how have I deserved that I should rest upon down and wear silk, that the grape should pour forth her most precious blood for me, and that all should throng around me and offer me their homage and love? This poor wretch is better and worthier than I, and misery is his nurse, and mockery and venomous scorn are the only sounds that hail his wedding. Every delicacy that is placed before me, every draught out of my costly goblets, my lying on soft beds, my wearing gold and rich garments, will be unto me like so many sins, now that I have beheld how the world hunts down many thousand thousand wretches, who are hungering after the dry bread that I throw away, and who never know what a good meal is. Oh, now I can fully understand your feelings, ye holy pious, whom the world despises and scorns and scoffs at, who scatter abroad your all, even unto the raiment of your poverty, and did gird sack-cloth about your loins, and did resolve as beggars to endure the gibes and the kicks wherewith brutal insolence and swilling voluptuousness drive away misery from their tables, that by so doing ye might thoroughly purge yourselves from the foul sin of wealth.'
The world, with all its forms of being, hung in a mist before his eyes; he determined to look upon the destitute as his brethren, and to depart far away from the communion of the happy. They had already been waiting for him a long time in the hall, to perform the ceremony; the bride had become uneasy; her parents had gone in search of him through the garden and park; at length he returned, lighter for having wept away his cares, and the solemn knot was tied.
The company then walked from the lower hall toward the open gallery, to seat themselves at table. The bride and bridegroom led the way, and the rest followed in their train. Roderick offered his arm to a young girl who was gay and talkative. 'Why does a bride always cry, and look so sad and serious during the ceremony,' said she, as they mounted the steps.
'Because it is the first moment in which she feels intensely all the weight and meaning and mystery of life,' answered Roderick.
'But our bride,' continued the girl, 'far surpasses in gravity all I have ever yet seen. Indeed, she almost always looks melancholy, and one can never catch her in a downright hearty laugh.'
'This does more honour to her heart,' answered Roderick, himself, contrary to custom, feeling somewhat seriously disposed. 'You know not, perhaps, that the bride a few years ago took a lovely little orphan girl into the house, to educate her. All her time was devoted to the child, and the love of this gentle being was her sweetest reward. The girl was become seven years old, when she was lost during a walk through the town, and in spite of all the means that have been employed, nobody could ever find out what became of her. Our noble-minded hostess has taken this misfortune so much to heart that she has been preyed upon ever since by a silent melancholy, nor can anything win her away from her longing after her little play-fellow.'
'A most interesting adventure, indeed,' said the lady. 'One might see a whole romance in three volumes grow out of this seed. It will be a strange sight, and it will not be for nothing, when this lost star reappears. What a pretty poem it would make! Don't you think so, sir?'
The party arranged themselves at table. The bride and bridegroom sat in the centre, and looked out upon the gay landscape. They talked and drank healths, and the most cheerful humour reigned; the bride's parents were quite happy; the bridegroom alone was reserved and thoughtful, eat but little, and took no part in the conversation. He started when some musical sounds rolled down from above, but grew calm again on finding it was nothing but the soft notes of a bugle, which wandered along with a pleasant murmur over the shrubs and through the park, till they died away on the distant hills. Roderick had stationed the musicians in the gallery overhead, and Emilius was satisfied with this arrangement. Toward the end of the dinner he called his butler, and turning to his bride, said, 'My love, let poverty also have a share of our superfluities.' He then ordered him to send several bottles of wine, some pastry, and other dishes in abundant portions, to the poor couple, so that with them also this day might be a day of rejoicing, unto which in after-times they might look back with delight. 'See, my friend,' cried Roderick, 'how beautifully all things in this world hang together. My idle trick of busying myself about other people's concerns, and my chattering, though you are for ever finding fault with them, have after all been the occasion of this good deed.' Several persons began making pretty speeches to their host on his compassion and kind heart, and the young lady next to Roderick lisped about romantic feelings and sentimental magnanimity. 'O, hold your tongues,' cried Emilius indignantly. 'This is no good action; it is no action at all; it is nothing. When swallows and linnets feed themselves with the crumbs that are thrown away from the waste of this meal, and carry them to their young ones in their nests, shall not I remember a poor brother who needs my help? If I durst follow my heart, ye would laugh and jeer at me, just as ye have laughed and jeered at many others who have gone forth into the wilderness, that they might hear no more of this world and its generosity.'
