A LEGEND OF PORNIC.
Oh, the beautiful girl, too white,
Who lived at Pornic, down by the sea,
Just where the sea and the Loire unite!
And a boasted name in Brittany
She bore, which I will not write.
Too white, for the flower of life is red;
Her flesh was the soft, seraphic screen
Of a soul that is meant (her parents said)
To just see earth, and hardly be seen,
And blossom in heaven instead.
Yet earth saw one thing, one how fair!
One grace that grew to its full on earth:
Smiles might be sparse on her cheek so spare,
And her waist want half a girdle's girth,
But she had her great gold hair:
Hair, such a wonder of flix and floss,
Freshness and fragrance,—floods of it, too!
Gold did I say? Nay, gold's mere dross.
Here Life smiled, "Think what I meant to do!"
And Love sighed, "Fancy my loss!"
So, when she died, it was scarce more strange
Than that, when some delicate evening dies,
That, while the breath was nearly to seek,
As they put the little cross to her lips,
She changed; a spot came out on her cheek,
A spark from her eye in mid-eclipse,
And she broke forth, "I must speak!"
"Not my hair!" made the girl her moan;—
"All the rest is gone, or to go;
But the last, last grace, my all, my own,
Let it stay in the grave, that the ghosts may know!
Leave my poor gold hair alone!"
The passion thus vented, dead lay she.
Her parents sobbed their worst on that;
All friends joined in, nor observed degree:
For, indeed, the hair was to wonder at,
As it spread,—not flowing free,
But curled around her brow, like a crown,
And coiled beside her cheeks, like a cap,
And calmed about her neck,—ay, down
To her breast, pressed flat, without a gap
I' the gold, it reached her gown.
All kissed that face, like a silver wedge
'Mid the yellow wealth, nor disturbed its hair;
E'en the priest allowed death's privilege,
As he planted the crucifix with care
On her breast, 'twixt edge and edge.
And thus was she buried, inviolate
Of body and soul, in the very space
By the altar,—keeping saintly state
In Pornic church, for her pride of race,
Pure life, and piteous fate.
And in after-time would your fresh tear fall,
Though your mouth might twitch with a dubious smile,
As they told you of gold both robe and pall,
How she prayed them leave it alone awhile,
So it never was touched at all.
Years flew; this legend grew at last
The life of the lady; all she had done,
All been, in the memories fading fast
Of lover and friend, was summed in one
Sentence survivors passed:
To wit, she was meant for heaven, not earth;
Had turned an' angel before the time:
Yet, since she was mortal, in such dearth
Of frailty, all you could count a crime
Was—she knew her gold hair's worth.
At little pleasant Pornic church,
It chanced, the pavement wanted repair,
Was taken to pieces: left in the lurch,
A certain sacred space lay bare,
And the boys began research.
'T was the space where our sires would lay a saint,
A benefactor,—a bishop, suppose;
A baron with armor-adornments quaint;
A dame with chased ring and jewelled rose,
Things sanctity saves from taint:
So we come to find them in after-days,
When the corpse is presumed to have done with gauds,
Of use to the living, in many ways;
For the boys get pelf, and the town applauds,
And the church deserves the praise.
They grubbed with a will: and at length—O cor
Humanum, pectora cœca, and the rest!—
They found—no gauds they were prying for,
No ring, no rose, but—who would have guessed?—
A double Louis-d'or!
Here was a case for the priest: he heard,
Marked, inwardly digested, laid
Finger on nose, smiled, "A little bird
Chirps in my ear!"—then, "Bring a spade,
Dig deeper!" he gave the word.
And lo! when they came to the coffin-lid,
Or the rotten planks which composed it once,
Why, there lay the girl's skull wedged amid
A mint of money, it served for the nonce
To hold in its hair-heaps hid:
Louis-d'ors, some six times five;
And duly double, every piece.
Now do you see? With the priest to shrive,—
With parents preventing her soul's release
By kisses that keep alive,—
With heaven's gold gates about to ope,—
With friends' praise, gold-like, lingering still,—
What instinct had bidden the girl's hand grope
For gold, the true sort?—"Gold in heaven, I hope;
But I keep earth's, if God will!"
Enough! The priest took the grave's grim yield;
The parents, they eyed that price of sin
As if thirty pieces lay revealed
On the place to bury strangers in,
The hideous Potter's Field.
But the priest bethought him: "'Milk that's spilt'
—You know the adage! Watch and pray!
Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt!
It would build a new altar; that we may!"
And the altar therewith was built.
Why I deliver this horrible verse?
As the text of a sermon, which now I preach:
Evil or good may be better or worse
In the human heart, but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.
The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays-and-Reviews' debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight:
I still to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin:
'T is the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie,—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart.
CALIFORNIA AS A VINELAND.
It has been reserved for California, from the plenitude of her capacities, to give to us a truly great boon in her light and delicate-wines.
Our Pacific sister, from whose generous hand has flowed an uninterrupted stream of golden gifts, has announced the fact that henceforth we are to be a wine-growing people. From the sparkling juices of her luscious grapes, rich with the breath of an unrivalled climate, is to come in future the drink of our people. By means of her capacity in this respect we are to convert the vast tracts of her yet untilled soil into blooming vineyards, which will give employment to thousands of men and women,—we are to make wine as common an article of consumption in America as upon the Rhine, and to break one more of the links which bind us unwilling slaves to foreign lands.
It is a little singular, that, in a country so particularly adapted to the culture of the grape, no species is indigenous to the soil. The earliest record of the grape in California is about 1770, at which time the Spanish Jesuits brought to Los Angeles what are supposed to have been cuttings from the Malaga. There is a difference of opinion as to what stock they originally came from; but one thing is certain,—from that stock has sprung what is now known all over the State as the "Mission" or "Los Angeles" grape, and from which is made all the wine at present in the market. The berry is round, reddish-brown while ripening, turning nearly black when fully ripe. It is very juicy and sweet, and a delicious table-grape.
Three prominent reasons maybe given in support of the claims of California to be considered a wine-producing State. First, her soil possesses a large amount of magnesia and lime, or chalk. Specimens of it, taken from various localities, and carried to Europe, when chemically tested and submitted to the judgment of competent men, have been pronounced to be admirably adapted to the purposes of wine-culture. Then, the climate is all that could possibly be desired,—as during the growth and ripening of the grapes they are never exposed to storms of rain or hail, which often destroy the entire crop in many parts of Europe. As an evidence of the great superiority enjoyed by California in this respect, it may be remarked, that, while the grape-crop here is a certainty, "the oldest inhabitant" not remembering a year that has failed of a good yield,—in Europe, on the contrary, in a period of 432 years, from 1420 to 1852, the statistics exhibit only 11 years which can be pronounced eminently good, and but 28 very good,—192 being simply what may be called "pretty good" and "middling," and 201, or nearly one-half, having proved total failures, not paying the expenses. Again, the enormous productiveness of the soil is an immense advantage. We make on an average from five hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty gallons of wine to the acre. The four most productive of the wine-growing districts of Europe are—
Italy, giving to the acre 441 1-2 gallons
Austria and her provinces 265 5-6 "
France, 176 2-7 "
Nassau, 237 1-2 "
Of these, it will be perceived, that Italy, the most prolific, falls fully one hundred and fifty gallons short of the average yield per acre in California.—In this connection the following account of a grape-vine in Santa Barbara may be interesting:—
"Four miles south of the town there is a vine which was planted more than a quarter of a century since, and has a stalk now about ten inches thick. The branches are supported by a train or arbor, and extend out about fifty feet on all sides. The annual crop of grapes upon this one vine is from six to ten thousand pounds, as much as the yield of half an acre of common vines. It is of the Los Angeles variety. There is a similar vine, but not so large, in the vineyard of Andres Pico, at San Fernando."
It is well known that California has within her borders five million acres of land suitable for vine-culture. Suppose it to average no larger yield than that of Italy, yet, at 25 cents a gallon, it would give an income of $551,875,000. That this may not seem an entirely chimerical estimate, it may be remarked that trustworthy statistics show that in France five millions of acres are planted in vines, producing seven hundred and fifty millions of gallons, while Hungary has three millions of acres, yielding three hundred and sixty millions of gallons. If it is asked, Supposing California capable of producing the amount claimed for her, what could be done with this enormous quantity of wine? the answer may be found in the experience of France, where, notwithstanding the immense native production, there is a large importation from foreign countries, besides a very considerable consumption of purely artificial wines.
Small quantities of wine have been made in California for over half a century, by the Spanish residents, not, however, as a commercial commodity, but for home-consumption, and there are wines now in the cellars of some of the wealthy Spanish families which money could not purchase. But it remained for American enterprise, aided by European experience, to develop the wonderful capacity which had so long slumbered in the bosom of this most favored land.
The following statistics exhibit the total number of vines in 1862, and the great increase in the last five or six years will show the opinion entertained as to the success of the business.
"The number of grape-vines set out in vineyards in the State, according to the Report of the County Assessors, as compiled in the Surveyor-General's Report for 1862, is 10,592,688, of which number Los Angeles has 2,570,000, and Sonoma 1,701,661.
"The rate of increase in the number and size of vineyards is large. All the vines of the State did not number 1,000,000 seven years ago. Los Angeles, which had three times as many vines surviving from the time of the Mexican domain as all the other counties together, had 592,000 bearing vines and 134,000 young vines in 1856. The annual increase in the State has been about 1,500,000 since then; and though less hereafter, it will still be large.
"The wine made in 1861 is reported, very incorrectly, by the County Assessors, as amounting to 343,000 gallons. The amount made in 1862 was about 700,000 gallons. The total amount made in all other States of the Union in 1859, according to the United States census, was 1,350,000 gallons; and the same authority puts down California's wine-yield for that year at 494,000 gallons, which is very nearly correct. In Los Angeles County most of the vineyards have 1,000 vines to the acre. In Sonoma the number varies from 680 to 1,000. The average number may be estimated at 900; and the 10,000,000 vines of the State cover about 11,500 acres. An acre of California vineyard in full bearing produces at least 500 gallons annually, and at that rate the produce of the 11,500 acres would be 5,750,000 gallons. Strike off, however, one-third for grapes lost, wasted, and gathered for the table, and we have an annual produce of 3,800,000 gallons. The reason why the present product is so far below this amount is that most of the vines are still very young, and will not be in full bearing for several years yet."
The cost of planting a vineyard will of course vary with the situation, price of labor, quality of soil, etc., but may be estimated at not far from fifty dollars an acre. This includes everything except the cost of the land, and brings the vines up to the third year, when they are in fair bearing condition. There are thousands of acres of land scattered over the State, admirably adapted to vine-culture, which may be purchased at from one to two dollars per acre. No enterprise holds out more encouragement for the investment of labor and capital than this, and the attention of some of the most intelligent capitalists of the country is being given to it. In this connection I cannot forbear referring to the action of the Government in regard to our native wines. By the National Excise Law of 1862 a tax of five cents a gallon was laid upon all wine made in the country. No tax has yet been laid upon agricultural productions generally, and only three per cent, upon manufactures. Now wine certainly falls properly under the head of agricultural productions. Upon this ground it might justly claim exemption from taxation. The wine-growers of California allege that the tax is oppressive and impolitic: oppressive, because it is equal to one-fourth of the original value of the wine, and because no other article of production or manufacture is taxed in anything like this proportion; impolitic, because the business is now in its infancy, struggling against enormous difficulties, among which may be mentioned the high price of labor, rate of interest, and cost of packages, making it difficult to compete with the wines of Europe, which have already established themselves in the country, and which are produced where interest is only three per cent. per annum, and the price of labor one-quarter of what it is in California. In addition to this there is the prejudice which exists against American wines, but which, happily, is passing away. The vintners ask only to be put upon the same footing as manufacturers, namely, an ad valorem tax of three per cent.; and they say that the Government will derive a greater revenue from such a tax than from the one now in force, as they cannot pay the present tax, and, unless it is abated, they will be obliged to abandon the business. Efforts are being made to induce Congress to modify it, and it is to be hoped they will be successful.
In 1861 California sent a commissioner to Europe, to procure the best varieties of vines cultivated there, and also to report upon the European culture generally. The gentleman selected for the mission was Colonel Haraszthy, to whom I am indebted for many of my statistics, and who has given us a very interesting book on the subject. He brought back a hundred thousand vines, embracing about fourteen hundred varieties. These were to have been planted and experimented upon under the auspices of the State. What the result has been I am unable to say; but we are informed upon good authority that over two hundred foreign varieties are now successfully cultivated. Such being the fact, it is a fair presumption that we are soon to make wines in sufficient variety to suit all tastes.
Los Angeles is at present the largest wine-growing county in the State, and Sonoma the second. Many other portions of the State, however, are fast becoming planted with vineyards, and some of them are already giving promise of furnishing superb wines. As usual in wine-growing countries, in the southern part of the State the wines are richer in saccharine properties, and heavier-bodied, than those of the more northern sections, but are deficient in flavor and bouquet. We shall get a lighter and tarter wine from the Sonoma and other northern vineyards, which will please many tastes better than the southern wines. The two largest vineyards in the State are owned by Colonel Haraszthy, of Sonoma, and John Rains, of San Gabriel. The former has two hundred and ninety thousand vines, and the latter one hundred and sixty-five thousand. It is probable that from one of these vineyards at least will come a good Champagne wine.
A large tract of land, to which has been given the name of "Anaheim," has been recently purchased by a German company. It is sold to actual settlers in lots of twenty acres, affording room for twenty thousand vines. There are now planted nearly three hundred thousand, which are in a very flourishing condition. The wines from this district will soon be in the market.
The wines now made in California are known under the following names: "White" or "Hock" Wine, "Angelica," "Port," "Muscatel," "Sparkling California," and "Piquet." The character of the first-named wine is much like that of the Rhine wines of Germany. It is not unlike the Capri bianco of Naples, or the white wines of the South of France. It is richer and fuller-bodied than the German wines, without the tartness which is strongly developed in nearly all the Rhenish varieties. It is a fine wine, and meets the approval of many of our best connoisseurs. Specimens of it have been sent to some of the wine-districts of Germany, and the most flattering expressions in its favor have come from the Rhine. The "Angelica" and "Muscatel" are both naturally sweet, intended as dessert-wines, and to suit the taste of those who do not like a dry wine. They are both of a most excellent quality, and are very popular. The "Port" is a rich, deep-colored, high-flavored wine, not unlike the Burgundies of France, yet not so dry. The "Sparkling California" and "Piquet" are as yet but little known. The latter is made from the lees of the grape, is a sour, very light wine, and not suitable for shipment. Messrs. Sainsivain Brothers have up to the present time been the principal house engaged in the manufacture of Champagne. So far, they have not been particularly successful. This wine has a certain bitter taste, which is not agreeable; yet it is a much better wine than some kinds of the foreign article sold in our markets. The makers are still experimenting, and will, no doubt, improve. It is probable that most of the good sparkling wine which we shall get from California will be made in the northern part of the State; the grapes grown there seem to be better adapted to the purpose than those raised in Los Angeles. There is no doubt, too, that the foreign grape will be used for this branch of the business, rather than the Los Angeles variety. All that is required to obtain many other varieties of wine, including brands similar to Sherry and Claret, is time to find a proper grape, and to select a suitable soil for its culture. Considering the short time which has elapsed since the business was commenced, wonders have been accomplished. It has taken Ohio thirty years to furnish us two varieties of wine, while in less than one-third that time California has produced six varieties, four of which are of a very superior quality, and have already taken a prominent position in the estimation of the best tastes in the country.
In 1854, Messrs. Köhler and Fröhling commenced business in Los Angeles, and shortly after opened a house in San Francisco. They were assisted by Charles Stern, who had enjoyed a long and valuable experience in the wine-business upon the Rhine. The vintage was very small and inferior in quality, as they had had no experience in making wine from such a grape as California produced. Numberless difficulties were met with, and it was only the indomitable energy of the gentlemen engaged in the enterprise, sustained by a firm faith in its ultimate success, which brought them triumphantly out of the slough of despond that seemed at times almost to overwhelm them. They have to-day the satisfaction of being the pioneers in what is soon to be one of the most important branches of industry in California. They own one of the finest vineyards in the State, from which some magnificent wine has been produced. They have contracts with owners of other vineyards; and after making the wine in their own, the men and machinery are moved into these, the grapes pressed, and the juice at once conveyed to their cellars, they paying the producers of the grapes a stipulated price per ton on the vines. The vintage commences about the first of October, and generally continues into November. The labor employed in gathering the grapes and in the work of the press is mostly performed by Indians. It is a novel and interesting sight to see them filing up to the press, each one bearing on his head about fifty pounds of the delicious fruit, which is soon to be reduced to an unseemly mass, and yield up its purple life-blood for the benefit of man. Some of the best wine made in the State is from the "Asuza" and "Sunny Slope" vineyards, both of which lie directly at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From a small beginning Messrs. Köhler and Fröhling have steadily progressed, till at this time their position is a very enviable one. Their cellars, occupying the basement of Montgomery Block, excite the admiration of all who visit them, and their wines are more favorably known than those of any other vintners. Agencies have been established in New York and other cities, under the supervision of Mr. Stern, and the favor with which they have been received has settled the fact that the wines of California are a success. It only remains for the vintners to keep their wines pure, and always up to the highest standard, and to take such measures as shall insure their delivery in a like condition to the consumers, to build up a business which shall eclipse that of any of the great houses of Europe. Thus will the State and nation be benefited, by keeping at home the money which we annually pay for wine to foreign countries, and the people will be led away from the use of strong, fiery drinks, to accept instead the light wines of their native land.
TO A YOUNG GIRL DYING:
WITH A GIFT OF FRESH PALM-LEAVES.
This is Palm-Sunday: mindful of the day,
I bring palm-branches, found upon my way:
But these will wither; thine shall never die,—
The sacred palms thou bearest to the sky!
Dear little saint, though but a child in years,
Older in wisdom than my gray compeers!
We doubt and tremble,—we with 'bated breath
Talk of this mystery of life and death:
Thou, strong in faith, art gifted to conceive
Beyond thy years, and teach us to believe!
Then take my palms, triumphal, to thy home,
Gentle white palmer, never more to roam!
Only, sweet sister, give me, ere thou go'st,
Thy benediction,—for my love thou know'st!
We, too, are pilgrims, travelling towards the shrine:
Pray that our pilgrimage may end like thine!
THE RIM.
PART I.
There are women at whom, after the first meeting, you forget to glance a second time, they seem to be such indifferent creations, such imperfect sketches of an idea to be fulfilled farther on in a clearer type, but who, met once more and yet again, suddenly take you captive in bonds. You find the sallow cheek to be but polished ivory, the heavy eye loaded with fire, the irregular features chords of a harmony whose whole is perfect; you find that this is the type itself; while in every gesture, every word, every look, the soul is shed abroad, and the fascination is what neither Campaspe, nor Jocasta, nor even Aspasia herself held in fee. For you, she has blossomed into the one beauty of the world; you hear her, and the Sirens sing in vain; she touches you, and makes you the slave beneath her feet.
