The barbarism which at successive intervals in history has swept southward over Asia was, at the least, something fresher and better than that which it displaced. The Gothic barbarians were, in very truth, the scourges of God to the inferior and more despicable barbarians of Southern Europe. The former exemplified a barbarism unconscious of itself, and carrying in its very rudeness the hope of the world; and the more complete and overwhelming its revolutions, the more glorious the promise involved in them. But, from the establishment over a continent of a system so deliberately barbarous that it dares to array its brutal features against the sunlight of this nineteenth century, that it dares even to oppose itself, with a distinct confession of its base purposes, against the only free, beneficent, and hope-giving government in the world,—from the triumph of such a system and over such a government there is not the shadow of a hope, but rather the widest possible field for dismal apprehension. From this barbarism we have everything to fear; and the only way to successfully oppose it is through the movements of war. Only through a triumph gained in the battle-field, and held decisive for all future time, can we, as a nation, make our way out of the fatal entanglements of this present time into the bright and glorious heritage of the future.
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REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
My Diary, North and South. By W.H. RUSSELL. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, pp. xxii., 602.
Plutarch, as a patriotic Boeotian, felt called on to write a tract concerning the malice of Herodotus in having told some unpleasant truths about the Thebans; and many of our countrymen have shown themselves as Boeotian, at least, if not as patriotic, in their diatribes against Mr. Russell, who is certainly very far from being an Herodotus, least of all in that winning simplicity of style which made him so dangerous in the eyes of Plutarch. It was foolish to take Mr. Russell at his own valuation, to elevate a clever Irish reporter of the London "Times" into a representative of England; but it was still more foolish, in attacking him, to mistake violence for force, and sensible people will be apt to think that there must have been some truth in criticisms which were resented with such unreasoning clamor. It is only too easy to force the growth of those national antipathies which ripen the seeds of danger and calamity to mankind; for there are few minds that are not capacious enough for a prejudice, and it has sometimes seemed as if, in our hasty resentment of the littlenesses of Englishmen, we were in danger of forgetting the greatness of England. A nation risks nothing in being underrated; the real peril is in underrating and misunderstanding a rival who may at any moment become an antagonist,—who will almost certainly become such, if we do our best to help him in it. Especially in judging the qualities of a people, we should be careful to take our measure by the highest, and not the lowest, types it has shown itself capable of producing. In moments of alarm, danger, or suffering, a nation is apt to relapse into that intellectual and moral condition of Mob from which it has slowly struggled upward; and this is especially true in an age of newspapers, where Cleon finds his way to every breakfast-table. It is her mob side that England has been showing us lately; but this should not blind us to the fact that in the long run the character of a nation tends more and more to assimilate itself to that ideal typified in its wisest thinkers and best citizens. In the qualities which historians and poets love to attribute to their country, national tendencies and aspirations are more or loss consciously represented; these qualities the nation will by-and-by learn to attribute to itself, until, becoming gradually traditional, they will at length realize themselves as active principles. The selfish clamor of Liverpool merchants, who see a rival in New York, and of London bankers who have dipped into Confederate stock, should not lead us to conclude, with M. Albert Blanc, that the foreign policy of England is nothing more or less than une haine de commerçants et d'industriels, haine implacable et inflexible comme les chiffres.[A]
[Footnote A: Mémoires et Correspondence de J. DE MAISTRE, p. 92.]
Mr. Russell's book purports to be, and probably is in substance, the diary from which he made up his letters to the London "Times"; and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of "the leading journal of Europe." When we learn, as we do from this "Diary," what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his own devices,—that he does not know the difference between would and should, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he believes in petto to mean in miniature, uses protagonist with as vague a notion of its sense as Mrs. Malaprop had of her derangement of epitaphs, and then recall to mind the comparative correctness of Mr. Russell's correspondence in point of style, we conceive a hearty respect for the proof-reader in Printing-House Square. We should hardly have noticed these trifles, except that Mr. Russell has a weakness for displaying the cheap jewelry of what we may call lingo, and that he is rather fond of criticizing the dialect and accent of persons who were indiscreet enough to trust him with their confidences. There is one respect, however, in which the matter has more importance,—in its bearing on our estimate of Mr. Russell as a trustworthy reporter of what he saw and heard. Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty; so that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning, and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant, we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind, which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer and reporter. We say this with no intention of imputing any wilful misstatements to Mr. Russell, but as something to be borne in mind while reading his record of private conversations. A scrupulous fidelity is absolutely essential, where the whole meaning may depend on a tone of voice or the use of one word instead of another. Any one accustomed to the study of dialects will understand what we mean, if he compare Mr. Olmsted's extracts from his diary with Mr. Russell's. The latter represents himself as constantly hearing the word Britisher used seriously and in good faith, and remarks expressly on an odd pronunciation of Europe with the accent on the last syllable, which be noticed in Mr. Seward among others. Mr. Russell's memory is at fault. What he heard was Európean; and Britisher is not, and never was, an Americanism.
We do not, however, mean to doubt the general truthfulness of Mr. Russell's reports. We find nothing in his book which leads us to modify the opinion we expressed of him more than a year ago.[B] We still think him "a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer." We still believe that his "strictures, if rightly taken, may do us infinite service." But we must enter our earnest protest against a violation of hospitality and confidence, which, if it became common, would render all society impossible. Any lively man might write a readable and salable book by exploiting his acquaintances; but such a proceeding would be looked upon by all right-minded people as an offence similar in kind, if not in degree, to the publication of private letters. A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in a foreign country should always know two things,—what he is, and where he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all. we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a hundred and fifty years after his death.
[Footnote B: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VIII., p. 765.]
One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr. Russell's book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall pay his travelling-charges. The object which men formerly proposed to themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,—and they treated of manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and impartiality of naturalists: They did not conclude things to be necessarily worse because they were different. A modern Tom Coryat, instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would find some excuse for thinking the Italians a nasty people because they used it. In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a traveller was to discover (or where that failed, to invent) all that he possibly can to the disadvantage of the country he visits; and he is so scrupulous a censor of individual manners that he has no eyes left for national characteristics. Another striking difference between the older traveller and his modern successor is that the observer and the object to be observed seem to have reversed their relations to each other, so that the man, with his sensations, prejudices, and annoyances, fills up the greater part of the book, while the foreign country becomes merely incidental, a sort of canvas, on which his own portrait is to be painted for the instruction of his readers. Pliny used to say that something was to be learned from the worst book; and accordingly let us be thankful to the voyagers of the last thirty years that they have taught us where we can get the toughest steak and the coldest coffee which this world offers to the diligent seeker after wisdom, and have made us intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of the fleas, if with those of none of the other dwellers in every corner of the globe. Such interesting particulars, to be sure, may claim a kind of classic authority in Horace's journey to Brundusium; but perhaps a gnat or a frog that kept Horace awake may fairly assume a greater historical importance than would be granted to similar tormentors of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Were it not for Mr. Olmsted, we should conclude the Arthur-Young type of traveller to be extinct, and that people go abroad merely for an excuse to write about themselves,—it is so much easier to write a clever book than a solid one. The plan of Montaigne, who wrote his travels round himself without stirring beyond his library, was as much wiser and cheaper as the result was more entertaining.