Everybody was silent, and Roderick, perceiving the most vehement displeasure in his friend's glowing eyes, feared he might forget himself still more in his present ungracious mood, and tried to give the conversation a sudden turn upon other subjects. But Emilius was becoming restless and absent; his eyes were continually wandering toward the upper gallery, where the servants who lived in the top story had many things to do.
'Who is that ugly old woman,' he at length asked, 'that is so busy there, going backwards and forwards, in her gray cloak?' 'She is one of my attendants,' said his bride; 'she is to overlook and manage my waiting-maids and the other girls.' 'How can you bear to have anything so hideous always at your elbow?' replied Emilius. 'Let her alone,' answered the young lady; 'God meant the ugly to live as well as the handsome: and she is such a good, honest creature, she may be of great use to us.'
On rising from table, everybody pressed round the new husband, again wished him joy, and urgently begged that he would consent to their having a ball. The bride too said, breathing a gentle kiss on his forehead: 'You will not deny your wife's first request, my beloved; we have all been looking forward with delight to this moment. It is so long since I danced last, and you have never yet seen me dance. Have you no curiosity how I shall acquit myself in this new character? My mother tells me I look better than at any other time.'
'I never saw you thus cheerful,' said Emilius; 'I will be no disturber of your joys: do just what you please; only let me bargain for nobody asking me to make myself ridiculous by any clumsy capers.'
'Oh, if you are a bad dancer,' she answered, laughing, 'you may feel quite safe; everybody will readily consent to your sitting still.' The bride then retired to put on her ball-dress.
'She does not know,' said Emilius to Roderick, with whom he withdrew, 'that I can pass from the next room into hers through a secret door; I will surprise her while she is dressing.'
When Emilius had left them, and many of the ladies were also gone to make such changes in their attire as were necessary for the ball, Roderick took the young men aside, and led the way to his own room. 'It is wearing toward evening,' said he, 'and will soon be dark; so make haste, every one of you, and mask yourselves, that we may render this night glorious in the annals of merriment and madness. Give your fancies free range in choosing your characters: the wilder and uglier the better. Try every combination of shaggy mane, and squinting eye, and mouth like a gaping volcano; build mountains upon your shoulders, or fatten yourselves into Falstaffs; and as a whet to your inventions, I hereby promise a kiss from the bride to the figure that would be the likeliest to make her miscarry. A wedding is such a strange event in one's life; the bride and bridegroom are so suddenly plunged, as it were by magic, head over heels into a new, unaccustomed element, that it is impossible to infuse too much of madness and folly into this feast, in order to keep pace with the whirlpool that is bearing a brace of human beings from the state in which they were two, into the state in which they become one, and to let all things round about them be fit accompaniments for the dizzy dream on the wings of which they are floating toward a new life. So let us rave away the night, making all sail before the breeze; and a fig for such as look twice on the grave sour faces that would have you behave rationally.'
'Don't be afraid,' said the young officer; 'we have brought from town with us a large chest full of masks and mad carnival dresses, such as would make even you stare.'
'But see here,' returned Roderick, 'what a gem I have got from my tailor, who was just going to cut up this peerless robe into strips. He bought it of an old crone, who must doubtless have worn it on gala days when she went to Lucifer's drawing-room on the Blocksberg. Look at this scarlet bodice, with its gold tassels and fringe, at this cap besmeared with the last fee the hag got from Beelzebub or his imps: it will give me a right worshipful air. To match such jewels, there is this green velvet petticoat with its saffron-coloured trimming, and this mask would melt even Medusa to a grin. Thus accoutred I mean to lead the chorus of Graces, myself their mother-queen, toward the bed-chamber. Make all the haste you can; and we will then go in procession to fetch the bride.'