Such a one was Éloise Changarnier.
There was iron of the old Huguenot blood in her veins; late American admixture had shot a racy sparkle through it; convent-care from her tenth to her sixteenth year had softened and toned the whole into a warm, generous life; and underneath all there slumbered that one atom of integral individuality that was nothing at all but a spark: as yet, its fire had never flashed; if it ever should do so, one might be safe in prophesying a strange wayward blaze.
In one of her earliest summers her widowed mother had died and bequeathed her sole legacy, a penniless orphan, to the care of the survivor in an imperishable friendship, Disbrowe Erne. A childless, thriftless, melancholy man, Mr. Erne had adopted her into his inmost heart, but out of respect to his friend had suffered her to retain her father's name, and had thoughtlessly delayed rendering the adoption legal. One day it was found too late to remedy this delay; for Mr. Erne died, just a year after Éloise's return from the distant Northern convent whither at ten years old she had been despatched, when, wild and witching as a wood-brier, there had been found nothing else to do with her. There her adopted father had visited her twice a year in all her exile, as she deemed it, sometimes taking up his residence for several months in the neighborhood of the nunnery; and a long vacation of many weeks she had every winter spent at home with him on the rich and beautiful plantation poetically known as The Rim, because, seen from several of the adjacent places, it occupied the whole southern horizon. The last vacation, however, she had passed with her adopted father travelling in France, whither some affairs called him; but, of all the splendid monuments and records of civilization that she saw, almost the only thing that had impressed itself distinctly upon her memory, through the chicanery of chances, was that once in a cathedral-choir she had seen the handsome, blonde-hued, Vandyck face of a gentleman with dreaming eyes looking at her from a gallery-niche with the most singular earnestness. So at sixteen she found that the nuns had exhausted their slender lore, and had nothing more to teach her; and after her brief travels, she returned home for a finality, and there had dallied a twelvemonth, lapped in the Elysium of freedom and youth. Every want anticipated, every whim gratified, servants prostrate before her, father adoring her,—the year sped on wings of silent joy, and left her a shade more imperious than it met her. Launched into society, wealthy and winning, Éloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round, wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often expressed his film of dissatisfaction with the conventual results, and had planned an attack on matters of more solid learning; but, tricksy as a sprite, Éloise had escaped his designs, broken through his regulations, implored, just out of shackles, a year's gambol in liberty, and had made herself too charming to be resisted in her plea; and if, feeling his health fail, he had at first insisted,—in the fear that there might be left but brief opportunity for him to make her pleasure, he yielded. Nevertheless, with the best outlay in the world, plantation-life is not all a gala, and there were, it must be confessed, certain ennuisome moments in which Éloise made inroads on her father's library, chiefly in wild out-of-the-way veins, all which, however, romantic, unsystematic, and undigested, did nothing towards rendering her one whit more independent of the world in time of future trial.
One afternoon, just reëntering the house from some gay farewell of friends, she found her father sitting in the hall, and she stood tiptoing in the door-way while smiling at him, with a fragrant vine half twisted in her dark drooping hair, the heat making her cheek yet paler, and the great blue-green eyes shining at him from under the black straight brows, like aquamarine jewels. Mr. Erne leaned forward in the chair, with hands clasped upon his knees, and eyes upbent.
"Éloise! Éloise!" he cried in a piercing voice, then grew white, and fell back in the cushions.
The girl flew to him, took the head upon her shoulder, caressed the deathly face, warmed the mouth with her own.
"Child!" he murmured, "I thought it was your mother!"
And by midnight, alone, and in the dark, he died, and went to find that mother.
As for Éloise, she was like some one made dumb by a thunderbolt. Her garden had become a desert. Ice had fallen in her summer. Death was too large a fact for her to comprehend. She had seen the Medusa's head in its terror, but not in its loveliness, and been stricken to stone. At length in the heart of that stone the inner fountains broke,—broke in rains of tempestuous tears, such gusts and gushes of grief as threatened to wash away life itself; and when Éloise issued from this stormy deep, the warmth and the wealth of being obscured, the effervescence and bubble of the child destroyed, feeling like a flower sodden with showers, if she had been capable of finding herself at all, she would have found herself a woman.
Among Mr. Erne's disorderly papers, full of incipient schemes, sketches, and schedules of gold-mining, steam-companies, and railways to the nebulæ in Orion, was discovered after his death a scrap witnessed by two signatures. The owner of one of these signatures was already dead, and there were no means to prove its genuineness. The other was that of a young man who had just enough of that remote taint in his descent which incapacitates one, in certain regions, from bearing witness. It was supposed that Mr. Erne had some day hurriedly executed this paper in the absence of his lawyer, as being, possibly, better than no paper at all, and he had certainly intended to have the whole matter arranged legitimately; but these are among the things which, with a superstitious loitering, some men linger long before doing, lest they prove to be, themselves, a death-warrant.
By this paper, in so many words, Disbrowe Erne left to Éloise Changarnier all the property of which he died possessed. An old friend of her father's in the neighborhood assured her that the only relatives were both distant, distinguished, and wealthy, unlikely to present any claims, and that she would be justified in fulfilling her father's desire. And so, without other forms, Éloise administered the affairs of The Rim,—waiting until the autumn to consult the usual lawyer, who was at present in England.
There had reigned over the domestic department of The Rim, for many years, a person who was the widow of a maternal cousin of Mr. Erne's, and who, when left destitute by the death of this young cousin, had found shelter, support, and generous courtesy beneath the roof of her late husband's kinsman. It was on the accession of this person, who was not a saint, that Éloise had become so ungovernable as to require the constraint of a nunnery. Mrs. Arles was a dark and quiet little lady, with some of the elements of beauty which her name suggested, and with a perfectly Andalusian foot and ankle. These being her sole wealth, it was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of wrath, and there was ever between her and Éloise a tacit feud, waiting, perhaps, only for occasion to fling down the gage in order to become open war. Mrs. Arles expected, therefore, that, so soon Éloise should take the reins in hand herself, she would be lightly, but decisively shaken off,—for the old friend had mentioned to Mrs. Arles that Mr. Erne's will left Éloise heir, as she had always supposed it would. She was, accordingly, silently amazed, when Éloise, softened by suffering, hoped she would always find it convenient to make a home with herself, and informed her that a certain section of the farm had been measured off and allotted to her, with its laborers, as the source of a yearly income. This delicacy, that endeavored to prevent her feeling the perpetual recurrence of benefits conferred, touched the speechless Mrs. Arles almost to the point of positive friendliness.
The plantation was one of those high and healthy spots that are ever visited by land- and sea-breezes, and there Éloise determined to stay that spring and summer; for this ground that her father had so often trod, this air that had given and received his last breath, were dear to her, and just now parting with them, for ever so short a time, would be but a renewal of her loss. As she became able to turn her energy to the business requiring attention, she discovered at last her sad ignorance. Dancing, drawing, music, and languages were of small avail in managing the interior concerns and the vexatious finance of a great estate. The neighbors complained that her spoiled and neglected servants infected theirs, and that her laxity of discipline was more ruinous in its effects than the rigor of Blue Bluffs. But she just held out to them her helpless little hands in so piteous and charming a way that they could not cherish an instant's enmity. If she tried to remedy the evil complained of, she fell into some fresh error; take what advice she would, it invariably twisted itself round and worked the other way. The plantation, always slackly managed, saw itself now on the high road to destruction. Let her do the very best in her power, she found it impossible to plan her season's campaign, to carry it out, to audit her accounts, to study agricultural directions, to preserve the peace, to keep her fences in order, to attend to the sick, to rule her household and her spirit, to dispose of her harvest, and to bring either end of the thread out of the tangled skein of her affairs.
Perhaps there could have been really no better thing for Éloise than the diversion from her sorrow which all this perplexity necessarily in some degree occasioned.
As for Mrs. Arles, so soon as Éloise had begun to move about again, she had taken herself off on a long-promised visit to the West, and was but just returning with the October weather.
Éloise, worn and thin, and looking nearly forty, as she had remarked to herself that morning in the brief moment she could snatch for her toilet, welcomed the cool and quiet little Mrs. Arles, who might be forty, but looked any age between twenty and thirty, with affectionate warmth, and made all the world bestir themselves for her comfort. It is only justice to the owner of the little Andalusian foot to say that in her specific domain things immediately changed for the better. But that was merely within-doors, and because she tightened the reins and used the whip in a manner which Éloise could not have done, if the whole equipage tumbled to pieces about her ears.
Mrs. Arles had been at home a week or so; the evening was chilly with rain, and a little fire flickered on the hearth. Mrs. Arles sat on one side of the hearth, with her tatting in hand; Éloise bent above the papers scattered over a small table.
"See what it is to go away!" said Éloise, cheerily. "It's like light in a painting, as the Sisters used to say,—brings out all the shadows."
"Nobody knew how indispensable I was," said the other lady, with the fragment of expression in the phantom of a smile.
"How pleasant it is to be missed! I did miss you so,—it seemed as if one of the four sides of the walls were gone. Now we stand—what is that word of Aristotle's?—four-square again. Now our universe is on wheels. Just tell me how you tamed Hazel so. She has conducted like a little wild gorilla all summer,—and here, in the twinkling of an eye, she goes about soberly, like a baptized Christian. How?"
"By a process of induction."
"You don't mean"—
"Oh, no. Nothing of the kind. I didn't touch her. I sent her into my room, and told her to take down that little riding-switch hanging over the mantel"—
"What,—the ebony and gold?"
"Yes. And to whip all the flies out of the air with it. It makes a monstrous whizzing. There's no such thing as actual experience for these imps of the vivid nerves. And when she came down I looked at her, and asked her how she liked the singing. Her conduct now leads me to believe that she has no desire to hear the tune again."
The hearer winced a trifle before lightly replying,—
"Well, I might have sent her forever, and all the result would have been the switch singing about my own shoulders, probably."
"That is because she knows you would never use it. As for me,—Hazel has a good memory."
Éloise gave a half-imperceptible shiver and frown; but, clearing her brow, said,—
"If Hazel had my accounts here, they would tame her. I will put all my malcontents through a course of mathematics. You do so well everywhere else, Mrs. Arles, that I've half the mind to ask you to advise me here. Little Arlesian, come over into Macedonia!"
"What is the matter?"
"Oh, it's only an inversion of the old problem, If the ton of coal cost ten dollars, what will the cord of wood come to? Now, if one bale"—
"But coal doesn't cost ten dollars," replied Mrs. Arles, with admirable simplicity.
"Now, if one bale of Sea-Island"—
"Oh, my dear, I know nothing at all about it. Pray, don't ask me."
"Well," said Éloise, after a moment's wondering pause, in which she had taken time to reflect that Mrs. Arles's corner of the estate was carried on faultlessly, "it is too bad to vex you with my matters, when you have as much as you can do in the house, yourself,"—and relapsed into what she called her Pythagorean errors.
"Did you know," said Mrs. Arles, after a half-hour's silence, "that Marlboro' has returned?"
"Marlboro'?" repeated Éloise, hesitatingly.
"Marlboro' of Blue Bluffs."
"Oh, yes. And five's eleven. No," said Éloise, absently and with half a sigh. "I've never seen him, you know,—he's been in Kamtschatka and the Moon so long. How did you know?"
"Hazel told me. Hazel wants to marry his Vane."
"His what?"
"Not his weathercock. Vane, his butler."
"That is why she behaved so. Dancing quicksilver. Then, perhaps, he'll buy her. What a relief it would be!"
"Marlboro' is a master!" said Mrs. Arles, emphatically.
There was a good deal in the ensuing pause. For Éloise, in her single year, had not half learned the neighborhood's gossip.
"A cruel man. Then it's not to be thought of. We shall have to buy Vane. Though how it's to be done"—
"I didn't say he was a cruel man. He wouldn't think of interfering with an ordinance of his overseers. I esteem his thoroughness. He has ideas. But I might have said that he is a remarkable man."
"There'll be some pulling of caps soon, Hazel said to-day, in her gibberish. I couldn't think what she meant."
"Blue Bluffs is a place to be mistress of. He's a woman-hater, though, Mr. Marlboro',—believes in no woman capable of resisting him when he flings the handkerchief, should he choose, but believes in none worth choosing."
"We shall have to invite him here, Mrs. Arles," said Éloise, mischievously, "and show him that there are two of us."
"That would never do!"
"Oh, I didn't mean so. Of course, I didn't mean so. How could I see any one else sitting in"—And there were tears in her eyes and on her trembling tones.
"My dear," said Mrs. Arles, "I am afraid, apropos of nothing at all, that you have isolated yourself from all society for too long a time already."
Just here Hazel entered and replenished the hearth, stopping half-way, with her armful of brush, to coquet an instant in the mirror, and adjust the scarlet love-knot in her curls.
"There's a carriage coming up the avenue, Miss," said she, demurely. "One of the boys"—
"What one?" asked Mrs. Arles.
"Vane," answered Hazel,—carmine staining her pretty olive cheek. "He ran before it."
"Who can it be, at this hour?" said Éloise, half rising, with the pen in her hand, and looking at Mrs. Arles, who did not stir.
As she spoke, there was a bustle in the hall, a slamming door, a voice of command, the door opened, and a stranger stood among them, surveying the long antique room with its diamonded windows flickering in every pane, and the quaint hearth, whose leaping, crackling, fragrant blaze lighted the sombre little person sitting beside it, and sparkled on the half-bending form of that strange dark-haired girl, with her aquamarine eyes bent full on his. He was wrapped, from head to foot, in a great sweeping brigand's cloak, and a black, wide-brimmed hat, that had for an instant slouched its shadow down his face, hung now in his gloved hand. Dropping cloak and hat upon a chair with an invisible motion, he advanced, an air of surprise lifting the heavy eyebrows so that they strongly accented the contrast in hue between the lower half of his face, tanned with wind and sun, and the wide, low brow, smooth as marble itself, and above which swept one great wave of dark-brown hair. Altogether, it was an odd, fiery impression that he made,—whether from that golden-brown tint of skin that always seems full of slumbering light, or from the teeth that flashed so beneath the triste moustache whenever the haughty lips parted and unbent their curve, or whether it were a habit the eyes seemed to have of accompanying all his thoughts with a play of flame.
"Really," said he,—and it may have been a subtile inner musical trait of his tone that took everybody's will captive,—"I was not aware"—making a long step into the room, with a certain lordly bearing, yet almost at a loss to whom he should address himself. "I am Earl St. George Erne. May I inquire"—
"My name is Éloise Changarnier," said its owner, drawing herself up, it being incumbent on her to receive him.
He bowed, and advanced.
"Mrs. Arles, then, I presume,—my cousin Disbrowe Erne's cousin. I expected to find you here."
Mrs. Arles, after a hurried acknowledgment, slipped over to Éloise.
"I have heard your father speak of him," she murmured. "They had business-relations. He is Mr. Erne's legal heir, in default of sufficient testament, I believe. He must have come to claim the property."
"He!" said Éloise, with sublime scorn. "The property is mine! My father left such commands!"
"But he can have no other reason for being here. Strange the lawyer didn't write! He is certainly at home again."
"I have not had time to open the mail to-day; it lies in the hall. Hazel! the mail-bag."
And directly afterward its contents were before her.
She hurriedly shifted and reshifted the letters of factors and agents, and broke the seal of one, while Earl St. George Erne deliberately warmed his long white hands at the blaze, and, supposing Éloise Changarnier to be a guest of the lonely Mrs. Arles, wondered with some angry amusement at her singular deportment.
Mrs. Arles was right. The letter in Éloise's hand, which had been intended to reach her earlier, was from their old lawyer, but lately returned from England. In it he informed her that the scrap of paper on the authority of which she had assumed control of the property was worthless,—and that not only was Earl St. George Erne the heir of his cousin, but that some three years previously he had lent that cousin a sum of money sufficient to cover much more than the whole value of The Rim, taking in payment only promissory notes, whose indorser was since insolvent. This sum—as Mr. Erne the elder had been already unfortunate in several rash speculations—had been applied towards lifting a heavy mortgage, and instituting improvements that would enable the farm soon to repay the debt in yearly instalments. Added to this was the fact that Earl St. George Erne, who had passed many years away from home upon Congressional duties, had lately met with a severe reverse himself, and had now nothing in the world except this lucky inheritance from his cousin, and into this he had been inducted by all legal forms. This had transpired during the lawyer's absence, (that person wrote,) as otherwise some provision might have been made for Miss Changarnier,—and not being able to meet with Mr. St. George Erne, he had learned the facts from others. Meantime she would see, that, even if her father left to her all he died possessed of, he died possessed of nothing.
The idea that anybody should dare to controvert her father's will flared for a moment behind Éloise's facial mask, and illumined every feature. Then her eye fell upon the mass of papers with the inextricable confusion of their figures. An exquisitely ludicrous sense of retributive justice seized her, heightened, perhaps, by some surprise and nervous excitement; she fairly laughed,—a little, low bubble of a laugh,—swept her letters into her apron, and, with the end of it hanging over her arm, stepped towards Mr. St. George, and offered him her hand. He thought she was a crazy girl. But there was the hand; he took it, and, looking at her a moment, forgot to drop it,—an error which she rectified.
"It seems, then, that you are the owner of The Rim," said she. "I had been dreaming myself to be that very unfortunate person,—a nightmare from which you wake me. The steward will show you over it to-morrow. You will find your exchequer in the escritoire-drawer in the cabinet across the hall. You will find the papers and accounts on that table, and I wish you joy of them!"
So saying, after her succinct statement, she vanished.
Mrs. Arles lingered a moment to wind up her tatting. St. George, who had at first stood like a golden bronze cast immovably in an irate surprise, then shook his shoulders, and stepped towards the table and carelessly parted the papers.
"Remarkable manuscript," said he, as if just then he could find nothing else to say. "Plainer than type. A purely American hand. Is it that of the young lady?"
"Miss Changarnier? Yes."
"She was apparent heiress?"
"Yes."
"What does she expect to become of her?"
"How can I tell?"
"You can conjecture."
"She has not yet begun to consider, herself, you see."
"She has other property?"
"None."
"Ah! A fine thing, usurping!"
Mrs. Arles did not reply.
And then, in a half-angry justification, he exclaimed,—
"I didn't know there was such a person in the world! I could not come immediately on Erne's death. I was ill, and I was busy, and I let things wait for me. Why did no one write?"
"No one knew there was such a person as you. At least, no one supposed it signified."
