LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle, the Ordeal, Torture. By Henry C. Lea. Third Edition, revised. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea.
Many will be tempted to say that this, like the Decline and Fall, is one of the uncriticisable books. Its facts are innumerable, its deductions simple and inevitable, and its chevaux-de-frise of references bristling and dense enough to make the keenest, stoutest and best-equipped assailant think twice before advancing. Nor is there anything controversial in it to provoke an assault. The author is no polemic. Though he obviously feels and thinks strongly, he succeeds in attaining impartiality. He even represses comment until it serves for little more than a cement for his data. What of argument there is shapes itself mostly from his collation. The minute and recondite records he throws together, in as much sequence as the chaotic state of European institutions and society in the Middle Ages will allow, are left to their own eloquence. And eloquent they are. Little beyond the citation of them is needed to show the brutality of chivalry, the selfish cruelty of sacerdotalism, and the wretchedness of the masses enslaved by political and religious superstition, until Roman law had a second time, after an interval of a thousand years, effected a conquest of the Northern barbarians. The work does not confine itself, historically, to that period nor to Europe, but what excursions are made outside of that time and country are chiefly in the way of introduction and conclusion. The moral defects which produce and perpetuate the follies and abuses discussed by Mr. Lea are confined to no time or race. They are inherent and abiding, and he takes care not to let us forget that the struggle to subdue them cannot anywhere or at any time be safely relaxed. We inherit, with their other possessions, the weaknesses and proclivities of our ancestors, and we even find some of their specific acts of error and injustice still imbedded in the institutions under which we live, and more or less vividly reproduced in the routine of individual, corporate or public existence. The compurgator slides into the witness and the juryman, bringing with him the oath on the Bible and trial for perjury, and the feed champion of the Church into the patron. The ordeal of battle is fought out bloodlessly by lawyers, with often quite as little regard to the merits of the case as could have been shown in the olden lists. Only the baser physical ordeals, of fire, hot and cold water, etc., with torture as a part of the regular machinery of justice, have died out, evidencing the great rise in intelligence and independence of the bulk of the people—the "lower orders" to whom these gross expedients were chiefly applied. Other forms of legal outrage, however, less apparent and palpable to the senses, have run deep into the nineteenth century, and are not yet wholly abolished. Mr. Lea, by the way, does not, we observe, refer to the trial of Bambridge in 1729 for torturing prisoners for debt "in violation of the laws of England." Perhaps he threw it aside in the redundance of other illustrative material. We must add, as proof of his impartiality, the comparatively slight mention made of torture under the Inquisition—a thing of which we have been told so much as to have fallen into a sort of popular belief that the Holy Office had a monopoly of this particular atrocity.
Man will always, in some guise or other, manifest his faith in and dependence on miracles, and will never cease to implore the special interposition of the Deity. It is so much simpler thus to make a daily convenience of his Creator than to consult those dry abstractions, the laws of Nature. Of this deep and tiresome x and y he has not time to solve the equation, granting it to be, in its ultimate terms, soluble. Who shall say in each instance whether the impulse to decline that method and adopt the shorter be superstition or religion?
Whether looked on as a picture or a mirror, a work such as this has lasting value. It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we must not expect the record of human fatuity to be closed in our day.
The Witchery of Archery. By Maurice Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
The author of this little volume certainly succeeds in proving the truth of his title to the extent of convincing his readers that archery has its witchery; and we gather from his words that he has made practical converts and imparted to many some portion of his own devotion to the immemorial implement he may be said to have, in this country and among its white inhabitants, reinvented. Seated in our easy-chair, we follow him gayly and untiringly into the depths of the woods, drink in the rich, cool, damp air, and revel in the primeval silence that is only broken by the twang of the bowstring or the call of its destined victim. We enjoy his marvellous shots with some little infusion of envy, and his exemplary patience under ill-success and repeated failure with perhaps more. We end, like his "Cracker" friend, with respecting sincerely the "bow-and-arrers" we were at first disposed to view with amused contempt; and we close the book with an unqualified recognition of the value of the bow as a means of athletic training—a healthful recreation for those who have difficulty in finding such means.
This ancient weapon of war and the chase, which has won so many battles and conquered so many kingdoms, has since the introduction of gunpowder been too readily allowed to sink into a plaything for boys. They retain something of a passion for it. Many can remember when they were wont to select the choicest splits of heart-hickory from the wood-pile, lay them aside to season, and then shape them, or have them shaped by stronger and defter hands, into the four-foot bow, equivalent to the six-foot bow of the man. The arrows were harder to get in any satisfactory quantity, for they were rapidly shot away, and they were hard to properly point and scientifically feather. The processes were altogether too abstruse to come out well from homemade work in boyish hands. So the results were not usually brilliant, being confined to the destruction of a few sparrows, the breaking of some windows and the serious maltreatment of the family cat. Such achievements did not commend themselves to parents, and archery rested under a cloud from which it failed to emerge as the youthful practitioners grew up. It retained its charm for them in books, however. The visit of Peter Parley to Wampum was the most delightful part of that historian's works; and Robin Hood and William Tell earned a yearning and trustful admiration which refuses to yield to the criticisms employed in reducing those characters to myths—triumphs of the "long-bow" in another sense. And here we are reminded that Mr. Thompson's affection is lavished wholly on the long-bow. The cross-bow, a weapon which largely superseded it in the Middle Ages for war and sport, the English gentleman's "birding-piece" before he took to the gun, he will not hear of. The sportsman of tender years often prefers it. It is less troublesome in the matter of ammunition. Any missile will answer for it, from a sixpenny nail to a six-inch pewter-headed bolt—projectiles which travel two hundred yards with force and precision. The draft on the muscular strength is of course the same with either form of the bow, but the long-bow admits of its being more easily graduated, and is therefore preferable for the exercise-ground.
Mr. Thompson, we observe, seems to disregard the spiral arrangement of the feather, and the rotary movement around the axis of flight imparted by it to the arrow. He uses three strips of feather, which is better than two flat ones for the purpose of keeping the missile steady, but still does not prevent its swerving toward the end of its course, as more than one vexatious incident of his hunting record shows. This usage may help to account for the superiority of the old bowmen to the amateurs of to-day in accuracy at long ranges. The best targets reported on the part of the latter, such as "eleven shots in a nine-inch bull's-eye, out of thirteen, at forty yards," and "ten successive shots in a sheet of paper eight inches square at thirty yards," are poor by the side of the exploits of the yeomen and foresters on the archery-grounds of yore. To split a willow-wand at two hundred paces must have required something in the way of practice and system more precise and absolute than the guesswork Mr. Thompson concedes to be unavoidable to-day with the utmost care and experience. It could not have been done with a missile liable, in the calmest atmosphere, the moment it passed the point-blank, to unaccountable aberrations, vertically and horizontally.
The China-Hunters' Club. By the Youngest Member. New York: Harper & Brothers.