The bugles were still playing; the company were walking about the garden, or sitting before the house. The sun had gone down behind thick, murky clouds, and the country was lying in the gray dusk, when a parting gleam suddenly burst forth athwart the cloudy veil, and flooded every spot around, but especially the building, and its galleries, and pillars, and wreaths of flowers, as it were with red blood. At this moment the parents of the bride and the other spectators beheld a train of the wildest appearances move toward the upper corridor. Roderick led the way as the scarlet old woman, and was followed by hump-backs, mountain-paunches, massy wigs, clowns, punches, skeleton-like pantaloons, female figures embanked by enormous hoops and over-canopied with three feet of horsehair, powder and pomatum, and by every disgusting shape that can be conceived, as though a nightmare were unrolling her stores. They jumped, and twirled, and tottered, and stumbled, and straddled, and strutted, and swaggered along the gallery, and then vanished behind one of the doors. But few of the beholders had been able to laugh: so utterly were they amazed by the strange sight. Suddenly a piercing shriek burst from one of the rooms, and there rushed forth into the blood-red glow of the sunset the pale bride, in a short white frock, round which wreaths of flowers were waving, with her lovely bosom all uncovered, and her rich locks streaming through the air. As though mad, with rolling eyes and distorted face, she darted along the gallery, and, blinded by terror, could find neither door nor staircase; and immediately after rushed Emilius in chase of her, with the sparkling Turkish dagger in his high, upraised hand. Now she was at the end of the passage; she could go no further; he reached her. His masked friends and the gray old woman were running after him. But he had already furiously pierced her bosom, and cut through her white neck; her blood spouted forth into the radiance of the setting sun. The old woman had clasped round him to tear him back; he struggled with her, and hurled himself together with her over the railing, and they both fell, almost lifeless, down at the feet of the relations who had been staring in dumb horror at the bloody scene. Above and below, or hastening down the stairs and along the galleries, were seen the hideous masks, standing or running about in various clusters, like fiends of hell.
Roderick took his dying friend in his arms. He had found him in his wife's room playing with the dagger. She was almost dressed when he entered. At the sight of the hated red bodice his memory had rekindled; the horrible vision of the night had risen upon his mind; and gnashing his teeth he had sprung after his trembling flying bride, to avenge that murder and all those devilish doings. The old woman, ere she expired, confessed the crime that had been wrought; and the gladness and mirth of the whole house were suddenly changed into sorrow and lamentation and dismay.
LUDWIG TIECK.
The author of the foregoing tale, Ludwig Tieck, has lately been introduced to the English reader by an admirable translation of his two exquisite little novels, The Pictures and The Betrothing. He is one among the great German writers who made their appearance during the last ten years of the eighteenth century; a period—whether from any extraordinary productiveness in the power that regulates the seed-time and the harvests of the human race, or from the mighty excitements and stimulants wherewith the world was then teeming—among the richest in the blossoming of genius. For not to mention the great military talents first developed in those days, among the holders of which were he who conquered all the continent of Europe, and he before whom that conqueror fell; turning away from the many rank but luxuriant weeds that sprang up in France, after all its plains had been manured with blood; and fixing the eye solely upon literary excellence, we find in our own country, that the chief part of those men by whom we may hope that the memory of our days will be transmitted to posterity as a thing precious and to be held in honour, that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Southey, and Lamb, and Landor, and Scott, put forth during those ten years the first-fruits of their minds; while in Germany, the same