"Signified! The Rim was my father's as much as it was Disbrowe Erne's father's. Disbrowe Erne's father entrapped mine, and got the other half. It was the old story of Esau's pottage, with thrice the villany. My father made me promise him on his death-bed, that, come fair means, The Rim should be mine again. I was twenty, Erne was fifty. Fair means came. Nevertheless, if I had known how things stood, I might have broken the promise,—who knows?—if at that moment I had happened to possess anything else in the world but my wardrobe, and sundry debts, and this!"
He opened, as he spoke, a purse that had seen service, and from his lordly height and supreme indifference, scattered its contents on the projecting top of the fireplace. They were two old pieces of ringing Spanish silver, a tiny golden coin of Hindostan, a dime, and a pine-tree shilling.
"Marlboro' won my last dollar," said he.
"Marlboro'?" said Mrs. Arles.
"What do you know of Marlboro'?"
"He lives over here at Blue Bluffs."
"The Devil he does!"
Mr. St. George Erne glanced at the dark little woman sitting before him. No smile softened her face, no ray had lighted it; she only intelligently observed, and monosyllabically answered him. She was a study,—might also be convenient; the place would be ennuisome; somebody must sit at the head of his table. He threw his purse into the fire.
"Mrs. Arles," he said, "it is decidedly necessary, that, to conduct my house, there should be in it a female relative,—an article I do not possess. Will you take the part, and remain with me on the same terms as with my Cousin Erne?"
Mrs. Arles had intended to propose such an arrangement herself, and, after a brief pause for apparent consideration, replied affirmatively, not thinking it worth while to tell him that the section of the farm, with its laborers, set apart for her benefit, was a device of Éloise's, and not one of anterior date.
"Thank you," said Mr. St. George Erne; "that being settled, will you have the kindness to order rooms prepared for me and my traps?"
Which Mrs. Arles disappeared to do.
It was early the next morning that Éloise knocked at Mrs. Arles's door.
"Good bye!" said she, looking in. "And good bye to The Rim! I don't suppose his Arch-Imperial Highness, Mr. Earl St. George Erne, will want to see my face immediately. I've only taken my clothes, as they'd be of no use to him, and"—
"Where are you going?" inquired Mrs. Arles from among her pillows, as quietly as if such an exodus were an every-day affair.
"To the Murrays',—till I can find something to do."
"What can you find to do?"
"I haven't the least idea," said Éloise, coming in and sitting down. "I've thought all night. I can't do anything. I can't teach; I can't sew; I can't play. I can starve; can't I, Mrs. Arles?"
"You don't know that!"
"Well, I can be a nursery-governess, or I can sing in a chorus; I should make a very decent figurante, or I could go round with baskets. Perhaps I can get writing. There's one comfort: I sha'n't have anything more to do with Arabic numerals till the latest day I live, and needn't know whether two and two make four or five. I may remember, though, that two from two leave nothing!"
"Yes,—we are all equal to subtraction."
"So, good bye, Mrs. Arles," said Éloise, rising. "We've had pleasant times together, first and last. I dare say, I've tried you to death. You'll forgive me, and only remember the peaceful part. If I succeed, I'll write you. And if I don't, you needn't bother. I'm well and strong, and seventeen."
Mrs. Arles elaborated a faint smile, kissed Éloise's cheek, told her she would help her look about for something, rang for Hazel to close the door the careless girl left ajar as she went springing down-stairs, and arranged herself anew in the laced pillows that singularly became with their setting the creamy hue of her tranquil face.
But Éloise was keeping up her spirits by an artificial process that she meant should last at least as far as the Murrays'. Passing, on her way, the door of her father's cozy cabinet, the attraction overcame her, she turned the handle, only for a moment, and looked in. The place was too full of memories: yonder he had stood, and she remembered what he said; there he had sat and stroked her hair; here he had every night kissed her two eyes for pleasant dreams. The door banged behind her, and she was sitting on the floor sobbing with all her soul.
When the tornado had passed, Éloise rose, smoothed her dress, opened the window that the morning air might cool her burning eyes, then at length went to find a servant who would take her trunk to the Murrays', and passed down the hall.
As she reached the door of the long, antique room where last night's scene had passed, it opened, and Mr. St. George Erne came out.
"Good morning, Miss Changarnier," said he. "May I speak with you a moment?"
"Very briefly," said Éloise, loftily, for she was in an entirely different mood from that in which she had left him the night before.
The corner of a smile curled Mr. St. George Erne's mouth and the brown moustache above it. Éloise saw it, and was an inch taller. Then St. George did not smile again, but was quite as regnantly cool and distant as the Khan of Tartary could be.
"I glanced at the papers to which you referred me last evening," said he. "As you intimated, I perceive the snarl is hopeless. Were it for nothing else," he added, casting down the orbs that had just now too tremulous a light in them, "I should ask you to remain and assist me in unravelling affairs, for a few days. I intend, so soon as the way shall be clear, to set off half of the estate to you"—
"Sir, I do not accept gifts from strangers. I will be under no obligations. I hope to earn my own livelihood. The estate is yours; I will not receive a penny of it!"
"Pardon me, if I say that this is a rash and ill-considered statement. There is no reason why you should be unwilling, in the first place, to see justice done, and, after that, to respect your Adopted father's wish."
"My father could have wished nothing dishonest. He is best pleased with me as I am."
"Will it make any difference, if I assure you that the half of the estate under my plan of management will yield larger receipts than the whole of it did under your proprietorship?"
"Not the least," said Éloise, with a scornful and incredulous smile.
"You make me very uncomfortable. Let me beg you to take the matter into consideration. After a few days of coolness, you will perhaps think otherwise."
"After a thousand years I should think the same. I do not want your money, Sir. I thank you. And so, good bye."
"Where are you going?"
"Out into the world."
"What are you going to do?"
"That is certainly no affair of yours."
"How much money have you in that little purse?"
She poured its contents down where he had emptied his own purse on the previous evening, adding to those still remaining there some four or five small gold-pieces.
"Of course they are yours, Sir. I have no right to them!"
He brushed them indignantly all down together in a heap upon the hearth.
"You sha'n't have them, then!" said he, and ground them with his heel into the ashes.
"I can sell my mother's jewels!" said she, defiantly.
"I can confiscate them for the balance of the half-year's income of the estate!"
Éloise turned pale with pride and anger and fear and mastery.
"We are talking very idly," said St. George, then, softening his falcon's glance. "Pray excuse such savage jesting. I should like to share my grandfather's estate with you, the adopted child of his elder grandson. It looks fairly enough, I think."
"Talking very idly. I have assured you that I never will touch it. And if you want more, here I swear it!"
"Hush! hush!"
"It's done!" said Éloise, exultantly, and almost restored to good-humor by the little triumph.
"And you won't reconsider? you won't break it? you will not let me beg you"—
"Never! If that is all you had to say, I shall bid you good-morning."
Mr. St. George was silent for a moment or two.
"I am greatly grieved," said he then. "I have done an evil thing unconsciously enough, and one for which there is no remedy, it seems. Until you mentioned your name last night, I was innocent of your existence. I had, indeed, originally heard of my cousin's educating some child, but our intercourse was so fragmentary that it made no impression upon me. I had entirely forgotten that there was such a person in the world, ungallant as it sounds. Afterwards,—last night, this morning,—I was so selfish as to imagine that we could each of us be very happy upon the half of such a property, until, at least, my affairs should right themselves. I was wrong. Whatever legal steps have been taken shall be recalled, and I leave you in full possession to-day and forever. 'The King sall ha' his ain again.'"
"Folderol!" said Éloise, turning her shoulder.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You may go where you please, and let all The Rim do the same,—go to dust and ashes, if it will! As for me, my hands are washed of it; if it isn't mine, I will not have it. Now let the thing rest! Besides, Sir," said Éloise, with a more gracious air, and forgetting her wicked temper, "you don't know the relief I feel! how free I am! no more figures! such a sad weight off me that I could fly! You would be silly to be such a Don Quixote as you threaten; it would do nobody any good, and would prove the ruin of all these poor creatures for whom you are now responsible. Don't you see?" said Éloise, taking a step nearer, and positively smiling upon him. "It isn't now just as you like,—you have a duty in the case. And as for me, good morning!"
And Éloise actually offered him her hand.
"One moment. Let me think."
And after her white flag of truce, there came a short cessation of hostilities.
"Very well," said Mr. St. George Erne at last, looking up, and shaking his strong shoulders like a Newfoundland dog coming out of the water. "Let it be. I have, then, one other idea,—in fact, one other condition. If I yield one thing, it is only right that you should yield another. It is this. I am entirely unaccustomed to doing my own writing. My script is illegible, even to myself. My amanuenses, my copyists, in Washington, have cost me a mint of money. I find there are none of the servants, of course, who write their names. I cannot afford, either, at present, to buy a clerk from Charleston. And on the whole, if it would be agreeable to you, I should be very glad if you would accept a salary,—such salary as I find convenient,—and remain as my accountant. You will, perhaps, receive this proposal with the more ease, as Mrs. Arles agrees to occupy the same position as formerly in the house."
Those horrible accounts! And a master! Who said Marlboro' was a master? What thing was Earl St. George Erne?—Yet too untaught to teach, too finely bred to sew, too delicate to labor, perhaps not good enough to starve,—
A quarter of an hour elapsed in dead silence.
Éloise threw back her head, and grew just a trifle more queenly, as she answered,—
"I thank you. I will stay, Mr. Erne."
The last word had tripped on her tongue; it had been almost impossible for her to give to another person her father's name, which she had never been allowed to wear herself.
He noticed her hesitation, and said,—
"You can call me St. George. Everybody does,—Mrs. Arles, the servants will. We have always been the St. Georges and the Disbrowes, for generations. Besides, if you had really been my cousin's child, you would naturally have called me so."
"If I had really been your cousin's child, Sir," said Éloise, with a flash, "I should not have been obliged to call you at all!"
This finished the business. Mr. St. George, who felt, that, in reality, he had only got his right again, who would gladly have given her back hers, who had only, in completest innocence and ignorance, made it impossible for her, in pride and honor, to accept it, who, moreover, very naturally considered his treatment of this handsome, disagreeable girl rather generous, and who had sacrificed much of his usually dictatorial manner in the conversation, felt also now that there was nothing more to do till she chose her ice should melt; and so he straightway let a frosty mood build itself up on his part into the very counterpart of hers. The resolution which he had just made, boyishly to abstract himself in secret, and leave her to fate and necessity and duty, faded. She deserved to lose. A haughty, ungovernable hussy! He would keep it in spite of her! How, under the sun, had his Cousin Disbrowe got along with her? Nevertheless, the salary which Mr. St. George had privately allotted to his accountant covered exactly one-half of his yearly income, whatever that contingent fund might prove to be; and, meantime, he did not intend to pay her a copper of it until they should become so much better friends that it would be impossible for her, with all her waywardness, to refuse it.
A bell sounded. Hazel came, and murmured something to Éloise. And thereupon, in this sweet and cordial frame of mind, they entered the breakfast-room, where Mrs. Arles awaited them behind a hissing urn,—and a cheery meal they had of it!
Mr. St. George passed a week in finding firm footing upon all the circumference of his property; by that time, clear and far-sighted as an eagle, he had seized on every speck of error throughout its wide mismanagement, and had initiated Éloise into a new way of performing old duties, as coolly as if no indignant word or thought had ever passed between them. And meanwhile, in place of their ancient warfare, but with no later friendship, Éloise and Mrs. Arles had tacitly instituted an offensive and defensive alliance against the common enemy. This the common enemy soon perceived, laughed at it a little grimly at first, then accepted it, as a kind of martyrdom expiatory of all previous sins, that a man must have against his grain two hostile women in the house, neither of whom had anything but the shadow of a claim upon him. Still, Earl St. George had his own plans; and by degrees it dimly dawned on his flattered intelligence that one of these women used her hostility merely as a feint towards the other.
TYPES.
Mr. Samuel Weller, of facetious memory, has told us of the girl who, having learned the alphabet, concluded that it was not worth going through so much to get so little. This, to say the least of it, was disrespectful to Cadmus, and should be condemned accordingly. Authors have feelings, which even scholastic young maidens cannot be permitted to lacerate. I therefore warn the reader of this article against any inclination toward sympathy with the critical mood of that obnoxious female. My theme is not as lively as "Punch" used to be; but, on the other hand, it is not as dull as a religious novel. Patient investigation may find it really agreeable: good-nature will not find it a bore.
I propose, then, a half-hour's gossip concerning Types, Type-Setting, and the machinery connected with Printing, at the present time. It would, perhaps, be interesting to review in detail the printing-devices of the past; but that would be to extend unwarrantably the limits of this article. Enough that any sketch of the invention, manufacture, and use of types would illustrate the triumph of the labor-saving instinct in man, and thus confirm the scientific lesson of to-day,—that machinery must entirely supersede the necessarily slow processes of labor by hand. That it will at no distant day supersede those processes in the art of printing is, as you will presently see, a fixed fact.
Machinery now does nearly every sort of labor,—economizing health, strength, time, and money, in all that it does. We tread upon beautifully figured carpets that are woven by machinery from single threads. We wear clothes that are made by machinery at the rate of two thousand stitches a minute. We hear in every direction the whistle of the locomotive, which saves us almost incalculable time, in the safe and convenient transportation of our persons and our property. We read in our newspapers messages that are brought instantaneously, from points far as well as near, by a simple electric current, governed by machinery, which prints its thought in plain Roman characters, at a rate of speed defying the emulation of the most expert penman. These, among many illustrations of scientific progress, occur in our daily experience. Manufacture, agriculture, and commerce would yield us others quite as impressive. In all this we see that man is finding out and applying the economy of Nature, and thus that the world is advancing, by well-directed effort, toward a more natural, and therefore a happier civilization.
The labor-saving processes of mechanism as applied to Printing are in the highest degree advantageous and admirable. Once types were cast in moulds, such as boys use for casting bullets. Now they are turned out, with inconceivable rapidity, from a casting-machine worked by steam. Ink and paper, too, are made by machinery; and when the types are set, we invoke the aid of the Steam-Press, and so print off at least fifty impressions to each one produced under the old process of press-work by hand. Machinery, moreover, folds the printed sheets,—trims the rough edges of books,—directs the newspaper,—and does, in short, the bulk of the drudgery that used to be done by operatives, at great expense of time and trouble, and with anything but commensurate profit.
These are facts of familiar knowledge. They indicate remarkable scientific progress. But the great fact—by no means so well known—remains to be stated. It is only of late that machinery has been successfully employed in the most laborious and expensive process connected with the art of printing,—that, namely, of Composition. In this process, however, iron fingers have proved so much better than fingers of flesh, that it is perfectly safe to predict the speedy discontinuance, by all sensible printers, of composition by hand.
Composition—as probably the reader knows—is the method of arranging types in the proper form for use. This, ever since the invention of movable types,—made by Laurentius Coster, in 1430,—has been done by hand. A movement toward economy in this respect was, indeed, made some sixty years ago, by Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, inventor of the Stanhope Press, and of the process of stereotyping which is still in use. His plan was to make the type-shank thicker than usual, and cast two or more letters upon its face instead of one. This, his Lordship rightly considered, would save labor, if only available combinations could be determined; since, using such types, it would frequently happen that the compositor would need to make but one movement for two or three or even four letters. The desired economy, however, was not secured. Subsequent attempts at combinations were made in England, but all proved abortive. In the office of the London "Times," castings of entire words—devised, I think, by Sterling—were used, to a limited extent. It remained, however, for a New-York mechanic to make the idea of combination-type a practical success. Mr. John H. Tobitt, being a stenographer as well as a compositor, was enabled to make a systematic selection of the syllables most frequently occurring in our language; and thus it happens that his combinations have stood a practical test. His improved cases, with combination-type, were shown at the London Exhibition, in 1851, when a medal was awarded to the inventor. These cases have now been in use upwards of ten years, and have demonstrated a gain of twenty per cent over the ordinary method of composition. It should be mentioned that Mr. Tobitt's invention was entirely original with himself. When he made it, he had never heard of Earl Stanhope, nor of any previous attempt at this improvement.
It is evident, when we reflect upon the intricate construction of language, that this method of saving labor, though it may be made still more useful than at present, must always be restricted within a limited circle of operations. Nor would any number of combination-letters obviate the necessity of composition by hand. The printer would still be obliged to stand at the case, picking up type after type, turning each one around and over, and so arranging the words in his "stick." Every one knows this process,—a painfully slow one in view of results, although individual compositors are sometimes wonderfully expert. But it is only when a great many men labor actively during more hours than ought to be spent in toil, that any considerable work is accomplished by this method. The composing-room of a large daily paper, for instance, presents, day and night, a spectacle of the almost ceaseless industry of jaded operatives. The need of relief in this respect was long ago recognized. The attempt at combination-letters was not less a precursor of reform than an acknowledgment of its necessity. It remained for American inventive genius, in this generation, to conceive and perfect the greatest labor-saving device that has ever been applied to the art of printing,—the last need of the operative,—the Type-Setting Machine.
It was inevitable that this should come. The only wonder is that it did not come before. Perhaps, indeed, the idea was often conceived in the minds of skilful, though dreamy and timorous inventors, but not developed, for fear of opposition. And opposition enough it has encountered,—alike from inertia, suspicion, and conservative hostility,—since first it assumed a practical position among American ideas, some ten years ago. But I do not care to dwell upon the shadows. Turn we to the sunshine. There are two strong points in favor of the invention, which, since they cover the whole ground of argument, deserve at least to be stated. I assert, then, without the fear of contradiction before my eyes, that the Type-Setting Machine, besides being a universal benefactor, is, in a double sense, a blessing to the mechanic. It spares his physical health, and it stimulates his mental and moral activity. The first truth appears by sanitary statistics, which prove that the health of such artisans as the type-founder and such craftsmen as the printer has been materially improved by the introduction of mechanical aids to their toil. The second is self-evident,—seeing that there is a moral instructor ever at work in the mazes of ingenious and highly-wrought machinery. Those philosophers are not far wrong, if at all, who assert that the rectitude of the human race has gained strength, as by a tonic, from the contemplation of the severe, arrowy railroad,—iron emblem of punctuality, directness, and despatch.
In the interest, therefore, of education no less than health, it becomes imperative that machinery should be substituted for hand-labor in composition. At present, our printing-offices are by no means the sources whence to draw inspirations of order, fitness, and wholesome toil. On the contrary, they are frequently badly lighted and worse ventilated rooms, wherein workmen elbow each other at the closely set cases, and grow dyspeptic under the combined pressure of foul air and irritating and long-protracted labor. All this should be changed. With the composing-machine would come an atmosphere of order and cleanliness and activity, making work rapid and agreeable, and lessening the period of its duration. I know that working-men are suspicious of scientific devices. But surely the compositor need not fear that the iron-handed automaton will snatch the bread out of his mouth. To diminish the cost of any article produced—which is the almost immediate result of substituting machinery for hand-labor—is to expand the market for that article. The Sewing-Machine has not injured the sempstress. The Power-Press has not injured the pressman. The Type-Setting Machine will not injure the compositor. Skilled labor, which must always be combined with the inventor's appliances for aiding it, so far from dreading harm in such association, may safely anticipate, in the far-reaching economy of science, ampler reward and better health, an increase of prosperity, and a longer and happier life in which to enjoy it.