period was rendered illustrious by Fichte and John Paul Richter at its commencement, and subsequently by Schelling, and Hegel, and Steffens, Schleiermacher, and the Schlegels, and Novalis, and Tieck. Of this noble brotherhood, who all, I believe, studied at the same university, that of Jena, and who were all bound together by friendship, by affinity of genius, and by unity of aim, the two latter, Novalis and Tieck, were the poets: for though there are several things of great poetical beauty in the works of the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in the whole history of literature, any poet who can count up so many and so great exploits achieved on his first descent into the arena: in number and variety even Goethe must yield the precedence, though his youthful triumphs were Goetz of Berlichingen and Werther. There was in Tieck's early works the promise, and far more than the promise, of the greatest dramatic poet whom Europe had seen since the days of Calderon; there was a rich, elastic, buoyant, comic spirit, not like the analytical reflection, keen biting wit of Molière and Congreve, and other comic writers of the satirical school, but like the living merriment, the uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, the humour arising from good humour, not, as it often does, from ill humour, the incarnation, so to say, of the principle of mirth, in Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Aristophanes; and as a wreath of flowers to crown the whole, there was the heavenly purity and starlike loveliness of his Genoveva. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace with the fertility of the six years from 1798 to 1804, he must have been beyond all rivalry the second of German poets; and as Eschylus in the Frogs shares his supremacy with Sophocles, so would Goethe have invited Tieck to sit beside him on his throne. Unfortunately for those who would have feasted upon his fruits, the poet, during the last twenty years, has been so weighed down by almost unintermitting ill health, that he has published but little. There was a short interval indeed that seemed to bid fairer, about the year 1812, when he began to collect his tales and lesser dramas, on a plan something like that of the Decameron, in the Phantasm, but it has not yet been carried beyond the second reign, out of seven through which it was designed to extend. Of that collection the chief part had been known to the world ten or twelve years before: some things, however, appeared then for the first time, and among them, I believe, was the tale of The Love-Charm. Latterly, Tieck's genius has taken a new spring, in a somewhat different direction from that of his youth. He has written half a dozen novels, in the manner of the couple recently translated; nor are the others of less excellence than those two; a beautiful tale of magic has also been just published; and the speedy appearance of several other things that have employed him during the long period of seeming inactivity, is promised; wherein he has been engaged more or less for above a quarter of a century, and to gather materials for which he some years since visited England. Of this work the highest expectations may justly be formed: not many people, even, in this country, possess a more extensive and accurate acquaintance with our ancient drama than Tieck; no one has entered more fully into the spirit of its great poets, than Tieck has shown himself to have done in the prefaces to his Old English Theatre and his Shakespeare's Vorschule; few have ever bestowed such attention on the history of the stage in all countries, or have so studied the principles of dramatic composition and the nature of dramatic effect; hardly any one, I may say no one, ever learnt so much from Shakespeare: no one, therefore, can have more to teach us about him; and to judge from the remarks on some of the plays which have already been printed in the Abendzeitung, no one was ever so able to trace out the most secret workings of the great master's mind, or to retain his full, calm self-possession when following him on his highest flights; no one ever united in such perfection the great critic with the great poet. One may look forward, therefore, with confidence to the greatest work in æsthetical criticism that even Germany will ever have produced.