Let me now briefly sketch the history of type-setting machinery. This must necessarily be done somewhat in the manner of Mr. Gradgrind. I am sorry thus to tax the reader's patience; but facts, which enjoy quite a reputation for stubbornness, cannot easily be wrought into fancies. Color the map as you will, it is but a prosy picture after all.
Charles Babbage, of London, the inventor of the Calculating-Engine, first essayed the application of machinery to composition. His calculator was so contrived that it would record in type the results of its own computations. This was over forty years ago. At about the same time Professor Treadwell of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was bred a practical mechanic, turned his attention to this improvement, and ascertained by experiment the feasibility of the type-setting machine. But mechanical enterprise was then comparatively inactive in America, and nothing of immediate practical importance resulted from the Professor's experiments. Nor did greater success attend the efforts of Dr. William Church, of Vermont, a contemporary inventor, who constructed an apparatus for setting types, but failed to provide for their distribution. Subsequently, for a long time, the idea slumbered.
At length, about the year 1840, Mr. Timothy Alden, a printer, and a native of Massachusetts, conceived a plan for setting and distributing type, which has since been put into successful operation. Mr. Alden's workshop was, I believe, situated at the corner of Canal and Centre Streets, in New York city. There he labored in privacy, year after year, encountering all manner of difficulty and discouragement, till his great work was substantially completed. His invention was patented in 1857, but the studious and persevering inventor did not live to reap the fruits of the seed he had sown. Worn out with care and toil and long-suffering patience, he died in 1859, a martyr to scientific progress. His patent passed into the hands of his cousin, Mr. Henry W. Alden, who has since organized a company for the manufacture and sale of the Alden Machine.
In appearance, this machine resembles a circular table, having in its centre a wheel, placed horizontally, from the outer edge of which lines of type radiate, like spokes from an axle, to the distance of about one foot. Three-quarters of the circle is filled up by these lines. In front is a key-board, containing one hundred and fifty-four keys, by which the operator governs the action of the machine. The central wheel controls some forty "conveyors," half of which compose the types into language, while the other half distribute them, guided by certain nicks cut upon their sides, to their proper places, when no longer needed. Both operations may go on at the same time. The types, as they are composed, are fed out in a continuous line, at the left of the key-board. The operator then divides this line into proper lengths, and "justifies" it by hand. "Justifying," it should be stated, consists in placing spaces between the words, and making the lines of equal length. This machine is a very ingenious invention, and marks the first great step towards successful improvement in the method of Type-Setting.
Another machine, originated by Mr. William H. Mitchell, of Brooklyn, New York, was patented in 1853. In appearance it suggests a harp placed horizontally. In front is a key-board, in shape and arrangement not unlike that of a piano. Each key indicates a certain letter. The types employed are arranged in columns, nearly perpendicular. The touching of a key throws out a type upon one of a series of endless belts, graduated in length, from six inches up to three feet, which move horizontally towards the farther side of the machine, depositing the types in due order upon a single belt. This latter carries them, in uninterrupted succession, to a brass receiver, on which they stand ranged in one long line. This line is then cut into lengths and justified by hand. Mr. Mitchell's Distributing-Apparatus—which is entirely distinct from the Composing-Machine—is, substantially, a circular wheel armed with feelers, which latter distribute according to the nicks cut in the types.
These machines require very considerable external aid in the labor they accomplish, while, like the Alden Machine, they neither justify nor lead the matter that is set. They have, however, stood a practical test,—having been in use several years. It may interest the reader to know that the matter for the "Continental Monthly" is set up and distributed by them, in the office of Mr. John F. Trow, of New York. They are also known, and to some extent employed, in printing-houses in London, and are found to be economical.
But, as remarked by Macbeth, "the greatest is behind." I touch now upon the most comprehensive and effectual invention for labor-saving in this respect,—namely, the Felt Machine. This ingenious creation, which is, in all particulars, original, and quite distinct from those already mentioned, performs, with accuracy and speed, all the work of composing, justifying, leading, and distributing types. It was invented by Mr. Charles W. Felt, of Salem, Massachusetts, a man of superior genius, whose energy in overcoming obstacles and working out the practical success of his idea is scarcely less remarkable than the idea itself. I shall dwell briefly upon his career, since it teaches the old, but never tiresome lesson of patient perseverance. He began the business of life in his native town, though not in mechanical pursuits. His mind, however, tended naturally toward mechanical science, and he improved every opportunity of increasing his knowledge in that department of study. The processes of Printing especially attracted his attention, and the idea of applying machinery to the work of composition haunted him from an early period of youth. He read, doubtless, of the various experiments that had been made in this direction, and observed, as far as possible, the results achieved by contemporary inventors. But it does not appear, that, in the original conception of his wonderful machine, he was indebted to any source for even a single suggestion. I have seen his first wooden model,—made at the age of eighteen,—crude and clumsy indeed, compared with the machine in its present shape, but containing the main features and principles. This was the first step. He began with the earnings of his boyhood. Then a few friends, fired by his spirit and courage, contributed money, and enabled him to prosecute his enterprise during several years. In this way it became the one purpose of his life. In time the number of his liberal patrons increased to nearly one hundred, and a considerable fund was placed at his disposal. Thus, genius, energy, and patience, aided by capital, carried the work bravely forward. It is a pleasure to record that a worthy design was thus generously nurtured. Mr. Felt's fund was subsequently increased by additional loans, from several of the same patrons. One of these gentlemen—Dr. G. Henry Lodge, of Swamscott, Massachusetts—contributed with such generous liberality that he may justly be said to share with the inventor the honor of having introduced this noble improvement in the art of printing. I take off my hat to Mæcenas. Dr. Lodge was led to appreciate the need of such an improvement by personal experience in publishing a large work, copies of which were gratuitously distributed among various libraries in the Republic. Acquainted with the toil of a printer's life, impelled by earnest love of real progress, and guided by a sound, practical judgment, he was peculiarly well fitted for the difficult province of directing the labors of an enthusiastic inventor. His duty has been well performed. The success of Mr. Felt's undertaking is due scarcely less to the pecuniary aid of all his patrons than to the counsel and encouragement of this wise, liberal, and steadfast friend. Thus aided, he has triumphed over all obstacles. Proceeding in a most unostentatious manner, he has submitted his device to the inspection of practical printers, and men of science, in various cities of the United States and Great Britain, and has everywhere won approval. His first patent was issued in 1854,—proceedings to obtain it having been commenced in the preceding year. Meanwhile he has organized a wealthy and influential company, for the purpose of manufacturing the machines and bringing them into general use. One of them has been built at Providence, Rhode Island, but the manufactory will be in Salem, Massachusetts, where the company has been formed.
The merits of Mr. Felt's machine are manifold. It is comparatively simple in construction, it is strongly made and durable, it cannot easily get out of order, and it does its work thoroughly. All that is required of the operator is to read the copy and touch the keys. The processes proceed, then, as of their own accord. But the supreme excellence of the machine is that it justifies the matter which it sets. The possibility of doing this by machinery has always been doubted, if not entirely disbelieved, from an erroneous idea that the process must be directed by immediate intelligence. Mr. Felt's invention demonstrates that this operation is clearly within the scope of machinery; that there is no need of a machine with brains, for setting or justifying type; that such a machine need not be able to think, read, or spell; but that, guided in its processes by an intelligent mind, a machine can perform operations which, as in this case, are purely mechanical, much more rapidly and cheaply than they can be performed by hand.
I cannot pretend to convey a technically accurate idea of this elaborate, though compact piece of machinery; but such a sketch as I can give—from memory of a pleasant hour spent in looking at it—shall here be given as briefly as possible.
The machine stands in a substantial iron framework, five feet by four, within which the mechanism is nicely disposed, so that there may be ample room for the four operations of setting, justifying, leading, and distributing. In front is a key-board of forty keys, which correspond to two hundred and fifty-six characters, arranged in eight cases. A single case consists of thirty-two flat brass tubes, standing perpendicularly, side by side, each one being filled with a certain denomination of type. Seven of the keys determine from which case the desired letter shall be taken. Thus, the small letter a is set by touching the a key; the capital A by touching the "capital key" in connection with the a key; the capital B by touching the "capital key" in connection with the b key; and so on with every letter. There are also keys called the "small capital," the "Italic," and the "Italic capital"; so that the machine contains all the characters known to the compositor. The operation of these "capital" and "small-capital keys" is similar to that of an organ-stop in modifying the effect of other keys.
When the machine is in motion,—and I should here mention that it is worked by steam,—a curious piece of mechanism, called "the stick,"—which is about as large as a man's hand, and quite as adroit,—plays to and fro beneath the cases, and acts obediently to the operator's touch. The spectacle of this little metallic intelligence is amusing. It is armed with pincers, which it uses much as the elephant does his trunk, though with infinite celerity. Every time a key is touched, these pincers seize a type from one of the tubes, turn downward, and, as it were, put it into the mouth of the stick. And so voracious is the appetite of this little creature, that in a few seconds its stomach is full,—in other words, the line is set. A tiny bell gives warning of this fact, and the operator finishes the word or syllabic. He then touches the justifying-key, and the spacer seizes the line and draws it into another part of the machine, to be justified, while the empty stick resumes its feeding. No time is lost; for, while the stick is setting a second line; the "spacer" is justifying the first; so that, in a few moments after starting, the processes are going forward simultaneously. That of justifying is, perhaps, the most ingenious. It is accomplished in this wise. The stick never sets a full line, but leaves room for spaces, and with the last letter of each word inserts a piece of steel, to separate the words. When the line has been drawn into the spacer, the pieces of steel, which are furnished with nicked heads for the purpose, are withdrawn, and ordinary spaces are substituted. All this requires no attention whatever from the operator. The matter, thus set and justified, is now leaded by the machine, and deposited upon a galley ready for the press.
In this machine, distribution is the reverse of composition, and is effected by simply reversing the motion of the shaft. By duplicating certain parts of the machine, both operations are performed at the same time. The process of distributing, and also that of resetting the same matter, may be made automatic by means of the Register. This device, although an original invention with Mr. Felt, is an application of the principle of the Jacquard loom. It consists of a narrow strip of card or paper, in which holes are punched as the types are taken, forming a substitute for the troublesome nicking of the type, which has heretofore been thought indispensable to automatic distribution. By this means the type can be changed in resetting, if desired, so that different editions of the same work can be printed in different sizes of type.
The machine is adapted to the use of combination-types as well as single letters. For this purpose Mr. Felt has developed a new system, based upon an elaborate analysis of the language. In a number of examples of printed matter, embracing a wide range of literature, the frequency of the single and combined letters has been ascertained by careful and accurate computation, and reduced to a percentage. It may interest the reader to know that e is the letter of most frequent occurrence, constituting one-eighth of the language. The, as a word or syllable, is found to be six per cent.; and, four per cent.; in, three per cent., etc.
I have not pretended, in this description of Mr. Felt's machine, to explain every technicality, or to raise and answer possible objections. The great point is, that the labor of setting, justifying, leading, and distributing types by machinery is actually done, by means of his invention. Thus the aspiration of inventive genius, in this department of art, is nobly fulfilled. Thus the links in the chain of progress are complete, from Laurentius Coster, walking in the woods of Holland, in 1430, and winning, from an accidental shower-bath, the art of making movable types, down to the wide-awake Massachusetts Yankee, whose genius will make printing as cheap as writing, and therefore a thousand times more available for all purposes of civilization,—besides lightening the burdens of toil, and blessing the jaded worker with a bright prospect of health, competence, and ease.
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.
V.
RAKING UP THE FIRE.
We have a custom at our house which we call raking up the fire. That is to say, the last half-hour before bed-time, we draw in, shoulder to shoulder, around the last brands and embers of our hearth, which we prick up and brighten, and dispose for a few farewell flickers and glimmers. This is a grand time for discussion. Then we talk over parties, if the young people have been out of an evening,—a book, if we have been reading one; we discuss and analyze characters,—give our views on all subjects, æsthetic, theological, and scientific, in a way most wonderful to hear; and, in fact, we sometimes get so engaged in our discussions that every spark of the fire burns out, and we begin to feel ourselves shivering around the shoulders, before we can remember that it is bed-time.
So, after the reading of my last article, we had a "raking-up talk,"—to wit, Jennie, Marianne, and I, with Bob Stephens;—my wife, still busy at her work-basket, sat at the table a little behind us. Jennie, of course, opened the ball in her usual incisive manner.
"But now, papa, after all you say in your piece there, I cannot help feeling, that, if I had the taste and the money too, it would be better than the taste alone with no money. I like the nice arrangements and the books and the drawings; but I think all these would appear better still with really elegant furniture."
"Who doubts that?" said I. "Give me a large tub of gold coin to dip into, and the furnishing and beautifying of a house is a simple affair. The same taste that could make beauty out of cents and dimes could make it more abundantly out of dollars and eagles. But I have been speaking for those who have not, and cannot get, riches, and who wish to have agreeable houses; and I begin in the outset by saying that beauty is a thing to be respected, reverenced, and devoutly cared for,—and then I say that BEAUTY IS CHEAP, nay, to put it so that the shrewdest Yankee will understand it, BEAUTY IS THE CHEAPEST THING YOU CAN HAVE, because in many ways it is a substitute for expense. A few vases of flowers in a room, a few blooming, well-kept plants, a few prints framed in fanciful frames of cheap domestic fabric, a statuette, a bracket, an engraving, a pencil-sketch, above all, a few choice books,—all these arranged by a woman who has the gift in her finger-ends often produce such an illusion on the mind's eye that one goes away without once having noticed that the cushion of the arm-chair was worn out, and that some veneering had fallen off the centre-table.
"I have a friend, a school-mistress, who lives in a poor little cottage enough, which, let alone of the Graces, might seem mean and sordid, but a few flower-seeds and a little weeding in the spring make it, all summer, an object which everybody stops to look at. Her æsthetic soul was at first greatly tried with the water-barrel which stood under the eaves-spout,—a most necessary evil, since only thus could her scanty supply of soft water for domestic purposes be secured. One of the Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought. She planted a row of morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of tacks around the top, and strung her water-butt with twine, like a great harpsichord. A few weeks covered the twine with blossoming plants, which every morning were a mass of many-colored airy blooms, waving in graceful sprays, and looking at themselves in the water. The water-barrel, in fact, became a celebrated stroke of ornamental gardening, which the neighbors came to look at."
"Well, but," said Jennie, "everybody hasn't mamma's faculty with flowers. Flowers will grow for some people, and for some they won't. Nobody can see what mamma does so very much, but her plants always look fresh and thriving and healthy,—her things blossom just when she wants them, and do anything else she wishes them to; and there are other people that fume and fuss and try, and their things won't do anything at all. There's Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma's go on flourishing as heart could desire."
"I can tell you what your mother puts into her plants," said I,—"just what she has put into her children, and all her other home-things,—her heart. She loves them; she lives in them; she has in herself a plant-life and a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as if she herself were a plant; she anticipates their wants,—always remembers them without an effort, and so the care flows to them daily and hourly. She hardly knows when she does the things that make them grow,—but she gives them a minute a hundred times a day. She moves this nearer the glass,—draws that back,—detects some thief of a worm on one,—digs at the root of another, to see why it droops,—washes these leaves, and sprinkles those,—waters, and refrains from watering, all with the habitual care of love. Your mother herself doesn't know why her plants grow; it takes a philosopher and a writer for the 'Atlantic' to tell her what the cause is."
Here I saw my wife laughing over her work-basket as she answered,—
"Girls, one of these days, I will write an article for the 'Atlantic,' that your papa need not have all the say to himself: however, I believe he has hit the nail on the head this time."
"Of course he has," said Marianne. "But, mamma, I am afraid to begin to depend much on plants for the beauty of my rooms, for fear I should not have your gift,—and of all forlorn and hopeless things in a room, ill-kept plants are the most so."
"I would not recommend," said I, "a young housekeeper, just beginning, to rest much for her home-ornament on plant-keeping, unless she has an experience of her own love and talent in this line, which makes her sure of success; for plants will not thrive, if they are forgotten or overlooked, and only tended in occasional intervals; and, as Marianne says, neglected plants are the most forlorn of all things."
"But, papa," said Marianne, anxiously, "there, in those patent parlors of John's that you wrote of, flowers acted a great part."
"The charm of those parlors of John's may be chemically analyzed," I said. "In the first place, there is sunshine, a thing that always affects the human nerves of happiness. Why else is it that people are always so glad to see the sun after a long storm? why are bright days matters of such congratulation? Sunshine fills a house with a thousand beautiful and fanciful effects of light and shade,—with soft, luminous, reflected radiances, that give picturesque effects to the pictures, books, statuettes of an interior. John, happily, had no money to buy brocatelle curtains,—and besides this, he loved sunshine too much to buy them, if he could. He had been enough with artists to know that heavy damask curtains darken precisely that part of the window where the light proper for pictures and statuary should come in, namely, the upper part. The fashionable system of curtains lights only the legs of the chairs and the carpets, and leaves all the upper portion of the room in shadow. John's windows have shades which can at pleasure be drawn down from the top or up from the bottom, so that the best light to be had may always be arranged for his little interior."
"Well, papa," said Marianne, "in your chemical analysis of John's rooms, what is the next thing to the sunshine?"
"The next," said I, "is harmony of color. The wall-paper, the furniture, the carpets, are of tints that harmonize with one another. This is a grace in rooms always, and one often neglected. The French have an expressive phrase with reference to articles which are out of accord,—they say that they swear at each other. I have been in rooms where I seemed to hear the wall-paper swearing at the carpet, and the carpet swearing back at the wall-paper, and each article of furniture swearing at the rest. These appointments may all of them be of the most expensive kind, but with such disharmony no arrangement can ever produce anything but a vulgar and disagreeable effect. On the other hand, I have been in rooms where all the material was cheap, and the furniture poor, but where, from some instinctive knowledge of the reciprocal effect of Colors, everything was harmonious, and produced a sense of elegance.