Of the foregoing tale itself little need be said. If the translator has failed so grievously that an English reader cannot see its merits, he would hardly help himself out of the scrape by talking about the effect he ought to have produced. And grievously he must have failed, if any reader with a feeling for poetry does not perceive and enjoy the beauty of the descriptions, especially of the two eventful scenes, the power and passion of the wild dithyramb, the admirable delineation of the characters in proportion to their relative importance, and the poetical harmony and perfect keeping of the whole. Nothing can be more delicate than the way of softening the horror that might be felt for the bride: she has not even a name, that there may be no distinct object for our disgust to fasten on; she is only spoken of under titles of a pleasurable meaning; her beauty, like Helen's on the walls of Troy, is manifested by its effect: the young men are astonished at it; her air of deep melancholy impresses even the gayest and most thoughtless, and is thus more powerful than if pages had been employed in giving utterance to her remorse; besides which, had the latter course been adopted, the main object would have been the wicked heart, not the wicked deed, the sin, not the crime; and sin is always loathsome, whereas a crime may often be looked upon with pity. The poet has therefore wisely kept all his power of characteristic delineation for the two chief persons in the tale; and rarely have any characters been brought out so distinctly within a work of such dimensions; the contrast between them runs through every feature, yet each is the necessary complement to the other; the abuse which they vent in the ball-room each against his dearest friend, and in the ears of almost a stranger, is in the true style of our frail affections, veering before the slightest puff of self-will; nor is there a circumstance mentioned about either, which tends not to complete the picture, and is not all but indispensable. On some occasions a whole life and character are revealed by a single touch; as for instance when Emilius exclaims, No bread! Can such things be? No other man could have been so ignorant of what goes on in the world, as to marvel at such a common occurrence; yet Emilius, it is quite certain, would be surprised, when awaked from his dreams, to behold the face of real life; so that this exclamation is, as it were, a great toe from which to construct one who is anything rather than a Hercules. Indeed the whole scene of the peasant's marriage, which at first sight may appear like a somewhat idle digression, brought in for no better reason than amusement, is absolutely necessary to the tale as a work of art: it not only shows the character of Emilius in a fresh and important point of view, not only supplies him with fuel, so that he is ready to burn at the approach of the first spark, as for the former scene he had been prepared by the arousal of his feelings in the ball-room; which, besides, cast a mysterious haze over the scene, and leave it half doubtful how much of the crime was actually perpetrated: the peasant's wedding is necessary as a contrast, as a complement, and as a relief to the other marriage; nor can that calm and masterly irony, which is among the first elements in the mind of a great poet, be more clearly manifested, than it is here, where the pomp and rejoicing of the great and wealthy are suddenly turned 'into sorrow and lamentation and dismay;' while the poor and the abashed and the despised are enabled to pass their days in what to them is comfort, and to obtain the enjoyment of a day 'unto which in after-times they may look back with delight.'
Everything about the one marriage seems happy; everything about the other seems wretched; but neither is what it seems: they who seem happy are a prey to extravagant and sinful desires; those who seem wretched have moderate wishes, and, though they have offended, have not done it wantonly or in malice; they are making what seems to them the only atonement in their power, and 'the fellow bears the creature the same good-will, though she is such a sorry bit of clay'; therefore the end of each marriage is according, not unto the outward show and promise, but unto that which lies within the heart. It is thus that poetical justice endeavours, so far as it may, to anticipate the sentence of Omniscient justice.
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.—THE HOUSE OF WEEPING.
From Jean Paul Frederick Richter.
Since the day when the town of Haslau first became the seat of a Court, no man could remember that any one event in its annals (always excepting the birth of the hereditary prince) had been looked for with so anxious a curiosity as the opening of the last will and testament left by Van der Kabel. This Van der Kabel may be styled the Haslau Crœsus; and his whole life might be termed, according to the pleasure of the wits, one long festival of god-sends, or a daily washing of golden sands nightly impregnated by golden showers of Danæ. Seven distant surviving relatives of seven distant relatives deceased of the said Van der Kabel, entertained some little hopes of a place amongst his legatees, grounded upon an assurance which he had made, 'that upon his oath he would not fail to remember them in his will.' These hopes, however, were but faint and weakly; for they could not repose any extraordinary confidence in his good faith—not only because in all cases he conducted his affairs in a disinterested spirit, and with a perverse obstinacy of moral principle, whereas his seven relatives were mere novices, and young beginners in the trade of morality,—but also because, in all these moral extravagances of his (so distressing to the feelings of the sincere rascal), he thought proper to be very satirical, and had his heart so full of odd caprices, tricks, and snares for unsuspicious scoundrels, that (as they all said) no man who was but raw in the art of virtue could deal with him, or place any reliance upon his intentions. Indeed the covert laughter which played about his temples, and the falsetto tones of his sneering voice, somewhat weakened the advantageous impression which was made by the noble composition of his face, and by a pair of large hands, from which were daily dropping favours little and great—benefit nights, Christmas-boxes and New-Year's gifts; for this reason it was that, by the whole flock of birds who sought shelter in his boughs, and who fed and built their nests on him, as on any wild service-tree, he was, notwithstanding, reputed a secret magazine of springes; and they were scarce able to find eyes for the visible berries which fed them, in their scrutiny after the supposed gossamer snares.
In the interval between two apoplectic fits he had drawn up his will, and had deposited it with the magistrate. When he was just at the point of death he transferred to the seven presumptive heirs the certificate of this deposit; and even then said, in his old tone—how far it was from his expectation, that by any such anticipation of his approaching decease, he could at all depress the spirits of men so steady and sedate, whom, for his own part, he would much rather regard in the light of laughing than of weeping heirs; to which remark one only of the whole number, namely, Mr. Harprecht, inspector of police, replied as a cool ironist to a bitter one—'that the total amount of concern and of interest, which might severally belong to them in such a loss, was not (they were sincerely sorry it was not) in their power to determine.'
At length the time is come when the seven heirs have made their appearance at the town-hall, with their certificate—of deposit; videlicet, the ecclesiastical councillor Glantz; Harprecht, the inspector of police; Neupeter, the court-agent; the court-fiscal, Knoll; Pasvogel, the bookseller; the reader of the morning lecture, Flacks; and Monsieur Flitte, from Alsace. Solemnly, and in due form, they demanded of the magistrate the schedule of effects consigned to him by the late Kabel, and the opening of his will. The principal executor of this will was Mr Mayor himself; the sub-executors were the rest of the town-council. Thereupon, without delay, the schedule and the will were fetched from the register office of the council to the council chamber: both were exhibited in rotation to the members of the council and the heirs, in order that they might see the privy seal of the town impressed upon them: the registry of consignment, indorsed upon the schedule, was read aloud to the seven heirs by the town-clerk: and by that registry it was notified to them, that the deceased had actually consigned the schedule to the magistrate, and entrusted it to the corporation-chest; and that on the day of consignment he was still of sound mind: finally, the seven seals, which he had himself affixed to the instrument, were found unbroken. These preliminaries gone through, it was now (but not until a brief registry of all these forms had been drawn up by the town-clerk) lawful, in God's name, that the will should be opened and read aloud by Mr Mayor, word for word as follows:—
'I, Van der Kabel, on this 7th day of May, 179-, being in my house at Haslau, situate in Dog-street, deliver and make known this for my last will; and without many millions of words, notwithstanding I have been both a German notary and a Dutch schoolmaster. Howsoever I may disgrace my old professions by this parsimony of words, I believe myself to be so far at home in the art and calling of a notary, that I am competent to act for myself as a testator in due form, and as a regular devisor of property.
'It is a custom of testators to premise the moving causes of their wills. These, in my case, as in most others, are regard for my happy departure, and for the disposal of the succession to my property—which, by the way, is the object of a tender passion in various quarters. To say anything about my funeral, and all that, would be absurd and stupid. This, and what shape my remains shall take, let the eternal sun settle above, not in any gloomy winter, but in some of his most verdant springs.
'As to those charitable foundations and memorial institutions of benevolence, about which notaries are so much occupied, in my case I appoint as follows: to three thousand of my poor townsmen of every class, I assign just the same number of florins, which sum I will that, on the anniversary of my death, they shall spend in feasting upon the town common, where they are previously to pitch their camp, unless the military camp of his Serene Highness shall be already pitched there, in preparation for the reviews; and when the gala is ended, I would have them cut up the tents into clothes. Item, to all the school-masters in our locality I bequeath one golden augustus. Item, to the Jews of this place I bequeath my pew in the high church.—As I would wish that my will should be divided into clauses, this is considered to be the first.