"I recollect once travelling on a Western canal through a long stretch of wilderness, and stopping to spend the night at an obscure settlement of a dozen houses. We were directed to lodgings in a common frame-house at a little distance, where, it seemed, the only hotel was kept. When we entered the parlor, we were struck with utter amazement at its prettiness, which affected us before we began to ask ourselves how it came to be pretty. It was, in fact, only one of the miracles of harmonious color working with very simple materials. Some woman had been busy there, who had both eyes and fingers. The sofa, the common wooden rocking-chairs, and some ottomans, probably made of old soap-boxes, were all covered with American nankeen of a soft yellowish-brown, with a bordering of blue print. The window-shades, the table-cover, and the piano-cloth, all repeated the same colors, in the same cheap material. A simple straw matting was laid over the floor, and, with a few books, a vase of flowers, and one or two prints, the room had a home-like, and even elegant air, that struck us all the more forcibly from its contrast with the usual tawdry, slovenly style of such parlors.
"The means used for getting up this effect were the most inexpensive possible,—simply the following-out, in cheap material, a law of uniformity and harmony, which always will produce beauty. In the same manner, I have seen a room furnished, whose effect was really gorgeous in color, where the only materials used were Turkey-red cotton and a simple ingrain carpet of corresponding color.
"Now, you girls have been busy lately in schemes for buying a velvet carpet for the new parlor that is to be, and the only points that have seemed to weigh in the council were that it was velvet, that it was cheaper than velvets usually are, and that it was a genteel pattern."
"Now, papa," said Jennie, "what ears you have! We thought you were reading all the time!"
"I see what you are going to say," said Marianne. "You think that we have not once mentioned the consideration which should determine the carpet,—whether it will harmonize with our other things. But, you see, papa, we don't really know what our other things are to be." "Yes," said Jennie, "and Aunt Easygo said it was an unusually good chance to get a velvet carpet."
"Yet, good as the chance is, it costs just twice as much as an ingrain."
"Yes, papa, it does."
"And you are not sure that the effect of it, after you get it down, will be as good as a well-chosen ingrain one."
"That's true," said Marianne, reflectively.
"But, then, papa," said Jennie, "Aunt Easygo said she never heard of such a bargain; only think, two dollars a yard for a velvet!"
"And why is it two dollars a yard? Is the man a personal friend, that he wishes to make you a present of a dollar on the yard? or is there some reason why it is undesirable?" said I.
"Well, you know, papa, he said those large patterns were not so salable."
"To tell the truth," said Marianne, "I never did like the pattern exactly; as to uniformity of tint, it might match with anything, for there's every color of the rainbow in it."
"You see, papa, it's a gorgeous flower-pattern," said Jennie.
"Well, Marianne, how many yards of this wonderfully cheap carpet do you want?"
"We want sixty yards for both rooms," said Jennie, always primed with statistics.
"That will be a hundred and twenty dollars," I said.
"Yes," said Jennie; "and we went over the figures together, and thought we could make it out by economizing in other things. Aunt Easygo said that the carpet was half the battle,—that it gave the air to everything else."
"Well, Marianne, if you want a man's advice in the case, mine is at your service."
"That is just what I want, papa."
"Well, then, my dear, choose your wall-papers and borderings, and, when they are up, choose an ingrain carpet to harmonize with them, and adapt your furniture to the same idea. The sixty dollars that you save on your carpet spend on engravings, chromo-lithographs, or photographs of some really good works of Art, to adorn your walls."
"Papa, I'll do it," said Marianne.
"My little dear," said I, "your papa may seem to be a sleepy old book-worm, yet he has his eyes open. Do you think I don't know why my girls have the credit of being the best-dressed girls on the street?"
"Oh, papa!" cried out both girls in a breath.
"Fact, that!" said Bob, with energy, pulling at his moustache. "Everybody talks about your dress, and wonders how you make it out."
"Well," said I, "I presume you do not go into a shop and buy a yard of ribbon because it is selling at half-price, and put it on without considering complexion, eyes, hair, and shade of the dress, do you?"
"Of course we don't!" chimed in the duo, with energy.
"Of course you don't. Haven't I seen you mincing down-stairs, with all your colors harmonized, even to your gloves and gaiters? Now, a room must be dressed as carefully as a lady."
"Well, I'm convinced," said Jennie, "that papa knows how to make rooms prettier than Aunt Easygo; but then she said this was cheap, because it would outlast two common carpets."
"But, as you pay double price," said I, "I don't see that. Besides, I would rather, in the course of twenty years, have two nice, fresh ingrain carpets, of just the color and pattern that suited my rooms, than labor along with one ill-chosen velvet that harmonized with nothing."
"I give it up," said Jennie; "I give it up."
"Now, understand me," said I; "I am not traducing velvet or Brussels or Axminster. I admit that more beautiful effects can be found in those goods than in the humbler fabrics of the carpet-rooms. Nothing would delight me more than to put an unlimited credit to Marianne's account, and let her work out the problems of harmonious color in velvet and damask. All I have to say is, that certain unities of color, certain general arrangements, will secure very nearly as good general effects in either material. A library with a neat, mossy green carpet on the floor, harmonizing with wall-paper and furniture, looks generally as well, whether the mossy green is made in Brussels or in ingrain. In the carpet-stores, these two materials stand side by side in the very same pattern, and one is often as good for the purpose as the other. A lady of my acquaintance, some years since, employed an artist to decorate her parlors. The walls being frescoed and tinted to suit his ideal, he immediately issued his decree that her splendid velvet carpets must be sent to auction, and others bought of certain colors, harmonizing with the walls. Unable to find exactly the color and pattern he wanted, he at last had the carpets woven in a neighboring factory, where, as yet, they had only the art of weaving ingrains. Thus was the material sacrificed at once to the harmony."
I remarked, in passing, that this was before Bigelow's mechanical genius had unlocked for America the higher secrets of carpet-weaving, and made it possible to have one's desires accomplished in Brussels or velvet. In those days, English carpet-weavers did not send to America for their looms, as they now do.
"But now to return to my analysis of John's rooms.
"Another thing which goes a great way towards giving them their agreeable air is the books in them. Some people are fond of treating books as others do children. One room in the house is selected, and every book driven into it and kept there. Yet nothing makes a room so home-like, so companionable, and gives it such an air of refinement, as the presence of books. They change the aspect of a parlor from that of a mere reception-room, where visitors perch for a transient call, and give it the air of a room where one feels like taking off one's things to stay. It gives the appearance of permanence and repose and quiet fellowship; and next to pictures on the walls, the many-colored bindings and gildings of books are the most agreeable adornment of a room."
"Then, Marianne," said Bob, "we have something to start with, at all events. There are my English Classics and English Poets, and my uniform editions of Scott and Thackeray and Macaulay and Prescott and Irving and Longfellow and Lowell and Hawthorne and Holmes and a host more. We really have something pretty there."
"You are a lucky girl," I said, "to have so much secured. A girl brought up in a house full of books, always able to turn to this or that author and look for any passage or poem when she thinks of it, doesn't know what a blank a house without books might be."
"Well," said Marianne, "mamma and I were counting over my treasures the other day. Do you know, I have one really fine old engraving, that Bob says is quite a genuine thing; and then there is that pencil-sketch that poor Schöne made for me the month before he died,—it is truly artistic."
"And I have a couple of capital things of Landseer's," said Bob.
"There's no danger that your rooms will not be pretty," said I, "now you are fairly on the right track."
"But, papa," said Marianne, "I am troubled about one thing. My love of beauty runs into everything. I want pretty things for my table,—and yet, as you say, servants are so careless, one cannot use such things freely without great waste."
"For my part," said my wife, "I believe in best china, to be kept carefully on an upper-shelf, and taken down for high-days and holidays; it may be a superstition, but I believe in it. It must never be taken out except when the mistress herself can see that it is safely cared for. My mother always washed her china herself; and it was a very pretty social ceremony, after tea was over, while she sat among us washing her pretty cups, and wiping them on a fine damask towel."
"With all my heart," said I; "have your best china, and venerate it,—it is one of the loveliest of domestic superstitions; only do not make it a bar to hospitality, and shrink from having a friend to tea with you, unless you feel equal to getting up to the high shelf where you keep it, getting it down, washing, and putting it up again.
"But in serving a table, I say, as I said of a house, beauty is a necessity, and beauty is cheap. Because you cannot afford beauty in one form, it does not follow that you cannot have it in another. Because one cannot afford to keep up a perennial supply of delicate china and crystal, subject to the accidents of raw, untrained servants, it does not follow that the every-day table need present a sordid assortment of articles chosen simply for cheapness, while the whole capacity of the purse is given to the set forever locked away for state-occasions.
"A table-service, all of simple white, of graceful forms, even though not of china, if arranged with care, with snowy, well-kept table-linen, clear glasses, and bright American plate in place of solid silver, may be made to look inviting; add a glass of flowers every day, and your table may look pretty;—and it is far more important that it should look pretty for the family every day than for company once in two weeks."
"I tell my girls," said my wife, "as the result of my experience, you may have your pretty china and your lovely fanciful articles for the table only so long as you can take all the care of them yourselves. As soon as you get tired of doing this, and put them into the hands of the trustiest servants, some good, well-meaning creature is sure to break her heart and your own and your very pet, darling china pitcher all in one and the same minute; and then her frantic despair leaves you not even the relief of scolding."
"I have become perfectly sure," said I, "that there are spiteful little brownies, intent on seducing good women to sin, who mount guard over the special idols of the china-closet. If you hear a crash, and a loud Irish wail from the inner depths, you never think of its being a yellow pie-plate, or that dreadful one-handled tureen that you have been wishing were broken these five years; no, indeed,—it is sure to be the lovely painted china bowl, wreathed with morning-glories and sweet-peas, or the engraved glass goblet, with quaint old-English initials. China sacrificed must be a great means of saintship to women. Pope, I think, puts it as the crowning grace of his perfect woman, that she is
'Mistress of herself, though china fall.'"
"I ought to be a saint by this time, then," said mamma; "for in the course of my days I have lost so many idols by breakage, and peculiar accidents that seemed by a special fatality to befall my prettiest and most irreplaceable things, that in fact it has come to be a superstitious feeling now with which I regard anything particularly pretty of a breakable nature."
"Well," said Marianne, "unless one has a great deal of money, it seems to me that the investment in these pretty fragilities is rather a poor one."
"Yet," said I, "the principle of beauty is never so captivating as when it presides over the hour of daily meals. I would have the room where they are served one of the pleasantest and sunniest in the house. I would have its coloring cheerful, and there should be companionable pictures and engravings on the walls. Of all things, I dislike a room that seems to be kept like a restaurant, merely to eat in. I like to see in a dining-room something that betokens a pleasant sitting-room at other hours. I like there some books, a comfortable sofa or lounge, and all that should make it cozy and inviting. The custom in some families, of adopting for the daily meals one of the two parlors which a city-house furnishes, has often seemed to me a particularly happy one. You take your meals, then, in an agreeable place, surrounded by the little agreeable arrangements of your daily sitting-room; and after the meal, if the lady of the house does the honors of her own pretty china herself, the office may be a pleasant and social one.
"But in regard to your table-service I have my advice at hand. Invest in pretty table-linen, in delicate napkins, have your vase of flowers, and be guided by the eye of taste in the choice and arrangement of even the every-day table-articles, and have no ugly things when you can have pretty ones by taking a little thought. If you are sore tempted with lovely china and crystal, too fragile to last, too expensive to be renewed, turn away to a print-shop and comfort yourself by hanging around the walls of your dining-room beauty that will not break or fade, that will meet your eye from year to year, though plates, tumblers, and tea-sets successively vanish. There is my advice for you, Marianne."
At the same time, let me say, in parenthesis, that my wife, whose weakness is china, informed me that night, when we were by ourselves, that she was ordering secretly a tea-set as a bridal gift for Marianne, every cup of which was to be exquisitely painted with the wild-flowers of America, from designs of her own,—a thing, by-the-by, that can now be very nicely executed in our country. "It will last her all her life," she said, "and always be such a pleasure to look at,—and a pretty tea-table is such a pretty sight!" So spoke Mrs. Crowfield, "unweaned from china by a thousand falls." She spoke even with tears in her eyes. Verily, these women are harps of a thousand strings!
But to return to my subject.
"Finally and lastly," I said, "in my analysis and explication of the agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,—their homeliness. By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to be used, but the air that is given to a room by being really at home in it. Not the most skilful arrangement can impart this charm.
"It is said that a king of France once remarked,—'My son, you must seem to love your people.'
"'Father, how shall I seem to love them?'
"'My son, you must love them.'
"So to make rooms seem home-like you must be at home in them. Human light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that they are never used, that you can never be at ease there. In vain the house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the centre-table.
"Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from a wax image.
"Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current. You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into the family, and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at a distance in some outer court of the gentiles.
"How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they lived in Kamtschatka! And why? Because the room which they call a front-parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know. They sit in a back-room,—work, talk, read, perhaps. After the servant has let you in and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting for them to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what they may be doing. From some distant region, the laugh of a child, the song of a canary-bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily to. Do they love plants? Do they write letters, sew, embroider, crochet? Do they ever romp and frolic? What books do they read? Do they sketch or paint? Of all these possibilities the mute and muffled room says nothing. A sofa and six chairs, two ottomans fresh from the upholsterer's, a Brussels carpet, a centre-table with four gilt Books of Beauty on it, a mantel-clock from Paris, and two bronze vases,—all these tell you only in frigid tones, 'This is the best room,'—only that, and nothing more,—and soon she trips in in her best clothes, and apologizes for keeping you waiting, asks how your mother is, and you remark that it is a pleasant day,—and thus the acquaintance progresses from year to year. One hour in the little back-room, where the plants and canary-bird and children are, might have made you fast friends for life; but as it is, you care no more for them than for the gilt clock on the mantel.
"And now, girls," said I, pulling a paper out of my pocket, "you must know that your father is getting to be famous by means of these 'House and Home Papers.' Here is a letter I have just received:—
"'MOST EXCELLENT MR. CROWFIELD,—Your thoughts have lighted into our family-circle, and echoed from our fireside. We all feel the force of them, and are delighted with the felicity of your treatment of the topic you have chosen. You have taken hold of a subject that lies deep in our hearts, in a genial, temperate, and convincing spirit. All must acknowledge the power of your sentiments upon their imaginations;—if they could only trust to them in actual life! There is the rub.
"'Omitting further upon these points, there is a special feature of your articles upon which we wish to address you. You seem as yet (we do not know, of course, what you may hereafter do) to speak only of homes whose conduct depends upon the help of servants. Now your principles apply, as some of us well conceive, to nearly all classes of society; yet most people, to take an impressive hint, must have their portraits drawn out more exactly. We therefore hope that you will give a reasonable share of your attention to us who do not employ servants, so that you may ease us of some of our burdens, which, in spite of common sense, we dare not throw off. For instance, we have company,—a friend from afar, (perhaps wealthy,) or a minister, or some other man of note. What do we do? Sit down and receive our visitor with all good-will and the freedom of a home? No; we (the lady of the house) flutter about to clear up things, apologizing about this, that, and the other condition of unpreparedness, and, having settled the visitor in the parlor, set about marshalling the elements of a grand dinner or supper, such as no person but a gourmand wants to sit down to, when at home and comfortable; and in getting up this meal, clearing away, and washing the dishes, we use up a good half of the time which our guest spends with us. We have spread ourselves, and shown him what we could do; but what a paltry, heart-sickening achievement! Now, good Mr. Crowfield, thou friend of the robbed and despairing, wilt thou not descend into our purgatorial circle, and tell the world what thou hast seen there of doleful remembrance? Tell us how we, who must do and desire to do our own work, can show forth in our homes a homely, yet genial hospitality, and entertain our guests without making a fuss and hurly-burly, and seeming to be anxious for their sake about many things, and spending too much time getting meals, as if eating were the chief social pleasure. Won't you do this, Mr. Crowfield?
"'Yours beseechingly,
"'R.H.A.'"
"That's a good letter," said Jennie.
"To be sure it is," said I.
"And shall you answer it, papa?"
"In the very next 'Atlantic,' you may be sure I shall. The class that do their own work are the strongest, the most numerous, and, taking one thing with another, quite as well cultivated a class as any other. They are the anomaly of our country,—the distinctive feature of the new society that we are building up here; and if we are to accomplish our national destiny, that class must increase rather than diminish. I shall certainly do my best to answer the very sensible and pregnant questions of that letter."
Here Marianne shivered and drew up a shawl, and Jennie gaped; my wife folded up the garment in which she had set the last stitch, and the clock struck twelve.
Bob gave a low whistle. "Who knew it was so late?"
"We have talked the fire fairly out," said Jennie.
REENLISTED.
Oh, did you see him in the street, dressed up in army-blue,
When drums and trumpets into town their storm of music threw,—
A louder tune than all the winds could muster in the air,
The Rebel winds, that tried so hard our flag in strips to tear?
You didn't mind him? Oh, you looked beyond him, then, perhaps,
To see the mounted officers rigged out with trooper-caps,
And shiny clothes, and sashes red, and epaulets and all;—
It wasn't for such things as these he heard his country call.
She asked for men; and up he spoke, my handsome, hearty Sam,—
"I'll die for the dear old Union, if she'll take me as I am."
And if a better man than he there's mother that can show,
From Maine to Minnesota, then let the nation know.
You would not pick him from the rest by eagles or by stars,
By straps upon his coat-sleeve, or gold or silver bars,
Nor a corporal's strip of worsted, but there's something in his face,
And something in his even step, a-marching in his place,
That couldn't be improved by all the badges in the land:
A patriot, and a good, strong man; are generals much more grand?
We rest our pride on that big heart wrapped up in army-blue,
The girl he loves, Mehitabel, and I, who love him too.
He's never shirked a battle yet, though frightful risks he's run,
Since treason flooded Baltimore, the spring of 'sixty-one;
Through blood and storm he's held out firm, nor fretted once, my Sam,
At swamps of Chickahominy, or fields of Antietam:
Though many a time, he's told us, when he saw them lying dead,
The boys that came from Newburyport, and Lynn, and Marblehead,
Stretched out upon the trampled turf, and wept on by the sky,
It seemed to him the Commonwealth had drained her life-blood dry.
"But then," he said, "the more's the need the country has of me:
To live and fight the war all through, what glory it would be!
The Rebel balls don't hit me, and, mother, if they should,
You'll know I've fallen in my place, where I have always stood."
He's taken out his furlough, and short enough it seemed:
I often tell Mehitabel he'll think he only dreamed
Of walking with her nights so bright you couldn't see a star,
And hearing the swift tide come in across the harbor-bar.
The stars that shine above the stripes, they light him southward now;
The tide of war has swept him back; he's made a solemn vow
To build himself no home-nest till his country's work is done:
God bless the vow, and speed the work, my patriot, my son!
And yet it is a pretty place where his new house might be;
An orchard-road that leads your eye straight out upon the sea:—
The boy not work his father's farm? it seems almost a shame;
But any selfish plan for him he'd never let me name.
He's reënlisted for the war, for victory or for death;
A soldier's grave, perhaps,—the thought has half-way stopped my breath,
And driven a cloud across the sun;—my boy, it will not be!
The war will soon be over; home again you'll come to me!
He's reënlisted; and I smiled to see him going, too:
There's nothing that becomes him half so well as army-blue.
Only a private in the ranks; but sure I am, indeed,
If all the privates were like him, they 'd scarcely captains need!
And I and Massachusetts share the honor of his birth,—
The grand old State! to me the best in all the peopled earth!
I cannot hold a musket, but I have a son who can;
And I'm proud for Freedom's sake to be the mother of a man!
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
For the first time since the American Presidency was created, the American people have entered upon a Presidential election in time of great war. Even the election of 1812 forms no exception to this assertion, as the second contest with England did not begin until the summer of that year, when the conditions of the political contest were already understood, and it was known that Mr. Madison would be reëlected, in spite of the opposition of the Federalists, and notwithstanding the disaffection of those Democrats who took De Witt Clinton for their leader. Mr. Madison, indeed, is supposed to have turned "war man," against his own convictions, in order to conciliate the "Young Democracy" of 1812, who had resolved upon having a fight with England,—and in that way to have secured for supporters men who would have prevented his reëlection, had he defied them. The trouble that we had with France at the close of the last century undoubtedly had some effect in deciding the fourth Presidential contest adversely to the Federalists; but though it was illustrated by some excellent naval fighting, it can hardly be spoken of as a war: certainly, it was not a great war. The Mexican War had been brought to a triumphant close before the election of 1848 was opened. Of the nineteen Presidential elections which the country has known, sixteen were held in times of profound peace,—as Indian wars went for nothing; and the other three were not affected as to their decision by the contests we had had with France or Mexico, or by that with England, which was in its first stage when Mr. Madison was reëlected. Every Presidential election, from that of 1788 to that of 1860, found us a united people, with every State taking some part in the canvas. Even South Carolina in 1860 was not clearly counted out of the fight until after Mr. Lincoln's success had been announced, and rebellion had been resolved upon.
But all is now changed. The twentieth Presidential election finds us not only at war, but engaged in a civil war of such magnitude that even the most martial nations of Europe are surprised at the numbers who take part in it, and at its cost. The election is to be carried, and perhaps decided, amid the din of arms, with a million of voters in the land and sea forces of the two parties. This is so new to us, that it would seem more like a dream than a reality, but that losses of life and high prices render the matter most painfully real. How to act under such circumstances might well puzzle us, were it not that the path of duty is pointed out by the spirit of patriotism. The election will have much effect on the operations of war, and those operations in their turn will have no light effect on the election. Our political action should be such as to strengthen the arm of Government; and the military action of Government should be such as to strengthen those who shall be engaged in affording it political support. Failure in the field would not lead to defeat at the polls, but it might so lessen the loyal majority that the public sentiment of the country would be but feebly represented by the country's political action. What happened in 1862 might happen again in 1864, and with much more disastrous effect on the fortunes of the Republic. In 1862 there was much discontent, because of the belief that Government had not done all it could have done to bring about the overthrow of the Rebels. Irritated by the reverses which had befallen our arms in Virginia, and knowing that nothing had been withheld that was necessary to the effective waging of the war, thousands of men refrained from voting, half-inclined as they were to see if the Democrats could not do that which others had failed to do. We are not discussing the justice of the opinion which then prevailed, but simply state a fact; and the consequence of the discontent that existed was that the Democrats came very near obtaining control of the popular branch of Congress. They made heavy gains in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other States; but that this result was not the effect of hostility to the national cause was made clearly apparent a year later, when the supporters of that cause won a series of brilliant political victories in the very States which had either pronounced for the Democrats in '62, or had given but small Republican majorities. The loyal majority in Ohio in 1863 was something that approached to the fabulous, because then the violent members of the Opposition, encouraged by what had taken place a year earlier, had the audacity to place Mr. Vallandigham in nomination for the office of Governor. Had that individual been elevated to the post for which he was nominated, Ohio must have been arrayed in open opposition to the Federal Government, almost as decisively so as South Carolina or Virginia. Had he been defeated by a small majority, his party would have taken arms against the State Government, and Ohio, compelled to fight for the maintenance of social order at home, would have done nothing for the national cause. But the majority against Mr. Vallandigham was upward of one hundred thousand; and to attempt resistance to a Government so potently supported as that of which Mr. Brough was the head was something that surpassed even the audacity of the men who had had the bad courage to select Mr. Vallandigham for their leader, in the hope of being able to make him the head of the State. That which was done in Ohio, not seven months since, should be done in the nation not seven months hence, if we would have peace preserved at home, and all our available means directed to the work of destroying the armies of the Southern Confederacy, and to the seizure of its ports and principal towns. The national popular majority should be so great in support of the war as to prevent any faction from thinking of resistance to the people's will as a possibility. The moral effect of a mighty political victory in November would be almost incalculable, both at home and in Europe; and in the Confederacy it would put an end to all such hopes of ultimate success as may rest upon the belief that we are a divided people.
The Democratic party should not be restored to power, happen what may in the course of the present campaign. This we say, not because we believe the Democratic masses wanting in loyalty or patriotism, but because we are of opinion that there should be no change either in the position of parties or in the personnel of the Government. There ought to be no doubt as to the soundness of the views that are held by most Democrats. They love their country, and they desire to see the Rebels subdued. They have the same interest, considered as citizens, in the triumph of the Federal cause that we all have. They have contributed their share of men to the fleets and armies of the Republic, and to the rolls on which are inscribed the names of the gallant dead. Many of our best generals formerly belonged to the Democratic organization, and they may still hold Democratic opinions on common politics. Why, then, object to the Democratic party being replaced in power? Because that would be a restoration, and it is a truism that a restoration is of all things the worst thing that can befall a country in times of civil commotion. If it could be settled beyond controversy that the Democratic party, should it be restored, would be governed by those of its members who have done their duty to their country in every way, no objection could be made to its coming again into possession of the National Government. But we know that nothing of the kind would take place. The most violent members of the Democratic party would govern that party, and dictate its policy and course of action, were it to triumph in the pending political contest. We wish for no better proof of this than is afforded by the conduct of Democratic conventions for some time past. The last convention of the New-Hampshire Democracy gave utterance to sentiments not essentially differing from those which were proclaimed by the supporters of Mr. Vallandigham in Ohio. Unwarned by the fate of the Ohio Democrats, the representatives of the New-Hampshire Democracy assumed a position that virtually pledged their State to make war on the Federal Government, should they succeed in electing Mr. Harrington, their candidate for Governor. The issue was distinctly made, and the people of New Hampshire, by a much larger majority than has usually marked the result of their State elections since the Civil War began, reëlected Mr. Gillmore, who owed his first term of office to the Legislature's action: so great was the change wrought in one year. This shows that some of the Democratic voters are not prepared to follow their leaders to destruction. So was it in Connecticut. The Democratic convention in that State exhibited a very strong feeling of disloyalty, but the people rebuked its members by reëlecting Governor Buckingham by a majority twice as large as that which he received last year. Here we have proofs, that, while the men who manage the Democratic party are prepared to go all lengths in opposition to the Federal Government, they cannot carry all their ordinary followers with them, when they unhesitatingly avow their principles and purpose. If they are so rabid, when engaged in action that is simply preliminary to local elections, what might not be expected from them, should they find themselves intrusted with the charge of the National Government? They would then behave in the most intolerant manner, and would introduce into this country a system of proscription quite as bad as anything of the kind that was known to the Romans as one of the most frightful consequences of their great civil contests. This would lead to reaction, and every Presidential election might be followed by deeds that would make our country a by-word, a hissing, and a reproach among the nations. There would be an end to all those fine hopes that are entertained that we shall speedily recover from the effects of the war, let peace once be restored. Prosperity would never return to the land, or would return only under the rule of some military despot, whose ascendency would gladly be seen and supported by a people weary of uncertainty and danger, and craving order above all things,—as the French people submitted to the rule of Napoleon III., because they believed him to be the man best qualified to protect themselves and their property against the designs of the Socialists. Our constitutional polity would give way to a cannonarchy, as every quietly disposed person would prefer the arbitrary government of one man to the organization of anarchy. If we should escape from both despotism and anarchy, it would be at the price of national destruction. Every great State would "set up for itself," while smaller States that are neighbors would form themselves into confederacies. There would come to exist a dozen nations where but one now exists,—for we leave the Southern Confederacy aside in this consideration. That Confederacy, however, would become the greatest power in North America. Not only would it hold together, but it would at once acquire the Border States, where slavery would be more than restored, for there it would be made as powerful an interest as it was in South Carolina and Mississippi but four years ago. War has welded the Southern Confederacy together, and in face of our breaking-up its rulers would have the strongest possible inducement to keep their Republic united, because they would then hope to conquer most of the Free States, and to confer upon them the "blessings" of the servile system of labor.
It is sometimes said, that, if the Democratic party should resume the rule of this nation, the Confederates, or Rebels, would signify their readiness to return into the Union, on the simple condition that things should be allowed to assume the forms they bore prior to Mr. Lincoln's election. They rebelled against the men who came into power through the political decision that was made in 1860; and, the American people having reversed that decision by restoring the Democracy, the cause of their rebellion having been removed, rebellion itself would cease as of course. Were this view of the subject indisputably sound, it would ill become the American to surrender to the men who assume that the decision of an election, this way or that, affords sufficient reason for a resort to arms. We should hold our existence as a nation by the basest of tenures, were we to admit the monstrous doctrine that only one party is competent to govern the Republic, and that there is an appeal from the decision of the ballot to that of the bayonet. There never existed a great people so craven as to make such an admission; and were we to set the example of making it, we should justify all that has been said adversely to us by domestic traitors and foreign foes. We should prove that we were unfit to enjoy that greatest of all public blessings, constitutional freedom, by surrendering it at the demand of a faction, merely that we might live in security, and enjoy the property we had accumulated. Ancient history mentions a people who were so fond of their ease that they placed all power in the hands of their slaves, on condition that the latter should not meddle with those pleasures to the unbroken pursuit of which they purposed devoting all their means and time. The slaves soon became masters, and the masters slaves. We should fare as badly as the Volsinians, were we to place all power in the hands of slaveholders, who then would own some millions of white bondmen, far inferior in every manly quality to those dark-faced chattels from among whom the Union has recruited some of its bravest and most unselfish champions. But there is no ground, none whatever, for believing that the Rebels would cease to be Rebels, if there should be a Democratic restoration effected. Not even the election of Mr. Buchanan to a second Presidential term would lead them to abandon their purpose: and he was their most useful tool in 1860, and without his assistance they could not have made one step in the road to rebellion, or ruin. Their purpose is to found a new nation, as they have never hesitated to avow, with a frankness that is as commendable as the cause in which it is evinced is abominable. They would be glad to see a Democrat chosen our next President, because they would expect from him an acknowledgment of their "independence"; but they would no more lay down their arms at his entreaty than they would at the command of a President of Republican opinions. Their arms can be forced from their hands, but there exists no man who could, from any position, induce them to surrender, or come back into the Union on any terms. They mean to abide the wager of battle, and are more likely to be moved from their purpose by the bold actions of General Grant than by the blandest words of the smoothest-tongued Democrat in America. To any mere persuader, no matter what his place or his opinions, they would turn an ear as deaf as that of the adder,—refusing to listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.
As there should be no change made in the political character of the Government, so there should be none in the men who compose it. To place power in new hands, at a time like the present, would be as unwise as it would be to raise a new army for the purpose of fighting the numerous, well-trained, and zealous force which the Rebels have organized with the intention of making a desperate effort to reëstablish their affairs. There is no reason for supposing that a change would give us wiser or better men, and it is certain that they would be inexperienced men, should they all be as many Solomons or Solons. As we are situated, it is men of experience that we require to administer the Government; and out of the present Administration it is impossible to find men of the kind of experience that is needed at this crisis of the nation's career. The errors into which we fell in the early days of the contest were the effect of want of experience; and it would be but to provide for their repetition, were we to call a new Administration into existence. The people understand this, and hence the very general expression of opinion in favor of the reëlection of President Lincoln, whose training through four most terrible years—years such as no other President ever knew—will have qualified him to carry on the Government during a second term to the satisfaction of all unselfish men. Mr. Lincoln's honesty is beyond question, and we need an honest man at the head of the nation now more than ever. That the Rebels object to him is a recommendation in the eyes of loyal men. The substitution of a new man would not dispose them to submission, and they would expect to profit from that inevitable change of policy which would follow from a change of men. As to "the one-term principle," we never held it in much regard; and we are less disposed to approve it now than we should have been, had peace been maintained. Were the President elected for six or eight years, it might be wise to amend the Constitution so as to prevent the reëlection of any man; but while the present arrangement shall exist, it would not be wise to insist upon a complete change of Government every four years. To hold out the Presidency as a prize to be struggled for by new men at every national election is to increase the troubles of the country. Among the causes of the Civil War the ambition to be made President must be reckoned. Every politician has carried a term at the White House in his portfolio, as every French conscript carries a marshal's bâton in his knapsack; and the disappointments of so many aspirants swelled the number of the disaffected to the proportions of an army, counting all who expected office as the consequence of this man's or that man's elevation to the Presidency. Were there no other reason for desiring the reëlection of President Lincoln, the fact that it would be the first step toward a return to the rule that obtained during the first half-century of our national existence under the existing Constitution should suffice to make us all advocates of his nomination for a second term. That the Baltimore Convention will meet next month, and that it will place Mr. Lincoln once more before the American people as a candidate for their suffrages, are facts now as fully established as anything well can be that depends upon the future; and that he will be reëlected admits of no doubt. The popular voice designates him as the man of the time and the occasion, and the action of the Convention will be nothing beyond a formal process, that shall give regular expression to a public sentiment which is too strong to be denied, and which will be found of irresistible force.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers. By SAMUEL SMILES, Author of "Self-Help," "Brief Biographies," and "Life of George Stephenson." Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
The history of iron is the history of civilization. The rough, shapeless ore that lies hidden in the earth folds in its unlovely bosom such fate and fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and huge of limb, bends slowly his brawny neck to the yoke of man, and at his bidding becomes a nimble servitor to do his will. Subtile as thought, rejoicing in power, no touch is too delicate for his perception, no service too mighty for his strength. Tales of faërie, feats of magic, pale before the simple story of his every-day labor, or find in his deeds the facts which they but faintly shadowed forth. And waiting upon his transformation, a tribe becomes a nation, a race of savages rises up philosophers, artists, gentlemen.
Commerce, science, warfare have their progress and their vicissitudes; but underneath them all, unnoted, it may be, or treated to a superficial and perhaps supercilious glance, yet mainspring and regulator of all, runs an iron thread, true thread of Fate, coiling around the limbs of man, and impeding all progress, till he shall have untwisted its Gordian knot, but bidding him forward from strength to strength with each successive release. No romance of court or camp surpasses the romance of the forge. A blacksmith at his anvil seems to us a respectable, but not an eminently heroic person; yet, walking backward along the past by the light which he strikes from the glowing metal beneath his hand, we shall fancy ourselves to be walking in the true heroic age. Kings and warriors have brandished their swords right royally, and such splendor has flashed from Excalibur and Morglay that our dazzled eyes have scarcely discerned the brawny smith who not only stood in the twilight of the background and fashioned with skilful hand the blade which radiates such light, but passed through all the land, changing huts into houses, houses into homes, and transforming into a garden by his skill the wilderness which had been rescued by the sword. Vigorous brains, clear eyes, sturdy arms have wrought out, not without blood, victories more potent, more permanent, more heroic, than those of the battle-field.
Such books as this under consideration give us only materials for the great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own rhythm and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage, rejoicing in the fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving a sufficient income from letting them out to his neighbors for the purpose of boring holes, down to the true Thor's hammer, so tractable to the master's hand that it can chip without breaking the end of an egg in a glass on the anvil, crack a nut without touching the kernel, or strike a blow of ten tons eighty times in a minute, we have a steady onward movement. Prejudice builds its solid breakwaters; ignorance, inability, clumsiness, and awkwardness raise such obstacles as they can; but the delay of a century is but a moment. Slowly and surely the waters rise till they sweep away all obstacles, overtop all barriers, and plunge forward again with ever accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our glory and of our humiliation,—a record of marvellous, inborn, God-given genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass most beneficent ends, but baffled, thwarted, fiercely and persistently resisted by obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and gaining its ends, if it gain them at all, only by address the most sagacious, courage the most invincible, and perseverance the most untiring. Every great advance in mechanical skill has been met by the determined hostility of men who fancied their craft to be in danger. An invention which enabled a hand of iron to do the work of fifty hands of flesh and blood was considered guilty of taking the bread from the thrice fifty mouths that depended on those hands' labor, and was not unfrequently visited with the punishment due to such guilt. No demonstrated fruitlessness of similar fears in the past served to allay fears for the future; no inefficiency of brute force permanently to stay the enterprise of the mind prevented brute force from making its futile and sometimes fatal attempts. It is no matter that increased facility of production has been attended by an increased demand for the product; it is no matter that ingenuity has never been held permanently back from its carefully conned plans; there have not been wanting men, numerous, ignorant, and ignoble enough to collect in mobs, raze workshops, destroy machinery, chase away inventors, and fancy, that, so employed, they have been engaged in the work of self-protection.
It is such indirect lessons as may be learned from these and other statements that give this book its chief value. The interesting historical and mechanical information contained in its pages makes it indeed well worthy of perusal; yet for that alone we should not take especial pains to set it before the people. But its incidental teachings ought to be taken to heart by every man, and especially every mechanic, who has any ambition or conscience beyond the exigencies of bread and butter. Lack of ambition is not an American fault, but it is too often an ambition that regards irrelevant and factitious honors rather than those to which it may legitimately and laudably aspire. A mechanic should find in the excellence of his mechanism a greater reward and satisfaction than in the wearing of a badge of office which any fifth-rate lawyer or broken-down man-of-business with influential "friends" may obtain, and whose petty duties they may discharge quite as well as the first-rate mechanic. The mechanic who is master of his calling need yield to none. We would not have him like the ironmongers denounced by the old religious writer as "heathenish in their manners, puffed up with pride, and inflated with worldly prosperity"; but we would have him mindful of his true dignity. In the importance of the results which he achieves, in the magnitude of the honors he may win, in the genius he may employ and the skill he may attain, no profession or occupation presents a more inviting field than his; but it will yield fruits only to the good husbandman. Science and art give up their treasures only to him who is capable of enthusiasm and devotion. He alone who magnifies his office makes it honorable. Whether he work in marble, canvas, or iron, the man who is content simply to follow his occupation, and is not possessed by it, may be an artificer, but will not be an artist, nor ever wear the laurel on his brow. He should be so enamored of his calling as to court it for its own charms. Invention is a capricious mistress, and does not always bestow her favors on the most worthy. Men not a few have died in poverty, and left a golden harvest to their successors; yet the race is often enough to the swift, and the battle to the strong, to justify men in striving after strength and swiftness, as well for the guerdon which they bring as for the jubilant consciousness which they impart. And this, at least, is sure: though merit may, by some rare mischance, be overlooked, demerit has no opportunity whatever to gain distinction. Sleight of hand cannot long pass muster for skill of hand. Unswerving integrity, unimpeachable sincerity, is the lesson constantly taught by the lives of these renowned mechanics. "The great secret," says one, "is to have the courage to be honest,—a spirit to purchase the best material, and the means and disposition to do justice to it in the manufacture." Another, remonstrated with for his high charges, which were declared to be six times more than the price his employers had before been paying for the same articles, could safely say, "That may be, but mine are more than six times better." A master of his profession is master of his employers. Maudslay's works, we are told, came to be regarded as a first-class school for mechanical engineers, the Oxford and Cambridge of mechanics; nor can Oxford and Cambridge men be any prouder of their connection with their colleges than distinguished engineers of their connection with this famous school of Maudslay. With such an esprit de corps what excellence have we not a right to expect?
We cannot forbear pointing out the Aids to Humility collected in this book from various quarters, and presented to the consideration of the nineteenth century. Our boasted age of invention turns out, after all, to have been only gathering up what antiquity has let fall,—rediscovering and putting to practical account what the past discovered, but could not, or, with miscalled dignity, would not, turn to the uses of common life. Steam-carriages, hydraulic engines, diving-bells, which we have regarded with so much complacency as our peculiar property, worked their wonders in the teeming brain of an old monk who lived six hundred years ago. Printing, stereotypes, lithography, gunpowder, Colt's revolvers and Armstrong guns, Congreve rockets, coal-gas and chloroform, daguerreotypes, reaping-machines, and the electric telegraph are nothing new under the sun. Hundreds of years ago the idea was born, but the world was too young to know its character or prize its service, and so the poor little bantling was left to shiver itself to death while the world stumbled on as aforetime. How many eras of birth there may have been we do not know, but it was reserved for our later age to receive the young stranger with open arms, and nourish his infant limbs to manly strength. Richly are we rewarded in the precision and power with which he performs our tasks, in the comfort with which he enriches, the beauty with which he adorns, and the knowledge with which he ennobles our daily life.
The Life and Times of John Huss; or, The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century. By E.H. GILLETT. 2 vols. Second Edition. Boston: Gould & Lincoln.
The style of Mr. Gillett is clear, manly, and discriminating. If, in respect of show, sparkle, nervous energy, verbal felicity, and picturesqueness, it is not equal to that of our chief American historians, yet it is not deficient in ease, grace, or vigor. He is almost always careful, always unambitious, always in good taste. To complain that the style is not equal to Mr. Motley's, simply on the ground that the book is large and the subject historical, is grossly unfair. Mr. Gillett has not been eager for a place as a writer; his story has more merit in the thing told than in the telling. Even with his want of German he has been thorough in the investigation of authorities; and if he writes without enthusiasm, his judgment carries the greater weight. As a scholar and an historian, as a man of candor and resources, his name is an ornament to the Presbyterian ministry, of which he is a member.
And yet the life of Huss is not adapted to produce popular effect, to show to striking advantage the charm of elaborate style, or to lift the hero himself into that upper light where his commonest deeds are dazzling and fascinating. He had not the acumen, the weight, the learning, the logical irresistibleness of Calvin; nor had he the great human sympathies, the touch of earthiness, yet not grossness, which made Luther so dear to his countrymen, and which have imprinted a cordial geniality on the whole Lutheran Church. John Huss, though a man of learning, the Rector of a great and powerful University, though a true friend, though a man of wide sympathies, though an eloquent preacher, and a most formidable enemy to the corruptions of the Romish Church, was yet a colorless character in comparison with some men who have become the objects of hero-worship. There are few of those grand bursts which will always justify Luther's reputation, nothing of that rich poetical vein of Luther's, finding its twofold course in music and in poetry: Huss was comparatively dry, and unenriched by those overflowings of a deep inner nature. He is, therefore, rather the exponent of an age than a brilliant mark,—rather a type than a great, restless, creative power. His life was almost too saintly to be interesting in the popular sense; and although he does emerge above his age, yet it is not as the advocate of an idea, as Luther was, nor of a great system, as Calvin was, nor as a man fearless of kings and queens, as Knox was; his life, rather, was a continued protest against sin in the high places of the Church. Though in him there appear glimpses of a clearer doctrine than that of his age, yet they do not come to a full expression; it is the pride of pontiffs, the debaucheries of priests, the grasp after place and power and wealth by those who claim to follow the meek and holy One, which provoke his fiercest invective.
Mr. Gillett has, therefore, done a good service in subordinating the story of John Huss to the history of his age. His work is strictly entitled, "The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century." That period has heretofore been almost a blank in our ecclesiastical records. The blank is now filled. It was a period of great beginnings. Germany was silent then; but Wycliffe in England, and Huss, with his predecessors, Waldhauser, Milicz, and Peter of Dresden, in Bohemia, were even then causing the Papal power, rent as it was with its internal dissensions, to tremble as before approaching death.
The story of that impotent rage which sought to purchase life and safety for the Romish Church by the murder of Huss and of Jerome of Prague is instructive, if it is not pleasing. The truth was too true to be spoken. Never has the Church of Rome, in its inquisitorial madness, been so blinded with fury and passion as then. Weakened by internal feuds, with two Popes struggling and hurling anathemas at each other, and with a priesthood at its lowest point, not of ignorance, but of carnality, it seemed in peril of utter extinction. Its own boldest and ablest men were among its most outspoken accusers; and no words stronger or more cutting were spoken by Huss than by Gerson and Clémangis. But Huss committed the common mistake of reformers. He put himself outside of the body to be reformed. He allowed his spirit to fret against the evils of his times so madly that he would fain have put himself outside of the circumstances of his age. This wiser men than he, men no loss ardent, but more calculating, never would do. In the city of Constance itself, during the sittings of the great Council which condemned Huss to death, sermons were preached more bitterly reproachful of the pride of the Pontiffs and the corruption of the Church than the words of any of the men who put themselves beyond its pale, and addressed it as "your Church," instead of speaking of it as "ours." And while the dignitaries of that corrupt body dared not lay a finger upon their more pure, prophetic, and sharply accusing brethren, they made men like Huss and Jerome of Prague the doubly burdened and tortured victims of their rage.
Much of the interest of these volumes is owing to the prominence given to Wycliffe, and his contemporaneous work in England. It is strange, indeed, that in those early days, before Europe was crossed with its net-works, not of railways, but of post-roads even, the land which inclosed the fountains that fed the Elbe, eight hundred miles above Hamburg, was closely bound to that distant island, four hundred miles beyond Hamburg, on the western side of the German Ocean. But a royal marriage in England had united that kingdom to Bohemia, and Wycliffe's name was a household word in the lecture-rooms of Prague, and Wycliffe's books were well worn in its libraries. The great work of preparation, the preliminary stirring-up of men's minds, by both of these great reformers, is hardly realized by us. But words had been spoken which could not die in a hundred years, and the public temper had been thrown into a glow which could not cool in a century. The "Morning Star of the Reformation" found its twin lighting up the dark ravines of Bohemia, and when they twain arose the day had begun to break. The Reformation did not begin with Luther. The elements had been made plastic to his touch; all was ready for his skilful hand to mould them into the symmetry of the Great Reformation. The armies of the Lord had enlisted man by man before he came; it was for his clarion blast to marshal them in companies and battalions, and lead them to the battle. We must again thank Mr. Gillett for his timely, serviceable book. It is never unprofitable to look back and see who have kept the sacred fire of Christianity burning when it seemed in danger of extinguishment. And in that fifteenth century its flames certainly burned low. Whenever the Church is on the side of aristocratic power, whenever it is a conservative and not a radical and progressive force in an evil age, when the forces of Satan are in power, the men are truly worthy of immortality who go out to meet death in behalf of Christ and the religion of meekness and purity and universal love. Such was John Huss. He ought never to have suffered himself to be driven from the Church, and when he did so, he committed the unceasing mistake of reformers, among whom Wesley and Zinzendorf stand as the two marked exceptions; but for rectitude, zeal, and a thorough consecration to the great interests of Christ, he merits an even more sumptuous memorial than this excellent book.
Sordello, Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. By ROBERT BROWNING. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
In his dedication to the new edition of "Sordello," Mr. Browning says,—"I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might—instead of what the few must—like; but, after all, I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it."
This, on the whole, he has done; for, though a prose heading runs before every page, with a knowing wink to the reader, the mystery is not cleared up. As the view dissolves with every turn of a leaf, the showman says, confidentially,—"Now you shall see how a poet's soul comes into play,—how he succeeds a little, but fails more,—tries again, is no better satisfied,—
"Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language: thought may take perception's place,
But hardly coexist in any case,
Being its mere presentment,—of the whole
By parts, the simultaneous and the sole
By the successive and the many. Lacks
The crowd perception?"
We fear so; at any rate, the exhibition fails, because the showman cannot furnish brains to his commentary. The man who can read "Sordello" is little helped by these headings, and the man who cannot is soon distracted by continual disappointment. We think he will end by reading only the headings. And they doubtless are the best for him. Otherwise, under the cerebral struggle to perceive how the prose interprets the poetry, he might become the idiot that Douglas Jerrold exclaimed that he was at his first trial of "Sordello."
There has been a careful overhauling of the punctuation, with benefit to the text. Many lines have been altered, sometimes to the comfort of the reader; and about a hundred fresh lines have been interpolated here and there, to the weakening, we think, of the dramatic vigor of nearly every place that is thus handled. Many readers will, however, find this compensated by an increased clearness of the sense. On page 131 (page 152, first edition) there is an improved manipulation of the simile of the dwarf palm; and four lines before the last one on page 147 (page 171, first edition) lighten up the thought. So there are eight lines placed to advantage after "Sordello, wake!" on page 152 (page 176). But, on the whole, what Mr. Browning first imagined cannot be tampered with, and he must generously trust the elements of his own fine genius to do justice to his thought with all people who would not thank him to furnish an interpreter.
One day we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,—he could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,—all the profit was expended in mental gymnastics,—in short,
"The man can't stoop
To sing us out, quoth he, a mere romance;
He'd fain do better than the best, enhance
The subjects' rarity, work problems out
Therewith: now, you're a bard, a bard past doubt,
And no philosopher; why introduce
Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use
In poetry,—which still must be, to strike,
Eased upon common sense; there's nothing like
Appealing to our nature!"
Find the rest of Mr. Average's argument on page 67.
These objections to the poetry of Mr. Browning, which the dense, involved, and metaphysical treatment of "Sordello" first suggested to the public, are made to apply to all his subsequent writings. We concede that "Sordello" over-refines, and that, after reading it, "who would has heard Sordello's story told," but who would not and could not has probably not heard it. The very time of the poem, which is put several centuries back amid the scenery of the Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, as if to make the struggle of a humane and poetic soul to grow, to become recognized, to find a place and purpose, seem still more premature, puzzles the reader with remote allusions, with names that belong to obscure Italian narrative, with motives and events that require historical analysis. The poem is impatient with those very things which make the environment of the bard Sordello, and treats them in curt lines. A character is jammed into a sentence, like a witch into a snuff-box, the didactic parts grow metaphysical, and the life of Sordello does not fuse the events of the poem into one long rhythm. He thinks and dreams apart, and Palma's ambition for him is an aside, and the events swing their arms and strike fiery and cruel blows with Sordello absent. Considering Mr. Browning's intent, there is a fine poetic success in this very fault of the poem, but it is not a plain one, and is an after-thought of the critic. The numerous splendid pages in "Sordello" do nothing towards making one complete impression which cannot be evaded. Naddo, the genius-haunter, would complain, that, in struggling out towards these aisles of beauty, he had seriously compromised his clothing in the underbrush.
But the faults which characterize "Sordello" are not prevalent in the subsequent writings which are loosely accused of them. They become afterwards exceptional, they vein here and there the surface, and Mr. Average stumbles over them and proceeds no farther. Still, Mr. Browning's verse is not easy reading. He is economical of words to the point of harmony; but what a hypocrite he would be, if he used more! He brings you meaning, if you bring him mind; and there is Tupper outside, if you don't care to trouble yourself. In saying this we are not arrogant at all, for there is a large and widening sympathy with Mr. Browning's thought. Perhaps a whole generation of readers will fretfully break itself upon his style, and pass away, before the mind hails with ease his merits. But is Shakspeare's verse easy reading? Not to this day, in spite of his level of common sense, the artlessness of his passion, and the broad simplicity of a great imagination, that causeth its sun to shine on the evil and the good. It was easy reading to Ben Jonson, to Milton, and to Chapman; it took "Eliza and our James"; it had more theatrical success than the scholarly plays of Jonson: but two or three centuries have exhausted neither his commentators nor the subtile parts that need a comment. A good deal of Shakspeare is read, but the rest is caviare to the multitude. We need not comfort ourselves on the facility with which we take his name in vain. We venture to say that the whole of Shakspeare's thought is inwardly tasted by as many people as enjoy the subtilty of Robert Browning. Shakspeare has broader places over which the waters lie, sweet and warm, to tempt disporting crowds, and places deep as human nature, upon whose brink the pleasure-seekers peer and shudder. But if Mr. Browning had a theatrical ability equal to his dramatic, and were content to exhibit a greater number of the stock-figures of humanity, men would say that here again they had love that maddened and grief that shattered, murdering ambition, humorous weakness, and imagination that remarries man and Nature.
Mr. Browning's literary and artistic allusions prevent a ready appreciation of his genius. "Sordello" needs a key. How many friends, "elect chiefly for love," have spent time burrowing in encyclopædias, manuals of history, old biographies, dictionaries of painting, and the like, for explanations of the remote knowledge which Mr. Browning uses as if it had been left at the door with the morning paper! On the very first page, who is "Pentapolin, named o' the Naked Arm"? If a man had just read Don Quixote, he might single out Pentapolin. Taurello and Ecelin were not familiar,—nor the politics of Verona, Padua, Ferrara, six hundred years ago. There was not a lively sympathy with Sordello himself. Who were the "Pisan pair"? Lanzi's pages were turned up to discover. And Greek scholars recognized the "Loxian." But any reader might be pardoned for not at once divining that the double rillet of minstrelsy, on page 37, was the Troubadour and the Trouvere, nor for refusing to read pages 155 and 156 without a tolerable outfit of information upon the historical points and personages there catalogued.
There are not a few pages that appear like a long stretch of prose suddenly broken up and jammed in the current; some of the ends stick out, some have gone under, the sense has grown hummocky, and the reader's whole faculty turns to picking his way. Take, for instance, page 95, of which we have prepared a translation, but considerately withhold it.
But turn now to the famous marble font, sculptured afresh in those perfect lines which begin at the middle of page 16, with the picture of the Castle Goito and the maple-panelled room. Here the boy Sordello comes every eve, to visit the marble standing in the midst, to watch the mute penance of the Caryatides, who flush with the dawn of his imagination. Read the description of his childhood, from page 25, and the delights of his opening fancy:—
"He e'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
All these pages are filled with poetry; the reflective element does not dominate severely. Bordello's youthful genius craves sympathy, and he finds it by investing Nature with fanciful forms and attributes. He is Apollo,—"that shall be the name." How he ransacks the world for his youth's outfit, as he climbs the ravine in the June weather, and emerges into the forest, which tries "old surprises on him," amid which he lingers, deep in the stratagems of his own fancy, till
"aloft would hang
White summer-lightnings; as it sank and sprang
To measure, that whole palpitating breast
Of heaven, 't was Apollo, Nature prest
At eve to worship."
Then comes a portrait of Palma, done with Titian's brush and manner. As we turn the leaves where favorite passages lie brilliantly athwart the faded politics of an old story, we are tempted to try spinning its thread again for the sake of holding up these lines, which are among the most delicate and sumptuous that Mr. Browning ever wrote. But room is at present dear as paper. Only turn, for instance, to pages 39-45, 72-74, the picturesque scenes on pages 84, 85, the opening of Book IV., Salinguerra's portrait, like an old picture of Florence, on page 127, and lines single and by the half-dozen everywhere.
The tragedy of "Strafford" is one of Mr. Browning's earliest compositions. It was once placed upon the stage by Mr. Macready, but it is no more of an acting play than all the other pieces of Mr. Browning, and is too political to be good reading. The characters seem to be merely reporting the condition of parties under Charles I.; this and the struggle of the King with the Parliament are told, but are not represented, the passions of the piece belong too exclusively to the caucus and the council-chamber, and even the way in which the King sacrifices Strafford does not dramatically appear. In the last act, there is much tenderness in the contrast of Stratford's doom with the unconsciousness of his children, and pathos in his confidence to the last moment that the King will protect him. The dialogue is generally too abrupt and exclamatory. Vane speaks well on page 222, and Hampden on page 231, and there are two good scenes between Charles and Strafford, where the King's irresolution appears against the Earl's devotedness. The closing scene of Act IV. has the dramatic form, but it is interfused with mere civil commotion instead of color, and the motive is a transient one, important only to the historian. But we need not multiply words over that one of all his compositions which Mr. Browning probably now respects the least.
"Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" is a beautiful poem, filled with thought, humor, and imagination. The mythical theory of Strauss was never so well analyzed as in the tilting lines from page 353 to 361. And there is good theology in this:—
"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed;
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him;
And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,
The light of heaven from the dark of hell,
That light would want its evidence," etc.
Naddo will doubtless tell us that this poem is not built broadly on the human heart; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the world to read it. It is no more difficult to read than "Paradise Lost," while its scenery is less conventional, and the longings of a religious heart are taken by a bold imagination into serene and starry skies.
A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. By JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER, M.D., LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Water and the science of Physiology are both good things. But water is one thing to drink, and another to be drowned in. In like manner, though Physiology is a large and noble science and a yet larger symbol, furnishing analogies to the thinker quite as often as uses to the medical doctor, nevertheless, Physiology in the form of a deluge, overflowing, swamping, drowning almost everything else, and leaving only Body, the sole ark, afloat,—this is a gift which we are able to receive with a gratitude not by any means unspeakable. And such, very nearly, is the contribution to modern thought which the author of the above work endeavors to make. He holds Physiology to be coextensive with Man, and would prove the fact by including History in its laws.
In truth, however, it is a pretty thin sort of Physiology to which this extension is to be given,—resembling water in this respect also. Our physiological philosopher seeks to prove (in 631 octavo pages) that there are in history five perpetually recurring epochs, answering—the reader will please consider—to the Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Maturity, and Old Age of the individual body. So much, therefore, as one would know concerning Physiology in its application to the individual body, in virtue of being aware that men pass from infancy to age, thus much does Dr. Draper propose to teach his readers concerning the said science in its application to History. Add now that his induction rests almost wholly on two main instances, of which one is yet incomplete! Should one, therefore, say that his logic is somewhat precipitate, and his "science" somewhat lacking in matter, he would appear not to prefer a wholly groundless charge.
Were Dr. Draper simply giving a History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, he could, of course, relate only such facts as exist; and should it appear that this history has but two cycles, one of them incomplete, he would be under no obligation to make more. But such is not the case. His "history" is purely a piece of polemic. His aim is to establish a formula for all history, past, present, and to come; and, in this view, the paucity of instances on which his induction rests becomes worthy of comment.
And this disproportion between induction and conclusion becomes still more glaring, when it is observed that he expects his formula for all history to carry an inference much larger than itself. Dr. Draper is devoted to a materialistic philosophy, and his moving purpose is to propagate this. He holds that Psychology must be an inference from Physiology,—that the whole science of Man is included in a science of his body. His two perpetual aims are, first, to absorb all physical science in theoretical materialism,—second, to absorb all history in physical science. And beside the ambition of his aims one must say that his logic has an air of slenderness.
This work, then, may be described as a review of European history, written in obedience to two primary and two secondary assumptions, as follows:—
Primary Assumptions: First, that man is fully determined by his "corporeal organization"; second, that all corporeal organizations, with their whole variety and character, are due solely to "external situations."
Secondary Assumptions: First, that physical science (under submission to materialistic interpretations) is the only satisfactory intellectual result in history, being the only pure product of "reason"; second, that "reason" alone represents the adult stage of the human mind,—"faith" being simply immature mental action, and "inquiry" belonging to a stage of intellect still less mature,—in fact, to its mere childishness.
The position thus assigned to inquiry is very significant of the theoretic precipitancy which is one of Dr. Draper's prominent characteristics. His mind is afflicted with that disease which physicians call "premature digestion." Inquiry, which is the perpetual tap-root of science, he separates wholly from science, stigmatizes it as the mere token of intellectual childhood; and this not in the haste of an epithet or heat of a paragraph, but as a fixed part of his scheme of history and of mind. The reason is found in his own intellectual habits. And the savage fury with which he plies his critical bludgeon upon Lord Bacon is due, not so much to that great man's infirmities, nor even to his possession of intellectual qualities which our author cannot appreciate and must therefore disparage, as to the profound consecration of Inquiry, which it was one grand aim of his life to make.
His assumptions made, Dr. Draper proceeds to "break" and train history into their service, much after the old fashion of "breaking" colts. First, he mounts the history of Greece. And now what a dust! What are centaurs to a savant on his hobby? To see him among the mythic imaginations of the sweet old land! He goes butting and plunging through them with the headiness of a he-goat, another monster added to those of which antique fancy had prattled.
He has collected many facts respecting ancient thought, (for his industry is laudable,) but the evil is that he has no real use for his facts when obtained. Think of finding in an elaborate "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe" no use for the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" but that of bolstering up the proposition that there was in Greece an age of unreasoning credulity! It is like employing Jove to turn a spit or to set up tenpins. Everywhere, save in a single direction, and that of secondary importance with respect to antique thought, he practises the same enormous waste of material. Socrates is a mere block in his way, which he treats with nothing finer than a crow-bar. Socrates had set a higher value on ethical philosophy, derived from the consciousness of man, than on physical science; consequently, Dr. Draper's choice must be between treating him weakly and treating him brutally; he chooses the latter, and plays his rôle with vigor,—talks of his "lecherous countenance," and calls him "infidel" and "hypocrite." Plato he treats with more respect, but scarcely with more intelligence. He makes an inventory of Plato's opinions, as a shopman might of his goods; and does it with an air which says, "He who buys these gets cheated," while occasionally be cannot help breaking out into an expression of impatience. Indeed, not only Plato, but Athens itself, represents to Dr. Draper's mind the mere raw youth, the mere ambitious immaturity of Grecian intellect, amusing itself with "faith" because incapable of "reason." He finds its higher and only rational stage at Alexandria, at Syracuse, or wherever results in physical science were attained. In Aristotle, indeed, he is able to have some complacency, since the Stagirite is in a degree "physiological." But this pleasure is partial, for Aristotle has the trick of eminent intelligences, and must needs presently spread his pinions and launch forth into the great skies of speculation; whereupon, albeit he flies low, almost touching the earth with the tips of his wings, our physiological philosopher begins to pish and pshaw.
In his treatment of modern or post-Roman history, Dr. Draper goes over new ground in much the same spirit. He seems, indeed, nearer to his facts, deals more with actual life, is more lively, graphic, engaging, and has not that air of an intellectual shopman making an inventory. Considered as a general review of the history of Europe, written chiefly in the interest of physical science, but also in marked opposition to Roman Catholicism, it might pass unchallenged and not without praise. But considered as a final scientific interpretation of the last fifteen centuries, its shortcomings are simply immeasurable. The history of Europe, from the fusion of the Christian Impulse with Roman imperialism to the time of Columbus, Copernicus, and Luther, is the history of a grand religious idealism established over men's heads in the form of an institution, because too great to be held in solution by their thoughts. Of such a matter the writer in question could give no other than a very inadequate account. Wanting that which is highest in the reason of man, namely, imaginative intellect, he has no natural fitness for explaining such a fact; while his unconsciousness of any such deficiency, his persuasion that an imagination and a delusion are one and the same, and his extreme dogmatic momentum cause him to handle it with all the confidence of commanding power.
Considered, again, as a polemic to the point that history revolves forever through five recurring epochs, and that, as our civilization has been now four centuries in the "age of reason," it must next (and probably soon) pass into the fifth stage, that of decrepitude, and thence into infantile credulity and imbecility once more,—as a demonstration that history is such a Sisyphus, his induction is weak even to flimsiness.
But on approaching times yet more modern, the dominating predilection of the writer no longer misleads him; it guides him, on the contrary, to the truth. For of the last four centuries the grand affirmative fact is the rise of physical science. Or rather, perhaps, one should say that it was the grand fact until some fifty years ago. Science is still making progress; indeed, leaving out of sight one or two great Newtonian steps, we may say that it is advancing more rapidly than ever. But now at length its spiritual correlative begins to emerge, and a new epoch forms itself, as we fully believe, in the history of humanity.
In celebrating this birth and growth of science, in treating it as the central and commanding fact of modern times, and in suggesting the vast modification of beliefs and habits of thought which this must effect, Dr. Draper has a large theme, and he treats it con amore. In this respect, his book has value, and is worth its cost to himself and his readers. In some branches of science, moreover, as in Physiology, and in questions of vital organization generally, he is to be named among the authorities, and we gladly attend when he raises his voice.
Yet even in respect to this feature, his work cannot be praised without reserve. Though a man of scientific eminence, yet in the pure and open spirit of science it is impossible for him to write. He is a dogmatist, a controversialist, a propagandist. No matter of what science he treats, his exposition ever has an aim beyond itself. It is always a means to an end; and that end is always a dogma. For example, he has written a work on Human Physiology; and in the present volume he avows that his "main object" therein was to "enforce the doctrine" of the "absolute dominion of physical agents over organic forms as the fundamental principle in all the sciences of organization." This "main object" is no less dear to him in the work immediately under consideration. He still teaches that the primitive cell, with which, it is supposed, all organisms begin, is in all the same, but, being placed in different situations, is developed here into a man, and there into a mushroom. "The offspring," he says, not without oracular twang, "is like its parent, not because it includes an immortal typical form, but because it is exposed in development to the same conditions as was its parent." Behold a cheap explanation of the mystery of life! If one inquire how the vast variety of parental conditions was obtained, Dr. Draper is ready with his answer:—"A suitableness of external situation called them forth," quoth he. An explanation nebulous enough to be sage!
Behold, therefore, a whole universe of life constructed by "Situations"! "Situations" are the new Elohim. They say to each other, "Let us make man"; and they do it! But they cannot say, "Let us make man in our own image"; for they have no image. No matter: they succeed all the same in giving one to man! Wonderful "Situations"! Who will set up an altar to almighty "Situations"?
We have ourselves a somewhat Benjamite tongue for pronouncing the popular shibboleths, but, verily, we would sooner try the crookedest of them all than endeavor to persuade ourselves that in a universe wherein no creative idea lives and acts "external situations" can "call forth" life and all its forms. We can understand that a divine, creative idea may develop itself under fixed conditions, as the reproductive element in opposite sexes may, under fixed conditions, prove its resources; but how, in a universe devoid of any productive thought, "external situations" can produce definite and animate forms, is, to our feeble minds, incomprehensible. Verily, therefore, we will have nothing to do with these new gods. The materialistic savans may cry Pagani at us, if they will; but we shall surely continue to kneel at the old altars, unless something other than the said "Situations" can be offered us in exchange.
We complain of Dr. Draper that he does not write in the spirit of science, but in the spirit of dogmatism. We complain of him, that, when he ostensibly attempts a piece of pure scientific exposition, his thought always has a squint, a boomerang obliquity; it is afflicted with strabismus, and never looks where it seems to look. He approaches history only to subject it to the service of certain pet opinions already formed before his inspection of history began. He seeks only to make it an instrument for the propagation of these. He is a philosophical historian in the same sense that Bossuet was a philosophical historian. Each of these seeks to subject history to a dogma. The dogma of Bossuet is Papal Catholicism; that of Dr. Draper is the creative supremacy of "Situations" and "the insignificance of man in the universe."
It is quite proper for Dr. Draper to appear as a polemic in science, if he will. It is not advocacy per se of which we complain; it is advocacy with a squint, advocacy round a corner. If he wishes to prove the creative efficacy of "Situations," let him do so; but let him not in doing so seem to be offering an impartial exposition of Human Physiology. If he wishes to prove that physical science is the only rational thing in the world, he may try; but let him not assume to be writing a history of intellectual development. If he would convince us that history has epochs corresponding to those of individual life, we will listen; but we shall listen with impatience, if it appear after all that he is merely seeking, under cover of this proposition, to further a low materialistic dogma, and convince us of "man's insignificance in the universe."
We are open to all reasonings. Any decent man, who has honorably gone through with his Pythagorean lustrum of silence and thought, shall, by our voice, have his turn on the world's tribune; and if he be honest, he shall lose nothing by it. But we hate indirections. We hate the pretension implied in assuming to be an authoritative expounder, when one is only an advocate. And, still further, we shall always resist any man's attempt to make his facts go for a great deal more than they are worth. Let him call his ten ten, and it shall pass for ten; but if he insist on calling it a thousand, we shall not acquiesce. The science of Physiology is just out of its babyhood. Of the nervous system in particular—of its physiology and pathology alike—our knowledge is extremely immature. We are just beginning, indeed, to know anything scientifically on that subject. The attempt in behalf of that little to banish spiritual philosophy out of the world, and to silence forever the voice of Human Consciousness, is a piece of pretension on behalf of which we decline to strain our hospitality.
Our notice of this work would, however, be both incomplete and unjust, did we forbear to say, that, in its avowed idea, the author has got hold of a genuine analogy. Not that we approve the details of his scheme; the details, we verily believe, are as nearly all wrong as an able and studious man could make them. But the general idea of a correspondence between individual and social life, of an organic existence in civilizations and a consequent subjection to the law of organisms, is a rich mine, and one that will sooner or later be worked to profit. And the definite, emphatic announcement of it in Dr. Draper's work, however awkwardly done, suffices to make the work one of grave importance.
Every system of civilization is in some degree special. None is universal; none represents purely the spirit of humanity; none contains all the possibilities of society. Not being universal, none can be, in its form, perpetual. The universal asserts its supremacy; all that is partial must be temporary. The human spirit takes back, as it were, into its bosom each sally of civilization before pulsing anew. Thus, even on their ideal side, civilizations have their law of limitation; and to know what this law of limitation definitely is constitutes now one of the great desiderata of the world. We believe, that, ceteris paribus, the duration of a civilization is proportioned to its depth and breadth,—that is, to the degree in which it represents the total resource and possibility of the human spirit.
Again, every system of civilization has a body, an institution, an established and outward interpretation of social relationship. In respect to this it is mortal. In respect to this it has a law of growth and decay. In respect to this, moreover, it is subject to what we call accident, the chances of the world. In fine, the bodies of individuals and of civilizations, the fixed forms, that is, in which they are instituted, serve the same uses and obey the same law.
Now a work which should deal in a really great and profound way with this corpus of civilizations,—not spending itself in a mere tedious, endless demonstration that such corpus exists, and has therefore its youth and its age, but really explaining its physiology and pathology,—such a work would be no less than a benefaction to the human race. And in such a work one of the easiest and most obvious points would be this,—that the spirit of civilizations has a certain power of changing the form of its body by successive partial rejections and remouldings; and the degree in which they prove capable of this continuous palingenesia is one important measure of their depth and determinant of their duration.
For writing such a work we do not think Dr. Draper perfectly qualified. For this we find in him no tokens of an intelligence sufficiently subtile, penetrating, and profound. He is, moreover, too heady and too well cased in his materialistic strait-waistcoat. Nevertheless, his book carries in it a certain large suggestion; it contains many excellent observations; its tone is unexceptionable; the style is firm and clear, though heavy and disfigured by such intolerable barbarisms as "commence to" walk, talk, or the like,—the use of the infinitive instead of the participle after commence. Dr. Draper is an able man, a scholar in science, a well-informed, studious gentleman in other provinces; but he tries to be a legislator in thought, and fails.
De l'Origine du Langage. Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l'Institut. Quatrième Èdition, augmentée. Paris.
It seems to be the law of French thought, that it shall never be exhaustive of any profound matter, and also that (Auguste Comte always excepted) it shall never be exhausting to the reader. German thought may be both; French is neither; English thought—but the English do not think, they dogmatize. Magnificent dogmatism it may be, but dogmatism. Exceptions of course, but these are equally exceptions to the characteristic spirit of the nation.
M. Renan is thoroughly French. The power of coming after the great synthetic products of the human spirit and distributing them by analysis into special categories, eminent in his country, is pre-eminent in him. The facility at slipping over hard points, and at coming to unity of representation, partly by the solving force of an interior principle, and partly by ingenious accommodations, characteristic of French thought, characterizes his thinking in particular. That supremacy of the critical spirit in the man which secures to it the loyalty of all the faculties is alike peculiar to France among nations, and to this writer among Frenchmen. In Germany the imagination dominates, or at least contends with, the critical spirit; the French Ariel not only gives magic service to the critical Prospero, but seeks no emancipation, desires nothing better. Hence an admirable clearness and shapeliness in the criticism of France. Hence, also, in its best criticism a high degree of imaginative subtilty and penetration, without prejudice either to the dominion of common sense in the thought or to clearness in the statement.
M. Renan's essay on "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality. Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,—almost profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,—it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease, grace, and vigor, and in its style there is such crystal perspicuity and precision, that one must he proof against good thinking and excellent writing not to feel its charm.
The main propositions of the work—whose force and significance, of course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration—are that language issues from the spontaneity of the human spirit,—"spontaneity, which is both divine and human"; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel with consciousness, that is, with the developed spirit of man, in its nature and growth; and that, by consequence, its first form is not one of analytic simplicity, but of a high synthesis and a rich complexity. The whole mind, he says, acts from the first, only not with the power of defining, distinguishing, separating, which characterizes the intellect of civilized man; his objects are groups; he grasps totalities; sees objects and their relationships as one fact; tends to connect his whole consciousness with all he sees, making the stone a man or a god: and language, in virtue of its perpetual parallelism with consciousness, must be equally synthetic and complex from the start.
He finds himself opposed, therefore, first, to those, "like M. Bonald," who attribute language to a purely extraneous, not an interior, revelation; secondly, to the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who made it a product of free and reflective reason; thirdly, to the German school, who trace it back to a few hundred monosyllabic roots, each expressing with analytic precision some definite material object, from which roots the whole subsequent must be derived by etymologic spinning-out, by agglutination, and by figurative heightening of meaning.
His work, accordingly, should be read by all sincere students of the question of Language in connection with the statements of Professor Müller, as he represents another and a typical aspect of the case. He denies the existence of a "Turanian" family of tongues, such as Müller sought to constitute in Bunsen's "Outlines"; pronouncing with great decision, and on grounds both philosophical and linguistic, against that notion of monosyllabic origin which assumes the Chinese as truest of all tongues to the original form and genius of language, he is even more decided that not the faintest trace can be found of the derivation of all existing languages from a single primitive tongue. From general principles, therefore, and equally from inspection of language, he infers with confidence that each great family of languages has come forth independently from the genius of man.
His results in Philology correspond, thus, with those of Mr. Agassiz in Natural History. They suggest multiplicity of human origins. From this result M. Renan does not recoil, and he takes care to state with great precision and vigor the entire independence of the spiritual upon the physical unity of man,—as Mr. Agassiz also did in that jewel which he set in the head of Nott and Gliddon's toad.
But here he pauses. His results bear him no farther. The philological and physiological classifications of mankind, he says, do not correspond; their lines cross; nothing can be concluded from one to the other. The question of unity or diversity of physical origins he leaves to the naturalist; upon that he has no right to raise his voice. Spiritual unity he asserts firmly; linguistic unity he firmly denies; on the question of physical unity he remains modestly and candidly silent, not finding in his peculiar studies data for a rational opinion.
M. Renan is not a Newton in his science. He satisfies, and he disappoints. The Newtonian depth, centrality, and poise,—well, one may still be a superior scholar and writer without these. And such he is. His tendency to central principles is decided, but with this there is a wavering, an unsteadiness, and you get only agility and good writing, it may be, where you had begun to look for a final word. Sometimes, too, in his desire of precision, he gives you precision indeed, but of a cheap kind, which is worse than any thoughtful vagueness. Thus, he opens his sixth section by naming l'onomatopée, the imitation of natural sounds, as the law of primitive language. He knew better; for he has hardly named this "law" before he slips away from it; and his whole work was pitched upon a much profounder key. Why must he seize upon this ready-made word? Why could he not have taken upon himself to say deliberately and truly, that the law of primitive language, and in the measure of its life of all language, is the symbolization of mental impression by sounds, just as man's spirit is symbolized in his body, and absolute spirit in the universe? But this is "vague," and M. Renan writes in Paris.
And in Paris he has written an able and in many respects admirable treatise,—almost profound, as we have said, and creditable to him and to France. It must be reckoned, we think, a foundation-stone in the literature of the problem of Language.
In five or six pages the theological peculiarities of M. Renan appear. The reader, however, who is most rigidly indisposed to open question on such matters will find these six pages which do not please him a feeble counterbalance to the two hundred and fifty which do.